Every big journey starts small. Mine started with five dollars an hour.
Let me take you back to the beginning.
A kid who loved numbers
I grew up in Kandy, Sri Lanka, always drawn to finance and business. That curiosity never left me. I studied Accounting and Finance at the university of Peradeniya, then went on to earn a professional qualification called CIMA – think of it as a black belt for finance people.
Then I did what every “smart, sensible” person does. I got a good job.
Playing it safe (and learning a lot)
I joined KPMG, one of the biggest accounting firms in the world. Think of it as finance boot camp — I learned how real businesses keep their books straight and how audits actually work.
Next, I joined Moody’s, working in investment research. My job was to look at companies, build financial models (basically, spreadsheets that predict the future of a business), and help decide where big money should be invested.
It was a good career. Structured. Respected. Safe.
But somewhere inside me, a question kept popping up:
“Is this really the only way to build a life? What else is out there?”
The evening that started it all
In 2019, I stumbled across something called Upwork – a place where people from anywhere in the world could offer their skills to clients from anywhere else. No office. No boss. Just skill, meeting demand.
I thought, “I know finance. I know modelling. Why not try it here?”
So in the evenings, after my regular job, I opened my laptop and gave it a shot.
Here’s the truth nobody tells beginners: being good at something and knowing how to sell it are two completely different skills. I was good at financial modelling. But I had zero idea how to convince a stranger on the internet to trust me with their money and their business.
Becoming a student again
I had no reviews. No client history. No reputation. Just a blank profile and a lot of hope.
So, I did the only thing that made sense – I became a student all over again.
I watched over a hundred YouTube videos about freelancing and Upwork. I read article after article. I studied what worked for other people and tried to understand why it worked, not just what they did.
Then I got to work:
- I built a small portfolio of financial modelling samples – real work, not just talk.
- I created simple personal finance and wealth-tracking templates, the kind of tool anyone could use to manage their own money – and I sent these to potential clients for free, just to show what I could do.
- I sent proposals. Lots of them. Some through the normal channels, some as cold messages with a sample attached, some with a free template as an icebreaker.
Most of it went nowhere. Silence. More silence. A little self-doubt.
The part nobody warns you about
Here’s something worth knowing, and I learned it the hard way: setting up a profile is the easy part. Anyone can fill in a few fields in an afternoon.
Getting your first project – that’s the real mountain to climb. And it’s not one clever trick. It’s a process. You send a proposal, hear nothing, adjust, try something new, and send another. For me, it took over a month of this before I found an approach that actually got replies.
A month of silence tests you. But I kept adjusting. Kept testing. Kept showing up.
The five-dollar breakthrough
Then, finally, it happened. I got my first client.
The rate? Five US dollars an hour.
It wasn’t glamorous. It wasn’t going to make me rich. But it was proof of one simple thing: this actually works. And once you prove something works even a little, you can build on it.
Think of it like planting a single seed. It doesn’t look like much on day one. But it’s the start of everything that grows after it.
From five dollars to fifty thousand
That one small client turned into two. Then five. Then more than I could count.
Over time, the numbers told their own story:
- 90+ completed projects with clients around the world
- Over USD 50,000 earned on Upwork alone
- Top Rated status, with a perfect job success score
That freelance work eventually grew into its own company – Fundora Analytics – helping startups and growing businesses with financial modelling, budgeting, forecasting, and strategy.
And through it all, I never stopped my day job. I moved to the UK, working with organisations like Fitch Ratings and Valtech. Then to Australia, where I still live and work today.
Here’s the lesson hiding in that: you don’t need to burn the boats to build something new. You just need one client, a little consistency, and a system you can repeat.
Building a team, not just a profile
As the projects got bigger, I noticed something. Some jobs needed more than just me. A project might need a financial modeller and a designer. Or an analyst and a developer.
So I built MonetizeIQ, an agency on Upwork – a group of freelancers across different skills, working together on bigger, better projects instead of everyone competing alone for the small ones – Visit – MonetizeIQ Upwork Agency
It’s deliberately a mixed team, not a single-skill shop – finance, design, development, and more, all under one roof, so a project gets staffed properly instead of squeezed into one person’s skill set.
By now, one client had grown into a company, a career across three countries, and a team. But something was still missing.
A book that connected the dots
Somewhere along this journey, I read a book called Entrepreneurship: Theory, Process and Practice, by Howard Frederick, Allan O’Connor, and Donald F. Kuratko. One idea from it stuck with me – the idea of social entrepreneurship: building something that genuinely helps people, while also earning a sustainable income from it. Not charity. Not pure profit-chasing. Both, together, by design.
Reading that, I realised I’d already been doing this without ever putting a name to it. Across Sri Lanka, the UK, and Australia, I’d worked with individuals managing their own money, startups figuring out their first budget, small businesses needing real financial structure, and even larger corporates with more complex needs. Different people, same problem: they needed clear, practical financial help, and it wasn’t always easy to find.
That’s when the real question hit me: why keep this help limited to one client at a time?
Why MonetizeIQ exists
That question is the whole reason MonetizeIQ.club exists.
I wanted to take everything I’d learned – from finance, from freelancing, from building a business from nothing — and make it available to far more people than I could ever help one client at a time.
So today, MonetizeIQ.club shares templates, courses, toolkits, and eBooks on:
- Freelancing — how to start, grow, and earn from your skills
- Personal finance — how to actually understand and manage your own money
- Building wealth — how to grow what you have, step by step
- Scaling a business — how to take something small and make it bigger
None of it is theory pulled from a textbook. It’s the same playbook I used myself, simplified so anyone can pick it up and apply it. And the first piece of that playbook — the one closest to where I started — is a course called LAUNCH, built entirely from that hard first month I told you about earlier. It’s designed to compress that struggle into a clear, guided path, so you don’t have to figure it all out alone the way I did.
If I could do it, so can you
I want to leave you with this: I started with no audience, no connections, and a single five-dollar-an-hour project. I built this while working a full-time job, in a country far from where most of my clients lived.
Your skills are your greatest asset — you just have to learn how to use them.
If I could do it, starting from scratch, so can you.
Or if you’d rather just talk it through first, feel free to reach out to me directly. I’m always happy to help.
