I started buying broken laptops on eBay, fixing them, and reselling them with my best friend. We started with $600 each on credit cards. That turned into a large refurbished computer sales business. So large that I started shopping for a vacation home (lake home).
Well, the process of buying a vacation home was frustrating. This was back in 2002 and most real estate brokerages did not have websites, and if they did, they were static and outdated. This led to a conversation with my business partner...and we ended up buying a really good domain related to my vacation home search and launched a website for realtors. We called it our side project.
When the used laptop market turned into the used VCR market, we shifted all of our eggs to our side project basket.
Today we own a real estate brokerage with 20 offices and are pretty much considered the leaders in the lake home sales market in the Midwest. We're on track to hit a $Billion in annual sales in the next couple of years (did about $300M last year). Neither of us were Realtors (I'm still not). It's been an interesting ride so far.
A naive question - if you are selling a lake home worth $5m then you are considering that amount as your sale? Let's say you are charging 1% as your fees then $50k is your revenue? Thx
Yea, the margins went from out-of-this-world to terrible as the price of new laptops came down. We used paypal and a few other (way worse) credit card processors. We also accepted checks and money orders by mail.
Edit: Another interesting tidbit. We were such a large paypal customer at the time that we were invited into their IPO. Bear Stearns (I think) called us 5 times trying to get us to buy in...but it was right after the .com crash and we chickened out. We would have doubled our money that day ;(
It's a real shame tbf, the drop in laptop prices means a lot more stuff is just thrown out and turned to e-waste instead of repaired / refurbished and resold, with fixing electronics having reached such a low point that it's become a somewhat rebellious volunteer job now.
I don't think it's a shame at all, I bought my first laptop in 2004 for iirc 2200 EUR, in my 2nd year of university. (OK, I wanted a nice laptop and not the cheapest piece of junk(.
It served me well for quite a few years, but I wasn't the starving student type, but actually working part-time as a programmer. I also wouldn't say this laptop was essential to finishing my studies, but (computer science) it was very, very handy.
I left my job. Or, more accurately, the startup I was doing contract work for went under, and I decided not to look for another contract afterwards. I worked on a few projects before starting my business, Indie Hackers, which I grew to just under $6k/mo in revenue (in 8 months) before joining Stripe.
I've done interviews with close to 300 founders. Recently, I added a sortable, filterable directory that can help answer questions like yours. For example, you can filter to only show businesses started as a side project: https://www.indiehackers.com/products?commitment=side-projec.... I'm still working on improving the accuracy, but it's coming along.
Wow, Courtland, I had no idea Indie Hackers was only 8 months old when Stripe acquired it - you already seemed super established to me. Congrats on achieving that in such a short space of time.
I was just listening to an older episode of Indie Hackers today as a matter of fact. Thank you for contributing something valuable to the ecosystem. A lot of similar podcasts/blogs focus on a lot of fluff, but you do/did a great job of directing the conversation, and summarizing long-winded guest comments that may not use the proper business jargon into concise and interesting tidbits.
One thing that was always interesting for me as a listener is that I'm actually the opposite of a lot of your audience. I'm a senior marketer who knows the marketing world inside and out, but I'd consider myself an "early" programmer[1]. It is a very different set of challenges. But one thing I noticed was the true lack of basic marketing skills many of your guests had in the beginning of their journeys.
Would you say that the "baseline" for that knowledge among engineers has increased over the last couple of years as the "indie hacker" movement you and others like Patrick McKenzie have helped foster has grown in awareness and popularity? Ie., given the propensity for developers to spend a lot of their time researching solutions online, do you find they are starting with more of the basics in place than they did maybe 5-10 years ago?
I used to read indie hackers once every 2weeks. I would go to the site and read the latest 6 or so interviews.
With the new sortable view, i can't sort by recently added. I can sort by recently updated, but that isn't the same thing.
Could you add a sort by recently added?
I've seen other attempts to build a community around this demographic before. One I really liked, I even found someone on there and we built a nice project together, though I forget the name.
Do you recall what you focused on when you started? What do you think led to your success and traction?
I find this stuff fascinating when there seems to be an idea that people want to happen but no has been able to get it right. Then finally someone (or some people) crack the code.
Long day, finally back. The key was a combination of (a) identifying the right audience, (b) finding a distribution channel that could consistently reach them in large numbers, (c) creating a product ideal for that audience and distribution channel, and (d) parlaying that traffic into its own community. And not necessarily in that order.
The answer to those questions turned out to be (a) developers who want to self-fund profitable online businesses, (b) Hacker News, (c) interviews with successful developer founders willing to tell their story and share revenue numbers in the open, and (d) getting readers onto a mailing list, then sending them links to interesting forum threads every week for a year.
