I've lost every job I've had. That's why Dinkum exists.

Every job I've ever had has ended with me fired, made redundant or in a spot where I had to leave. It took me years to see it was making me free. Dinkum is what I built with that freedom: SEO work that gets done five mornings a week without anyone standing over it, from a company that's easy to fire.

Every job, one way or another

I've been put on notice, pushed out, made redundant, and I've walked away from a company I started. Not once or twice: all the way through my working life, every job I've had has ended one way or another.

The warehouse. I worked in a Woolworths warehouse and refused to follow one of the safety rules, because I thought the rule itself was unsafe and it made no sense. The managers pulled me up and I was put on notice. Afterwards, they changed the rule to the one I'd suggested.

The Friday night push. At a company that made form software, I was told to push a complicated release on a Friday night. I offered to do it first thing Saturday morning instead. That made me "not a team player", and they set about getting me out. I was by far the most productive person in that company, and it didn't matter.

The client that left. Another company lost its biggest client, and I was made redundant. Nothing I did at my desk that week could have changed it.

My own company. Even a company I started ended for me. We had competing views of the future: I wanted to build something like beehiiv and Substack in one, and the people I started it with didn't. So I left.

For a long time I took all of it personally. You start to wonder what's wrong with you. Somewhere along the way it stopped feeling like failure. Each time I lost a job I also lost a boss, a set of rules I hadn't written and somebody else's idea of what I was for. What was left was the work I could actually do.

What getting let go teaches you

• Being right won't keep you the job. The warehouse ended up with my rule. I still got put on notice for it.
• A job is someone else's decision. It can end because a client walks, in a meeting you weren't in, for reasons that have nothing to do with your work.
• Keep your work portable. The skills you build and the things you make are the only parts that come with you.
• If you can see it, build it yourself. The only way to make the thing you believe in is to own it.

The ultimate freedom tool

Dinkum is what I built when I stopped looking for the next job. Every weekday morning it reads a site's Search Console data, checks what Google and the AI answer engines say about the business, picks the one change most likely to help, makes it and sends it to the owner as a pull request. One change a morning: a Dink. Then it checks, at 14 and 28 days, whether that Dink worked.

It doesn't need me in an office. It doesn't need a manager to sign off its week. It just runs. And nothing it makes goes live as a surprise late on a Friday: every Dink waits as a pull request until someone has looked at it and approved it. That's freedom for me: a business that does its work whether or not anyone is watching, and a job nobody can make redundant.

It's freedom for the people who use it too. The owner who'd rather run their café or their clinic than learn what a canonical tag is. The founder who's sick of paying a retainer for a monthly report. Nobody should have to give up their evenings to SEO, or hand their search traffic to an agency and hope.

A company you can fire

I've been on the wrong end of it enough times to know how it feels, so I built Dinkum to leave the power with you, not us.

• Nothing ships without you. Every Dink is a pull request you approve or close.
• Month to month. There's no contract to get out of.
• Your first five Dinks are free, and they're yours to keep whether you stay or not.
• Money back for the first month. If you join and aren't happy by the end of it, tell us why and we refund it in full.
• Every change lives in your own code. If you let us go, nothing leaves with us.
• We give the methods away. Guides like how to get ChatGPT to recommend your business show every step, so you can do all of it yourself.

If it just happened to you

If you're reading this the week after you lost a job: I'm sorry. It's rough, and it doesn't help much to hear it might be the start of something. But every time it happened to me, it pushed me a bit closer to work that was mine. It didn't feel like that on the first Monday. It did later.

These days the only people who can let me go are my customers, and that's how it should be. Dinkum has to earn its place every morning. If it doesn't, you can fire it. Dirk, for the record, says he got the boot from a Nokia 3310 and never looked back.