Week 66 - Freelance Unlocked special edition 🔥

Author

Yurii Lazaruk
June 14, 2026

Hey my friend, this week was all about the Freelance Unlocked conference in Berlin—the number one conference for freelancers and solopreneurs in Europe! 🤩

We are doing it for the third year in a row, and this year we aimed for 1000 participants!

My personal goal was to connect with every participant via LinkedIn, invite them to a WhatsApp community, and ensure that they make at least one friend before and during the conference.

Of course, I didn’t connect with all the people, but I talked to at least 400-500 participants, which can be tricky to remember all of them 😲

And that’s exactly why the number one question people asked me there was: “How do you remember so many people?”

But remembering was not the hardest part because I tried to make every conversation personal. That’s exactly why I asked folks to share some fun facts about themselves.

First of all, it’s fun 😁 Secondly, it’s memorable! 🤓

The hardest part was matching someone’s LinkedIn or WhatsApp photo with a real human, so sometimes people came to me, like: “Oh, hey Yurii, how are you?” and I was like, “Yeah, I’m great, and you? Btw, who are you?” 😅

But when I could match a real person with their photo in my mind’s database, the next part was easy 😊

And the second question folks asked me was: “Are you stressed?”

I can only guess why they asked it: sure, making such a big conference and thinking about all the expectations and all the things that can go wrong is stressful.

But I told folks: look, we’ve done a hard work, prepared a lot, and now it’s all about meeting amazing humans and having fun!

If something goes wrong, well, life happens sometimes, we’ll deal with it.

The main thing is how exactly you do that: either smile, improvise, and find a solution, or stress and make people around you stressed. I chose the first path 😉

So yes, the conference went amazingly (here, I shared a few more interesting things that happened at the conference 😏)

But don’t trust me, go check what other people say on the Freelance Unlocked LinkedIn page 🤓

The craziest part was on my way back home, when I learned that if you buy a train ticket via Deutsche Bahn and have a specific seat number on that, it doesn’t mean this seat exists in a train carriage 😲

I had the number 15, but the closest existing seats where 14 and 16, so I had to search for a free one (luckily there were enough), and had to switch seats 5 times, well, good to move a little during a 5-hour ride 😝

💡 What influenced me this week 💡

Thoughts of the week:

  • “Innovation is something different that creates value.” - Scott D. Anthony

Song of the week:

Book and quotes of the week:

“Technology develops faster than people's lives change to adapt to the technology. That which is not good enough and that which is too expensive today inevitably gets better and gets cheaper.”

“Research studies began to show that companies that invested in robotics ended up adding employment.”

“Innovation is predictably unpredictable, and overnight success often takes decades.”

Tools that I use with referrals:

  • Descript - for anything around podcasting and video editing

  • Beehiiv - for a newsletter (that’s what you receive 😅)

  • Text Blaze - to access message templates with shortcuts (like “/ty”)

  • Exali - promo “FROMYURII” - indemnity insurance for independent experts in Europe

  • Manus - for building complex systems and projects

Daily actions:

  • tell 1 person what I’m thankful to them for

  • read a self-development book/listen to a professional podcast for 15 minutes

  • make a valuable post/comment on LinkedIn

  • tag 10 people in my connections database

  • connect with 30 interesting people on LinkedIn

Weekly actions:

If you have any thoughts, ideas, or questions, please 👇

And if you’d like to have more 👋 Friendworking in your life 👇

See you next week! 👋