Lest I seem smarter than I am, this analysis is being done with the benefit of hindsight. I did not have 100% of this stuff planned from the beginning.
I put my whole history up here: https://www.indiehackers.com/product/indie-hackers. I've got to run, but hopefully will remember to come back and edit this comment to respond to some of your questions!
Traffic was relatively high when I started talking to sponsors (~100k uniques/mo). Also, it helps to choose your sponsors widely. A company with low conversion rates that sells a service for low prices needs tons of clicks to justify what they spend on an ad. But a different company — let's say a recruiting company — may make thousands of dollars off of a single high-quality click, so they make for a better sponsor/advertiser.
It doesn't anymore, since I joined Stripe. Before that I sold ad space on the newsletter, website, and podcast, and I experimented with affiliate links when my interviewees would mention certain products or books. Selling ads was a pain, and the affiliate links weren't particularly effective.
If had to do it over again, I would've avoided most of the above and instead focused on charging for community memberships while simultaneously making the community more valuable to join.
I had been a recruiter for several years, starting off out of college with a ~200 person international firm for a couple years and then a founding member of a small boutique recruiting firm for about seven years. I eventually figured out that I wasn't getting any value from my partner, so I started my own recruiting firm.
During my recruiting career I was always writing/editing resumes and giving job search advice to my candidates, but the job search advice was always awkward because I had "skin in the game" (potential fees). I never became comfortable with that process.
On the side I started a resume writing and career consulting business, and I decided a couple years ago to make that my full-time focus. At first I wasn't sure if I'd be able to maintain my income from recruiting (wife and 2 kids in an expensive area, special needs kids), but so far it looks like I'm on schedule to actually earn more.
Beyond the compensation, I find the work far more fulfilling. I'm working more hours than I used to, but I feel I'm actually helping people much more effectively. Hearing stories about how a resume and advice got someone their dream job feels good, and I'm also writing for some interesting people both in and out of tech.
Recruiting and resume writing is what entrepreneurs call a "tie shop business." The product is already well-defined, the customers are already well-known, and how to operate the business is already well-known.
Even a software consulting firm is a "tie shop business."
Developing new technology is the polar opposite of a "tie shop business." The product is new, the customers are unknown, and how to sell the product is unknown.
The reason why I state this is that hacker news's users, and Y Combinator's businesses, are developing new technology. They aren't creating "tie shop businesses."
It's important that you know the difference when participating in a forum like this, and deciding what kind of business to start. Advice that applies to a "tie shop business" doesn't really apply to someone who's starting a business to develop new technology.
I expect most users of hacker news aren't creating any businesses at all ("tie shops" or otherwise) but are here for interesting stories and dialogue with others.
YC's portfolio and team may be creating new tech, but HN is a bit of a bigger umbrella from what I've seen, and in my several years commenting here your comment is the closest thing to a "you don't belong here" or "stay in your lane" signal that I think I've heard.
OP's question was pretty open and didn't mention anything about developing technology. I wouldn't offer expertise where I didn't have it, but if someone asks how I started my business I think I'm qualified to answer.
Exactly, was reading hacker news for a while before starting my "tie shop" web agency business. Don't mind that guy, nothing stated only fancy new stuff can be talked about, and yours was an interesting read nevertheless.
Thanks, and I absolutely do feel valued here. I was a bit surprised by this reply as it was a bit out of left field given what I wrote and the question asked. Identifying as a recruiter (now former recruiter) here was always interesting based on the reputation of the industry, but I haven't had any real issues with the audience.
> Recruiting and resume writing is what entrepreneurs call a "tie shop business."
I'm a (successful) entrepreneur and I don't call any businesses "tie shop businesses." In a quick search, I can't even find a reference to that terminology. That's a pretty condescending label, whether you mean it to be or not. The polite way to make your point is to talk about how certain businesses are designed to scale up rapidly while others are designed to be profitable with steady growth. Ideally, you'd make this point while considering the tradeoffs of each and acknowledging that advice about each is going to be different. Hopefully you'd make this point 1) where it's actually relevant, and 2) without reducing all the considerable effort involved in building and maintaining any kind of business to selling ties.
In any case, it's not accurate as stated. What you're saying is a false dichotomy. Not all companies designed to scale with venture capital are legitimately developing novel technology. In fact, having spoken to many of Y Combinator's founders directly, I would say most of them aren't, and many actually have well-defined markets with which to sell their products. Most "tech startups" are something closer to the application of existing technology than they are to the development of new technology. In contrast, a machine learning consulting firm can absolutely be developing new technology, and it can absolutely have difficulty finding product-market fit.
