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Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
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The network for creativity
Join 1.25M professional creatives like you
Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free
Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
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Weekend is almost here ✨
A little reminder for all designers, developers, and creatives: it's okay to step away from the laptop and give your fingers a rest 😅
We spend so much of our time creating, solving problems, moving pixels, answering messages, and jumping between tasks that it's easy to forget how important it is to recharge.
I've noticed that some of my best ideas come when I'm not sitting in front of a screen at all.
Personally, I love hiking in the mountains and practicing yoga. Both help me slow down, clear my mind, reconnect with myself, and come back to work with fresh energy and a new perspective.
This weekend I'm planning to spend a little less time with my laptop and a little more time outside.
What about you?
How do you disconnect and recharge after a busy week? Do you have a favorite hobby, ritual, or weekend activity that helps you reset? 👇🤍
Wow, what a magic
$945K on Contra. And $10K of next month is already booked, without sending a single new offer.
That second number is the one that matters. Early on, freelancing felt like starting from zero every month. Close, deliver, panic, repeat. The fix wasn't more outreach. It was treating my client list like a portfolio.
Two kinds of income, same as investing.
Retainers are your index funds. Ongoing, month to month, slower, but they pay whether or not you land something new. That is where the $10K came from.
One-off projects are your growth stocks. One can be 9K, the next 20K, but you never quite know what next month looks like.
Live on only retainers and you cap your upside. Live on only one-offs and you ride the rollercoaster. The freelancers who stop white-knuckling every month are the ones who hold both and tune the ratio to how much stability they actually need.
I'm still dialing in my mix. But going from zero recurring to a real safety net changed how the whole business feels.
New Road to a Million every week. What's your retainer-to-project split right now?
I’m new on Contra. What advice would you give for getting the first clients and building toward retainers?
Lately, I’ve been diving deep into Cursor, Claude, and AI agents.
Instead of just watching tutorials, I decided to learn by building something myself — a Figma plugin from scratch. There are already plenty of similar solutions out there, but my goal was to understand the entire creation process, from idea to a working product.
And here’s the result: I went from zero knowledge to a functioning plugin in just two days.
The plugin already helps identify issues in design files and highlights things that are easy to miss during day-to-day work. Of course, I’m still not 100% satisfied with it — there’s always room for improvement. But for a first attempt, I’m pretty happy with the outcome.
The most exciting part is that while building it, I started coming up with new ideas for Design System automation: naming conventions, component structure, style organization, and other repetitive tasks that could be streamlined with AI.
Looks like this is just the beginning 😄
Tech stack: Cursor, Claude, ChatGPT, and the Figma Plugin API.
For now, here’s a look at what I’ve built so far 👇
Wowww, great job 😍 Intrigued for part 2! You know, your approach to testing things yourself (from scratch!) reminded me the Tumblr times back in idk 2012-2014 maybe when everyone was photoshopping pics, memes, gifs etc. and I created my own "colors" (layers with different image...
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