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I had been working as a freelance brand designer in Buenos Aires for two years. The work was not stable. Some months were good. Some were not. I had been thinking about going back to work inside a studio, for the routine and for the team, but most of the studios I liked were in São Paulo, or they paid in pesos at rates that were too low for me.
One design studio in Buenos Aires was different. They were small, six people, and they paid in USD through Deel because most of their clients were in the US. On their public Instagram they posted the work they did for one regular client, a health tech company in the US. I had been following them for about a year.
Then I had an idea: maybe they would look at a small spec project. I chose their main public client and made three concepts for how I would change the brand. I was honest with myself about it. Nobody had asked for my opinion, so I decided to send it as a piece of work, not as a job application.
I sent a DM to the founder. The message was three sentences: I had been following their work, I had made three versions of a brand refresh for that public client, and did she have ten minutes to look at them? I put one Figma link in the message.
She answered two hours later. She said clearly that my versions were not what they would use, but that this was the kind of work she wanted to buy, and she asked if I was free for one project they needed to give to someone outside. I was.
The project was a brand refresh for a different client. Three weeks of work. The fee was five figures, in USD. I delivered on time. The client approved it with no changes, which does not happen often.
One month later the founder asked if I wanted a longer contract. We agreed on a three-month rolling contract. After two months she asked if I wanted to join full time. The job was permanent, paid in USD through Deel, and I would work inside the team of six instead of continuing as a contractor.
The offer was US$30,000 base. In dollars that number does not look big, but with the exchange rate it works here, and it is better than what I earned on my own. I asked for US$36,000. I explained the work I had already delivered for them, and what it would cost me to change from contractor to employee. They came back at US$36,000.
I said yes. I sent two real applications in the whole search. Both went to job boards and nobody answered. The Instagram DM was my real application.
I'd been applying selectively, only four applications over those two months, because I didn't want to waste time on roles that weren't actually interesting. Most of my search was slow and discouraging. Then I came across a Substack post by the CTO of a New York data company about their decision to refactor their entire data pipeline around dbt and Snowflake. The post was technical, specific, and honest about the tradeoffs they'd made. It wasn't marketing. It read like someone who actually lived inside the problem, and I recognized a lot of the same pain points from my previous role.
I spent a couple of evenings on a cold email. I didn't pitch myself generically. I referenced specific paragraphs from the post and linked a public GitHub repo I'd built for stream-to-batch reconciliation. The repo wasn't perfect, but it was real work: documented, tested, and directly relevant to what he'd described. I figured if he was the kind of engineer who wrote that post, he'd at least look at the code. Three days later he replied. No recruiter, no application portal, no automated acknowledgment. Just a direct response asking if I wanted to jump on a call that week.
The process ended up being four rounds over about nine weeks. The first call was conversational, more mutual vetting than a formal screen. The third and fourth rounds brought in the broader data team and covered system design and past-project deep-dives. But the second round was the one that stuck with me. It was framed as a live SQL pairing session, and it started that way, but somewhere around the thirty-minute mark we were both heads-down on an actual production query they were struggling with. We went ninety minutes. I didn't solve it completely, but how I reasoned through it mattered more than any clean answer would have.
The offer came in at $145,000, hybrid in New York. I accepted.
I had wanted to write for a Madrid magazine since I moved to the city four years before. They were a serious publication, long-form, properly edited, careful with facts, and they paid their writers, which is rare. I read every issue I could find for a year before I did anything about it.
When I started looking for a job, it did not go well. I sent thirty applications in three months, mostly for content roles at SaaS companies that wanted "blog posts" and not journalism. I got two interviews. One of them was the most depressing forty-five minutes of the whole search. A content marketing manager told me directly that the job was producing SEO content with an LLM, and that the human writer was there to "make it sound better".
That night I went home and decided to stop applying for content jobs. Instead I would write the kind of article I wanted to be paid for.
I chose two ideas that I thought the magazine would really publish. One was about a small Madrid neighbourhood that remote workers had slowly changed. The other was an interview with a local food cooperative. I wrote a pitch of three paragraphs for each one and emailed them to the editor.
She answered about one of them, the neighbourhood article. She liked the idea, she had been thinking about other pitches on the same subject, and she offered me a 1,500-word draft on spec. The fee was €200, paid within thirty days after publication.
I wrote it. It took ten days. The editing was thorough. She disagreed with three sections and I rewrote them. The article was published in the May issue.
In late May, two months after we agreed the freelance article, the editor emailed me. They had opened a permanent staff writer position and she wanted to talk to me before they published it. The shortlist was already her, the editor-in-chief and the publisher. The "interview" was a conversation of forty minutes about the work I wanted to do, what I was reading, and one article in the magazine that I would have edited differently.
The "test" was a 600-word article on a subject she gave me the next day. I had two days. I wrote eight hundred words, cut one hundred and fifty, and sent it. They sent the offer two days later.
The offer was €26,000 base, which is a normal staff writer salary in Spain and is acceptable. I asked for €30,000. I explained the freelance work I had already done for them, and that the role included running their newsletter. They came back at €28,000 and a small monthly payment for travel for assignments. I took it.
30Applications
2Interviews
4 monthsSearch length
Cold outreachSource
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