That distinction doesn't matter much, because both sorts of businesses can encounter significant difficulties, and both types encounter difficulties not subsumed by the other. Most importantly, most users active on Hacker News have yet to build any business. The author of this post didn't specify what sort of company they were looking for advice about. Your "advice" seems utterly misplaced and discouraging.
Employee => academia (PhD in AI) => open source (Gensim) => ML freelancing (radimrehurek.com) => ML consulting company (rare-technologies.com) => ML products (pii-tools.com, scaletext.ai).
Looking back, it's hard to imagine what it would be like to jump right into full-time products, skipping the intermediate budding steps. Is it a burden to understand the whole process, from accounting, legal, HR, management, ops, sales, support? Better to outsource them right away?
It's definitely true that all that ancillary stuff is a distraction, a (stressful) time sink. Especially when you're just starting out and clueless, like I was. Bootstrapping slows you down. On the other hand, it felt kinda natural, but took many years. Not the standard (?) SV path of rapid growth.
Quit in 2009, age 28. It was not that hard financially -- I moved to southern Thailand, worked on the PhD and Gensim there. Thailand is a pretty cheap country to live actually.
I feel like I'm not helping you guys much, because my circumstances may have been unique, but the honest answer is:
Not much negotiation needed. My uni had what I'd call an "old school AI department", grounded in linguistics / semantic web and RDFs / expert systems, that type of research. I was more into statistics, Bayesian inference and vectors. The mutual impact was lukewarm, and completing my thesis remotely not an issue.
Did "PhD" pedigree help in anyway? I mean you could do your research outside academia, since your department was not helping you (in research). But I guess US PhD stipend could be considered as a good salary in Thailand.
Most programs have a year or two of coursework, then it's just research and writing. So if you're ABD ("All But Dissertation") it wouldn't be a big deal if your advisor is on board. You can do committee meetings over videochat.
I was ABD and took a job, and finished my dissertation in the evenings. I basically just had to fly back to school to defend.
Neither. After getting my degree, I continued a student project for 1 year that went nowhere. Eventually, I realized it wasn't going anywhere, so I decided to look for a job.
I went to a hackathon, summarily said I was looking for a job on stage at the end. Instead, someone I already knew came talk to me about their startup idea (which had PoC already live, a solid business plan and good proofs the project could be viable), and I decided to give it a go.
That was 5 years ago, I'm still there, learned a lot, and now we are 12 employees (we started at 2 unpaid founders, and started paying ourselves a minimal salary after a year). While it's not up to SV standard, I do consider it a success that we are still alive, and did not sell our soul doing others people project at any time of the company (which happens a lot here, companies don't die, they become contractors).
Important note: I had the privilege of a nice parental cushion that let me do that instead of absolutely requiring an income. I couldn't have done it otherwise.
Thanks for the honesty about the cushion. Often these tidbits get left out. It is really interesting to understand all the puzzle pieces and the mentality of those that made it.
Very close to my story! Only that it was the student project that worked out. We started out with 5 students living off student loans. After a year we were finished with school, and went unpaid for another year. Started with a micro salary by then, and 2 of the original founders had left.
Now, 5 years after we started we are 7 full time emps, though not yet profitable.
I started my company, https://rezi.io, 5 months after graduating college in August of 2014
I noticed that about all of my classmates were grossly underemployed since their resumes were simply trash. They didn't understand applicant tracking systems and existing resume companies don't address the issue of resume optimization (except Jobscan, but they're a little different)
It started as a side project in Wisconsin, then in November 2016, I moved to South Korea where we've successfully supported a number of the top universities with our English resume solutions and I've been able to go full time + hire our first employee. Feels great. Such a ride so far. Here is a quick article of my time in Korea
I started making video games as a teenager, and about ten years ago there was this golden age of Flash games where you could make a small video game, auction it off on a private website to various companies that ran Flash game arcades. You'd incorporate their branding, ads, links, and in exchange receive an upfront fee followed by a split of the ad revenue. Over the course of my three year degree I had five games published, which gave me a taste of the business side of game development. It was a weird, unique, fun time in game development! I don't think there's much like that now for hobbyists to transition into commercial work quite so naturally.
But I finished uni and went into the industry, writing Python/Django code for a startup. During this time I started work on the game that eventually let me go full-time, The Cat Machine (http://store.steampowered.com/app/386900). I'd work on it on Saturdays and towards the end of development I'd even get up early in the morning to get an hour or two in. I released it on Steam and a bunch of other places, where it did... better than a niche puzzle game about cats should do, I think! Other good things happened, it was featured for a number of months on the front page of the Apple Mac Store next to actually really good games like Braid and Mini Metro, so it turned out that cross-platform support was really worth it!
