i spent saturday morning making a spreadsheet of everything i need to cancel.
domains. email hosting. a brand i've been paying for its domain that hasn't shipped an order in 3 years. three websites. three inboxes. three logos i paid someone to design. three brands i was VERY sure about at the time.
the total comes to about $500 a year. not enough money to matter. just enough to notice every month, and just enough to make me feel slightly ridiculous every time the charge came through.
but that's not really why i'm closing them.
i'm closing them because i finally said the thing out loud: i've been maintaining three businesses and only one of them is actually me.
so. the graveyard.
nomad kloud was the first agency. organic social media management. a team of ten, ten clients, all of it running through me. i was 28 and i genuinely believed the point was to get BIGGER. more clients, more people, more logos on the homepage. and it worked, for a while, right up until the morning i woke up and realised i had built myself a job i would never in my life apply for.
queerlish was the e-commerce brand. i was like 23. this was the one i was having the hardest time with. a client project ending is just a project ending. but a thing you invented and named and photographed yourself?
hyln hub was the creative studio. the newest one. and the one i built so i could niche down and rebuild the team better. more on that in two weeks, because it deserves its own post.
three brands. one girl. me, in a flat in barcelona, doing all of it.
here's the part i genuinely didn't expect to be complicated: none of them failed.
nomad kloud paid my rent for YEARS. queerlish taught me more about how people actually buy things than any campaign i've ever run for a client. hyln hub got me top rated plus on upwork.
they didn't fail. i outgrew them. which is a much weirder feeling, because there's no moment where you're allowed to be sad about it. nobody sends you a card when you close a business that was doing perfectly fine.
so i've been doing it slowly, like a freak. screenshotting homepages before i take them down. saving the good work into a folder called "archive" that i will absolutely never open again. reading old client emails i should have deleted in 2021.
saying goodbye PROPERLY. which is an extremely unserious thing to admit about a stupid subscription and i am going to admit it anyway.
so why am i here. and why now.
because after all that, i don't want to build a fourth brand. i want to write under my own name.
i've spent 10 years making other people's brands sound like they know exactly what they're doing. luxury fashion in paris. then e-commerce. then the agency. then my coaching business. now paid social creative strategy for health and wellness brands, as one person, with no team and no one to hide behind.
i have written thousands of hooks and scripts and angles for companies i don't own.
i have written almost NOTHING for myself.
this is me fixing that.
what this is going to be: letters about working alone. the money. the loneliness. the pricing conversations that make you want to throw your laptop into the sea. the days you don't open it at all. clients who ghost. the very specific grief of closing things that were fine. what it's like to build a life in a city you weren't born in.
life first, work woven in. this is not a marketing newsletter. there are ten thousand of those and most of them are written by people who have never once had to look at their own bank account on a sunday night.
if you're building something on your own, freelance, solo, one woman studio, whatever you're calling it this month, you're who i'm writing to.
as consistent as i can be. mostly unfiltered. occasionally about ads. usually not.
come with me. it's going to be a strange year.
eda x