I never planned for it.

I think most of us never had any interest in AI(which is not a new technology) before the recent advancements.

I was just not happy and felt empty inside.

I was balancing a couple of ideas and projects with my 9-to-5 for almost 5-6 years.

I never started those to make money.

But it was a mistake.

Why?

Let me first talk about the main Project that was my passion and also consumed most of my time.

It was and is "OneHimachal".

Just check "OneHimachal" on Instagram and you will see a big community account with around 70k+ followers.

OneHimachal is a community that aims to promote and showcase a region/province/state called "Himachal Pradesh" in India.

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This is my Home. I felt the need to promote and tell the rest of the world that I come from such a place that has some surreal nature and landscapes, a culture that is so rich and pure, people who are so hospitable and warm, and other aspects like food and music as well.

I shared and sometimes created tons of content and it used to get tons of impressions and that helped thousands of people and businesses.​

Long story short, it was always a passion project but more like a Social Work/NGO work without a team.

I did try to monetize some parts of this and created an e-commerce store to further help local businesses and artists. It did fairly well but it became way too much for me to handle everything from managing the website, to social media marketing, and customer support all alone.

I am turning 30 in a couple of days and I have a bunch of responsibilities to take care of. I have my plans to carry out and I do want to ACE on all those things when I am about to enter a new phase in my life.

I am glad and proud that I could build something that gave me access to so many talented people in my region. I could help a lot of people in return as well. However, it became a job in itself and the impact just 'HIT A WALL'.
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The biggest issue I felt personally was that I felt very empty inside. I wasn't reading any books, I wasn't learning anything new, and I was too afraid to put this thing on 'Hold' because I built it for more than 6 years.

I took a leap of faith and started decreasing the amount of posts and time spent on Instagram. I focused on my own skills development and started consuming different types of content online.

ChatGPT was out sometime around late 2022 and I was fascinated to try that out. It was amazing and then I got sucked into the AI hype and I was feeling happy and motivated again.

I stopped posting on OneHimachal and decided that I would learn new skills and start posting on Instagram on my account. It did not do well on IG but I was just glad to post something different.

I decided to build a passive income source and find clients who might want to use these AI tools for content creation. I tried a lot on Upwork and Fiverr but I wasn't lucky for almost a month.

The day I was about to give up on Upwork, the very same day I got a job opportunity. It was a $5 gig to create an image. It was in June.

Since then I have served a dozen clients on both platforms and made $4k+ and I am proud of that.

So, now you know what was my motivation and a little backstory behind all of it.

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With Love,
Anirudh Thakur