I have had some side projects make a little bit of money, but never enough to make any sort of headway toward replacing my full-time job.
My current effort is also a side business while I continue to work my FT job. It is definitely detrimental to the business to continue to devote 40+ hours per week to something else, but I need to feed my family (if I was young and single with no other financial obligations, I would totally just quit the day job and live on canned meat and potatoes) :/
My advice - if you're young, take your financial risks now. It only gets harder to do later :)
Depending on how far you take your business while young, you may find it difficult to go back to regular employment, especially in places where people expect you to be reliable and dedicated.
I'm not sure young people can take financial risks, unless they're already rich. If they're not rich, I'd sooner advise people to work for long enough to have a safety net of cash, as well as cash to invest in their idea first. A bonus you get while working is that you meet people who can potentially help you in your business later on. Seeing what's involved in a real business will also help you make more realistic estimates of what you'll need in your own.
The average age of the successful startup/business founder is way older than what the media lets people know by showing only the youngest entrepreneurs i.e. the outliers who are noteworthy. Those people happen to have industry experience and money that can be "risked".
> I'm not sure young people can take financial risks, unless they're already rich.
It's a lot easier to take a financial risk when you have no dependents and no mortgage.
I quit my job to start a business in my late 20s, when I was single and had no kids. I will say that another reply's statement is very true: "If I think back to the person I was in my mid-20s, I would not have had the dedication, confidence, people skills, or even the technical know-how to pull off anything approaching a successful business."
In my case, I just wanted to be in charge of my own destiny for awhile, with the freedom to screw up. (And I did screw up.) Although I wish I did things differently, the experience itself was worthwhile. Our modern upbringings are so structured that "starting our own business" really just turns into an outlet for avoiding authority for awhile.
During my 20s, I was in graduate school and I had no money. Now I'm in my 30s making good developer money, and while I have a mortgage I also have enough saved to pay it for a long time.
I also have no dependents, which is obviously the big difference maker.
> I also have no dependents, which is obviously the big difference maker.
Yep. Just try to build significant savings with a wife and 3 kids. I'll probably never have more than a couple of months' pay sitting in savings. I realize if I lived alone I could easily live on 1/3 of my current salary. Ah well, life choices and all that...
> The average age of the successful startup/business founder is way older than what the media lets people know by showing only the youngest entrepreneurs i.e. the outliers who are noteworthy.
Interesting point. If I think back to the person I was in my mid-20s, I would not have had the dedication, confidence, people skills, or even the technical know-how to pull off anything approaching a successful business (I still may not for all I know, but I'm trying). However, I've met a few brilliant people in that age range who seemed to excel in all of those attributes I just listed :) -- but they're definitely extreme outliers, as you say.
Hah, I worry about this. I started my business at 25. I've never had a job. I'm not sure how employable I would be if I ever needed one. I rarely work the same number of hours each day, and I don't keep a set schedule.
As such, a safety net is a bit priority. Enough so I could start another business if mine ever gets problems.
This sounds very similar to my history. I've built a number of projects on the side, one of which my current employer purchased for a decent sum of money (and then hired me). I continue to build projects on the side, but I just don't have the necessary time to commit to them.
I finally bit the bullet last week and put in my 2 week notice to work on side projects full time. I have enough money to cover myself comfortably for several years, and I have no dependents - this is an opportunity I may never get again. I'm giving myself 1 year to see what I can build, and then I'll decide what to do.
As one with family but also safety cushion I would also recommend a middle option for those in fear: negotiate part-time switch. Start with 4/5 days job to heal burn-out and spend Fridays on some own side experiments.
I started working on a prototype smartwatch back in 2008 while I was doing undergrad at UWaterloo. iPhone didn't have a Bluetooth API then so I actually hacked together a small 30 pin dongle with an nrf radio. Quickly moved to Blackberry which had a semi working BT API.
I graduated in 2009 and decided to work on it full time. Funding in early days came from oversized novelty cheques from pitch competition wins, some interest free loans ($15k personal loan from Canadian government - CYBF) and personal savings from my coop work terms over previous 5 years.
Got $20k YC funding in 2011 which kicked company into higher gear before our Kickstarter campaign in 2012.
No, there's no point. You can buy a Pebble 2 HR on Amazon for $90. It will last long into the future (albeit with slightly reduced feature set in July, until the Rebble.io project is up to speed).
