Welcome to Kitchen Table Career:
Hey, you made it. I’m really glad you’re here.
Welcome to Kitchen Table Career, a free weekly newsletter for stay at home moms who are starting a freelance career. We go from $0 to $1,000 a month using real strategies and a bit of AI help, and we cover everything from building your first portfolio to landing your first paying client.
No degree required. No prior clients. No career gap too big. Just a kitchen table, a bit of time, and enough willingness to start before you feel ready.
Five years ago, getting a freelance job meant you needed a CV, a portfolio, and years of experience already behind you. Today it just means having a skill, a profile, and the guts to start.
The commute, the 9 to 5, the childcare juggling act, the career gap. These used to be real walls keeping stay at home moms out of the workforce. They’re not as solid as they used to be. The work has come to us. The real question is whether we’re ready to meet it.
Who this is for
Moms who’ve never freelanced before. Whether you’ve been home for one year or ten, this is a step by step guide starting from zero. No portfolio, no clients, no formal experience needed. We take the skills you already use running your home and show you how to turn them into services people are hiring for right now.
Moms coming back after a career gap. Maybe you paused for your health, for your kids, or just because life happened. This is your way back in, minus the part where you have to pretend your last few years didn’t happen.
Moms who keep hearing about AI and have no idea what to do with it. You’ve heard the names, ChatGPT, Claude, and none of it has been explained in a way that actually applies to you. I’ll show you, in plain language, how to use these tools to write proposals, build sample work, and get things done faster. No tech background needed.
The problems I see most often
• Not knowing where to start. Too many platforms, too many so called strategies, too much noise.
• Believing you have no marketable skills. After years at home it’s easy to feel behind. You’ve actually been building skills the entire time.
• No portfolio to show. Every listing wants experience you don’t have yet.
• Picking the wrong platform. Upwork, Fiverr, Contra, Bark, and nobody tells you which one actually makes sense for a beginner.
• Profiles nobody clicks on. Proposals that go nowhere. Waiting to feel ready, which somehow never actually arrives.
• No consistent time to work on any of this between school runs and nap times.
• Not knowing how to use AI, or feeling like it’s too late to even try.
I’ve lived through every one of these. Kitchen Table Career is how I worked my way through them.
What you’ll get every week
A step by step guide walking you through one specific task, in plain language, nothing skipped. Something you can actually follow during nap time or while waiting in the pickup line.
AI prompts and tools that make the boring parts faster. Portfolio builders, profile builders, proposal help, ways to figure out which skills you should be leaning on.
Honest stories with real numbers. What worked, what didn’t, what I’d do differently. No highlight reel, no promises about ten thousand dollars a month.
Who I am
I’m Lana Reynolds, and I started Kitchen Table Career in 2024. I’m a mom who wasn’t willing to give up having a career of my own just because I chose to stay home with my kids.
I went looking online first, like everyone does, and found a lot of pages promising huge numbers that turned into bloated templates and nothing else. Eventually I found freelance platforms, and later AI tools, and realized both were flexible enough to fit around a kid’s nap schedule.
That’s when things actually shifted. I learned to use Claude to write proposals and build sample work from scratch, and I figured out how to talk about six years of running a household in a way that clients actually valued. I built income around my kids’ schedule, and I’ve helped over 500 moms do the same thing since.
This is the newsletter I wish existed back when I was starting out.
If something here ever helps you, forward it to a mom friend who needs it too. That’s really the only thing I’ll ever ask.
Welcome to Kitchen Table Career. I’m glad you’re here.
Lana
