How I was able to scale to $10k per month in Europe?

Europe and US IT markets are very similar, but not in terms of salaries. It's very hard 😓 to get to the desired $10k/month salary as a Software Developer in Europe when in the US, it's pretty much average.

So, the obvious solution would be to "Just work remotely for the US company and make $10k/month".

Well, those who tried know that it's not that easy and if you gonna just go to US job boards and apply for jobs, most likely companies will ABSOLUTELY ignore your application 🥲, because:

• They are worried about your 'English' level
• They don't want to make 1 extra document to hire a non-US resident
• Potential time-zone problems
• Unsure about your communication abilities

To sum up, in one word, US Companies DON'T TRUST YOU ❌.

And when I reached my salary maximum in Europe, I knew that the only way to significantly boost my income is to find a job in the USA. But how can I build the needed trust and eliminate risk for them? 🤔

And the best way is to just use someone else's reputation 🧐, they don't trust me, but they might trust that BIG company that outsources software engineers.

So I qualified for the closed Freelance platform 🚪, and they helped me to find a US client (for that they were taking a % of my hourly rate). So the US company signed a contract with this big Freelance platform, not with me.

I've started working with them and proved that my communication level is good enough, I am a culture fit and there are no timezone problems working with me (I now work in the second half of the day 🌝).

And after around 5 months, they BOUGHT ME OUT 😍 from the freelance platform and now I'm able to work directly with the US company and make 6 figures a year.

📄 Framework for YOU

Scaling your career to $10k/month as a Developer is hard and requires a lot of hard work.

But it's 100% worth it.

Receiving a US salary, while living in Europe feels like a cheat code 😌 (but you still get used to it pretty quickly, but it's a topic for another email).

If you are ready to work hard, here is the plan which you can use to get a job in the US while living in Europe:

1. Learn English WELL. You can have an accent, but make sure to reduce it as much as possible.
2. Get some experience working for any company (working in a Software House that has clients from the US is A HUGE PLUS ➕).
3. Apply for closed Freelance/Outsourcing platforms.
4. Find your first US client there and start building relations and connections. It's super important to always SHOW INITIATIVE 💪 and communicate well.
5. After some time, offer them to work directly OR using that experience and some of the connections you've built find a US company to work with.

Note: The method that I've described mostly works with smaller companies (below 5000 employees). With corporations, this process looks completely different.

That's it, that's my secret 🤫 formula to the $10k/month as a software engineer in Europe.

There are a lot of other pitfalls 🕳 on that road, and I will be covering them in my future blog posts.

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