The best thing that I was able to do is to reduce my fulltime job hours to part time, initially 3 days/week, and used the other time to grow my own business. This may or may not be applicable in every situation, but if you are a positive contributer in your working environment, it's unlikely that your boss would rather just replace you (and retrain a new person) instead of just having you work less. This eases the stress tremendously on the new business if you don't have to worry about eating and rent/mortgage payments.
This is exactly what I'd do. I'm currently at 20h/week due to finishing university. After that I'll go to 40h/week for a while, and if I figure out the ideas I have are "more than a hobby"-worthy I'll reduce to 80%, pursue those and see where it goes from there.
My SO and I don't plan to have kids and our rent is already well affordable; this makes it easier (plus FT job \subset hobby helps a lot); so additional earnings would go straight to savings anyway...
You know what, I've never thought about that possibility at all. Usually, when you hear about starting a business while working, you're just working extra hours on top of your 9-5.
Maybe I can try that with the leave I have saved up and then ease my way into a part-time gig. Well, after I start making money on the side business.
1st step, going from 5 days / week to 4 days / week is pretty much a no brainer. You get 50% more free time for 20% less money. I did that 2 years ago and never looked back. Sometimes I switch to 3 days / week, then back to 4 days, depending on how I feel. But I would never consider a "full time job" more than 4 days / week. But sure, I am getting shit done, so I don't have a problem asking for that.
Office Snapshots (https://officesnapshots.com) was started ~11 years ago as a side project while I was teaching middle and high school history. It got fairly popular immediately due to early viral sharing on Twitter and Digg.
I just kept going at posting to it for the next several years. Eventually I decided to stop teaching, and my wife and I moved to a new city, and decided to do something else for a career. Through the process of temping at various businesses (warehouse for a tooth whitening company, office manager at a cremation sales company), I decided that Office Snapshots should be my main pursuit.
There was still a lot of doing various projects for people to make money in the meantime while the business was growing such as web design work or hunting for working coupon codes for a friend's business.
All that said, Office Snapshots has been my sole work for the last 3 years and we recently launched a site dedicated to healthcare projects and one for educational architecture projects.
I check out your site every few weeks. I really enjoy looking at the design and layouts in offices around the world. No real reason for it. It’s just a nice distraction sometimes. (Especially in boring meetings!) Keep up the good work!
I left my job, took some time out, and then started building my business (https://dependabot.com).
Financially, it's been tough - after 10 months Dependabot makes $2,100 a month (although that's now growing quite fast). I know I'm the kind of personality that couldn't have started it at the same time as working a full time job, though - I need to be really focussed on one thing at a time.
Looks like a great product. How did you come up with the pricing models? It seems on the cheap side. Have you thought about having something between small and unlimited (at the $50 mark or more) and then the unlimited plan for quite a bit more (or even contact us for pricing)?
From what channels did you gain the most initial traction? After reading your other comments, I assume you didn't do "traditional" sales such as cold calling/emailing, so I'm curious as to how you built up a user base. I'm currently struggling to do that exact thing with my own business right now. I started selling (cold calling/emailing, demoing, PH/HN/IH posts, etc.) Jan. 1 2018 and I feel like there's something I'm missing as far as my sales process.
I did an interview for Indie Hackers with some detail (https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/dependabot) but the short answer is cold sales was how I got started, followed by piggybacking off of GitHub's new marketplace.
I can't stress enough how valuable (from a learning perspective) sales was for Dependabot, but only after I started targeting the right people. For Dependabot that was commenting on open-source dependency update PRs (that people had created manually).
Yeah, this is going to sound mad, but I quite like only charging $50. I know some customers would be willing to pay more, but under the hood the product is the same and I personally feel good about giving people great value.
The above would have to change if I started doing serious sales, in which case I’d need a higher number to justify the time involved.
Value is relative. That is how you justify charging open source $0, a bootstrapped business $15, and a multi-billion dollar corporation $5000. The larger the product/more revenue a product brings in the more value your service offers them.
I started freelancing 5-6 years ago, doing copywriting projects mostly. Website copy, monthly blog posts, that kind of stuff.
After a few months I realized that none of the clients I was working with had an actual digital marketing plan in place; they were just farming out copy projects because they "knew the needed to have a blog."
I pitched all of my existing clients and spent the next year building up a side roster of additional clients who relied on me for their digital marketing strategy, copy, and social media management. This pivot away from being just copy-based to strategy and execution/management earned me enough recurring monthly revenue that I was making more from my side project than my 9-5, so I quit.
I've been running my company, Starling Social (https://www.starling.social) for just shy of three years now. I have a Copywriter, an Account Manager, and it's looking like I'll need to hire an Ads Specialist in the not-too-distant future. Life is pretty great.
