One Million from Photoshop: How a Self-Taught Designer Turned Digital Skill into Freelancing, 120 App Downloads, and Million-Dollar Career

20 October 2010, 10:46. A twenty-one-year-old in Bucharest registers on 99designs. No training. No desk, just an old extendable table and a wooden chair with no back rest. A CRT monitor that made everything look pink. A cracked copy of Photoshop, because $700 for a licence was out of the question. Three weeks later he won his first web design contest. The prize was $1,247. That was six months of pay for a door-to-door cosmetics salesman. Chris Barin is blunt about what this book is not. Not a self-help book. Not a get-rich programme. "I've failed a lot and made a lot of mistakes, and most of them are in here." Inside: - Bread and margarine, hand-me-down clothes, and ex-communist Romania in the 90s- The computer he begged for- 333 contests, 578 designs, 42 wins. A 13% win rate, and what losing that often does to your head- The back injury, the two hernias, and what they cost him- Everything he tried that did not work: the blog, poker, a bagel shop- A studio in a villa outside Bucharest turning Photoshop templates into Android apps, 120 million downloads, and the day Google Play took the whole portfolio away for life- Running a team. Being hated online. A quarter of a million euro lost on a food brand. Where the money actually went No mastermind. No networking. No mailing list. No rich friends. One self-taught skill and a very long stretch of work. Written by someone still in the middle of it, not from an exotic beach.