Hello everyone! My name is Stefan Petrov (22) and I live, or should I say used to live, in the small city of Bitola, Macedonia. I had a pretty normal childhood, apart from the fact that I was completely fascinated by cars. I know every little boy likes cars, but I was infatuated by them.
I tried karting but it's difficult to get anywhere when your city's population is 50,000 residents at best. Anyway, I found my second calling in high school: programming. After finishing high school I decided to move to a different city in the same country and live with a couple of life-long friends that I now call my roommates.
Things were going okay for two years or so, but I decided I no longer wanted to live off of my parents. Lots of people my age start working as waiters in restaurants or dish cleaners, but the pay here is abysmal. You're lucky to get $10 for an 8-hour shift, and monthly costs of rent and bills can get north of $150. It's clear that most people here live on a day-to-day basis, just getting on by.
I decided I wasn't going to do the same, so I started looking at online job opportunities. I took English courses in elementary school but they told my parents I was too advanced for the class and I couldn't benefit from it in any way. Throughout elementary and high school I took some online English courses, but I mostly benefited from reading car magazines and watching automotive videos.
I took the plunge with Freelancer first, but I wasn't happy with their system or the payout. After a short while I moved to Upwork where I started working as a blog writer. It was a case of everything goes really. Interior design, health and fitness, programming... there isn't a topic I haven't written about. Initially i worked for $3-$4 per hour, which is still a massive amount given most people in Macedonia earn $1 per hour.
Eventually a guy reached out to me and offered me a job as an automotive writer. I cursed at myself for not thinking of it sooner. Rather than writing about boring and tedious stuff (to me), I can continue earning by writing about something I love. It all came pretty natural really. I no longer had to research the topics as extensively as I did before or get bogged down with thinking of a conversation piece. It was like every piece of the puzzle finally fell into its place.
Eventually I even started offering my services on Fiverr, and things went smoothly for the next two years or so. A couple of months ago I got bored and realized I was writing content which wasn't to my liking. People gave me topics and/or ideas and I had to follow them, more often than not very strictly. I had little to no way to express my opinion in most cases, especially when writing sponsored posts. Currently I'm only working for two online websites which actually do want to hear my opinion on topics and give me basically freedom of will.
I've been working on an automotive website (along with my roommate) for several months now, and we're almost ready to launch it. We have pretty big plans for it, but rather than hyping it then failing to deliver, I'll let it do the talking. If you're interested you can visit www.allutomotive.com (site is still not up but will be in a few weeks), or find us as Allutomotive on Facebook and Instagram.
A couple of days ago my cousin suggested I try Steemit, so the next day I googled it and here I am. I'm new to Steemit and am kind of learning as I go along, but so far I really love what I found here. You get to write your own content whenever you want, talking and discussing with like-minded people.
I'll mostly cover automotive topics since I have a lot of great discussion ideas, but I'm honestly not restricting myself to that genre only. Looking forward to meeting a lot of you and hopefully make new friends (if just online) along the way! :)