A little tangential, but my wife decided to start a business a few years ago. We had no idea where to begin with the legal, banking, etc. side of things.
My first company was a design agency which I started in 2005 with one other partner. I left my other job to do it after I got tired of working for other people.
Built that up to 80 people and left in 2012 to got to New York to help another company get acquired. That happened faster than I thought (hadn't anythhing to do with me), that company was Square were I spent 4 1/2 years. Last year I left to start a new product consultancy we are still two, have a bunch of freelancers and are about to hire our first people.
I have had a lot of side projects (still do) my most profitable one is Ghostnote. Because I live in NY I wouldn't be able to live from it but it does give me substantial income and I am working on a few more which will definitely put me in position to not even have to do consulting (although I really do enjoy it)
To me the most important benefit besides the money is freedom and if I have anything to say I will never work for someone again.
I started https://www.browserless.io/ when I found out that there wasn't a good hosted solution for headless-browser work. There's a ton of other higher-level services that do things like screenshots and pdfs, but what if I needed something that those services didn't cover (and had to scale out to 100's of concurrent sessions).
I didn't really set out to do this service, but it came after _not_ finding it anywhere else. I'm about ~4 months in and make $1k/month on it so far, which tells me that others need this service as well. Happy to answer other questions about the business if folks are curious.
Version 1.0 was a very very simple hosted headless image running on a few VM's. At that point there wasn't any debugger or notifications about your sessions. Pretty much just a submission form that provisioned machines to support the account.
This actually took place after a few months in a beta where I was doing everything manually (to see if it could even work). That was actually a good lesson: do things manually until it doesn't scale as it's possible that you'll be writing code that doesn't ever run!
Never had a job in my life. I helped friends at real estate offices fix their IT problems while a student. People kept asking me for more and more stuff. Server setup, hosting, data analysis, websites, etc. Also got many referrals that expanded the business.
Eventually I just focused on the most fun and profitable projects only, while passing the rest on to freelancers or friends.
Got fired from this large international company. By the time I was saying farewell to my project team some folks from India told me they wanted to partner with me in case I decided to open my own (web development) company. And that's what I did a couple of weeks later. The partnership lasted 5 years. Lesson learned: networking is everything, not only with levels above but also below. You will need it when you decide it is the right time to build the team you need.
Hope you are not looking only for success stories...
I left a stable job at a small consultancy, with one-year-worth of salaries on the bank, armed with my tech skills but no sales expertise ( or commercial talent ) whatsoever.
The results, 14 years later: bankruptcy, lots of debt, a couple labor-related lawsuits and back to full time employment for a large corporation...
Lesson learned: as an entrepreneur you can buy tech skills ( and it's cheaper than most would imagine ) but nothing is more valuable than sales (soft)skills. A competent, well related, sales person is the most valuable asset on your company.
( BTW, my company was developing J2EE/JEE/JavaEE small/mid-sized projects for finance&insurance companies in Brazil )
I started freelancing just under 20 years ago and have worked as a solo developer ever since.
Maybe this isn't the best advice but I think we're capable of doing pretty extraordinary things when you're thrown into the deep end. You'd be surprised at how things start to work out once you're 100% out of your comfort zone.
I'm not saying quit your job immediately while still in debt or whatever. I just think that if you're debt free and have a few months of savings you could at least give starting your own business a fair shot without a safety net. If things don't look like they are going to work out, you could always find some type of job to pay the bills.
> I think we're capable of doing pretty extraordinary things when you're thrown into the deep end
This resonates with me as I've been there once already in my life and felt the same thing. A very sudden life-changing situation popped up unexpectedly and I just had to dig my heels in and push forward. You really find out what you're made of when failure is not an option. It turned out great and got me a job at a Fortune 500 while still in college, but admittedly I've had trouble replicating that tenacity ever since. There has to be a term for the phenomenon, but you feel like you're in this advanced state of mind and somehow you just know you're going to hit the ball out of the park if you keep working. Thanks for sharing your story!
I started a first company with some friend. I was in charge of the IT, he was in charge on Sales. However, things were catastrophic as I was selling more than him. A huge conflict occurred and I closed the company.
=> I lost some money in the process, but I learnt a lot.
Then, a friend from Engineering school just graduated. We had previously worked together on side-projects, and we had a common passion for cybersecurity. We decided to launch our company.
After three years of hard work, we are now profitable and really happy about this choice :).
I'm building my company (https://weardulo.com/) while working as a web developer full-time. Mornings, evenings and weekends is when I dedicate time to it.
A colleague and I left a large UK company and started orangejellyfish (https://orangejellyfish.com), a software consultancy with a focus on the web and JavaScript. The real push to start it came when we realised that much of what we both wanted to achieve in terms of craftsmanship, maintainable code and training in new technologies for engineering teams not yet exposed to them, was not going to be possible. We knew that many businesses do have a desire to improve those aspects of their engineering teams, and when we came to an agreement with a company that would become our first major client we decided that the time was right to both commit ourselves full-time.
We've doubled in size from our initial 2 in the last couple of months and with many more prospects on the horizon we're hoping to add a few more to that over the course of the next year!
We network at meetups, conferences and other events, so through word of mouth mainly. The active engineering community in London is fantastic at helping to spread opportunities.
A job was no option in the first place. Started and failed with businesses since I finished school with 19. With 29 now I have a business with 7 figure yearly profits.
I was in law school, planning to start my own law practice. Then I read the 4HWW, fell in love with the automated business model, and realized it was difficult in law.
I left law school, using LSAT tutoring and teaching to cover expenses while thinking of an automated product idea.
I had reached out to online LSAT tutors for tips when I first started tutoring. A few months in, one of them approached me to ask if I would write some explanations for LSAT preptests. He needed them for licsening reasons, but didn't have the time to write them himself.
This seemed like an automated product (he would pay me royalties, I kept the rights). I wrote a bunch. These eventually also turned into print books.
I later made the explanations free online. This site attracted a lot of users, and I made video courses to sell to them.
I was touring full-time in a band, while on retainer with an app agency for 30-hours/week when we launched https://soundstripe.com. I was introduced to the other two co-founders by a client, and we hit it off.
I quit touring about 10 months after we launched because we had gotten a staff of a few people and it was starting to take off. I took about a 75% pay cut to focus on it full-time until we were able to pay ourselves a reasonable salary about a year or year and a half into business. Still did some side work until then, but not 30-hours/week worth.
We bootstrapped it for the first two years (had about 15 employees by then), but just recently closed a late seed round, and have about 25 staff now.
Started my own business with a friend 4 years ago to write funny sci-fi side scrollers, he was then promoted in his permanent job which meant he didn't have any intention of leaving it.
Straight after with a 3d artist co-worker at the job at the time created a relatively re-useable VR ArchViz Engine in UE4 and Oculus Rift, our first client (major Indian construction firm) expected us to give it away for free and subsequently they went radio silent.
I panicked and quickly pivoted to DevOps/SRE consulting and contracting through agencies, which I've happily been doing since then.
Now it's a decision on whether to go back to permanent work (at a relatively senior level) as I'm starting a family or to double down and start hiring.
Started it in 2012 while wrapping up my last year of school. Put my idea for a product I really believed in on Kickstarter, luckily Hacker News and the like really took to it, pushing it past 100% quickly. Been at it ever since.
I left my job to become a consultant. I had some savings that were only going to last me a few months but I found a way to stretch that to 6 months, which is how long it took me to start getting consistent work. That was 5 years ago and I'm still consulting and loving it.
It simply started out with blogging about web development, JavaScript, and React and writing a self-published book about it eventually. I didn't plan to do it in the first place, but now I teach many people online React.js on my own course platform [0].
It's an exciting adventure, because suddenly you have to handle customer support, marketing and sales. Yet your main priority is keeping the course content up to date, adding new content and ensuring content with a high quality. It's not a 100% full-time gig yet, but I would say 60%. I hope by getting more students this year that I can accelerate it to 100%, because the teaching part itself is more fulfilling for me than any other 9 to 5 job. Last year I quit my job to support this adventure, but I have to have a couple of clients on the side [1]. Most of these clients are companies which are transitioning to React.
My first startup attempt was a indie game right out of university. In hindsight, I was too inexperienced, and as the only programmer on the game; it failed.
I got a job and worked there for ~3 years to gain experience, learn, and make some money. About 2 years into that, I started working on a side project with my lead and we left about a year later to work on it full time.
https://www.stroom.live started out as a live streaming video "social network for local happenings". Shortly before we launched, Facebook Live/Meerkat/Periscope were launched, and we could not gather any traction. We took our base tech and pivoted, turning it into a low cost, high quality (allowing the user to plug their professional camera into a cell phone) professional live streaming platform for video and broadcast professionals. After 2 years, we are finally starting to gain traction and customers.
My founder and I were able to pay for it through savings, me sucking it up and living at home, side contracts, and a Canadian government research program IRAP.
I started freelancing in 2012. Some years after, I started to understand I could never be rich or dissociate my income from my time while freelancing.
Started to build side projects 2 years ago. I roughly get $700/mrr with my 1st side project and my goal this year is $1.2k/mrr in 2018. So still far from being a full-time gig and still freelancing but increasing other revenues, which is my long term goal.
1. My nation elected a president more interested in plundering the environment than protecting it.
2. Nearly everyone feels "I want to act but if no one else does then my actions won't matter so I'll keep doing what I'm doing."
3. When I've gotten over that feeling, my changes improved my life.
My podcast, Leadership and the Environment http://joshuaspodek.com/podcast, emerged to help provide the leadership for cultural change, to where people want to act on their environmental values.
Then guests like Dan Pink, John Lee Dumas, Dorie Clark, Frances Hesselbein, and other luminaries enjoyed their personal challenges, leading to more influential guests.
With a Superbowl champion and a Victoria's Secret model coming up, I'm more motivated than ever.
Plus people are volunteering to help, leading to in-person events.
are you eating meat? avoiding meat & diary products is the best way to help the environment. Sensitive issue because not many people will do the change.
75% of carbon emissions come from our energy supplies. Not taking any long flights is another amazingly potent way to reduce footprint. It's hard to pinpoint a best way to help but there are certainly a lot of good ways.
I have a question about starting businesses...I'm getting ready to launch an MVP and it never occurred to me to research opening a specific bank account for it, whether or not I need to get a sole proprietorship (I'm in Canada, afaik this is our version of LLC more or less), etc. Anybody have any good resources for this stage of the process?
In the US a sole proprietorship is different than an LLC. It's basically just an alias that an individual uses to operate as a business. I think this is the same in Canada. An LLC limits your liability in the case that the business goes bankrupt or someone sues you or something like that so that your personal assets can't be taken.
I'm hesitant to give legal advice, especially to someone in another country whose laws I don't know, but in the US sole proprietorship are very common for small businesses and you can always switch to an LLC (or its Canadian equivalent) later.
I was contracting as an individual. I thought of myself as a a temp employee. The one of the executives at the company I was contracting for referred me to an executive at another business. In that moment I realized I could make the mental transition from temp to consultant, and my consulting business was born.
I started a blog on the side in 2015 as I was taking the 30x500 business class, built up an email list, and later wrote a book that teaches folks about the React JS library. I launched the book in 2016. I still have a job at this point, but the book continues to sell, and I have more products in the works.
It's not been fast. There are no hockey-stick graphs. But it's slow steady growth, and still seems to be growing. I am very glad I did not quit my job before I started this thing! I did a podcast interview about the process I went through and some of the earlier false starts here: https://stackingthebricks.com/podcast/ep27-you-can-ship-but-...
Before i was hired i went through around 150+ rejections. Every time i would go for an interview or interview candidates in my current role as technical team lead.
I will seriously wish for some resources which can teach me and others about the full interview process. what to do and what not to do. What kind of questions to prepare and what not to prepare.
And moreover a self assessment tool which can tell me how good i am as a developer from the interview perspective.
I got tired of (only) working for other people as a consultant.
Started a side project 14 months ago to create a small scale integration tool, and it turned into a full-on search indexing tool for digital product companies - https://getctx.io
(Basically you connect it with your Slack, Trello, Google Drive, email and GitHub and it indexes the content & lets you search via web or our Slackbot)
I've got multiple clients in trial and a couple of promising community installations for large tech bodies, hoping to get some decent revenue on the scoreboard soon :-)
I started freelancing on the side for about a year or two. Once it started to gain some momentum and be more predictable, I officially made an LLC and website and started devoting more time to it.
For many years I was switching between earning money from client projects for 6-8 months and then trying to build my own things for 3-4 months while living from savings.
A few years ago I was working as an application security consultant at Accuvant LABS. I had been reading the small business and consulting writings of tptacek and patio11 on this site and elsewhere for some time before then.
My experience as a security consultant was mostly working with very large enterprises. The technical work was interesting for the most part, but there was a lot of mundane "process" minutia and bureaucratic scar tissue. I noticed that kickoff calls with these companies would involve myself and any other technical consultants scheduled on the engagement, sales representatives, my immediate manager, a "solutions architect", the account manager, several people from their side, etc...I also witnessed a lot of "we'll get back to you" and inefficient internal team communication happening. At the time they were billing out consultants for $10-12,000 per week, but each consultant was only typically paid about 20% of that. A lot of value was being captured by a process very clearly designed for enterprise sales funneling, whereas the technical meat of the process was receiving a relatively smaller portion of the value.
So I left that company and started my own consultancy, aiming to effectively streamline the logistical for a smaller absolute rate while capturing nearly all of it individually. I began by focusing on smaller clients, particularly seed stage and VC-funded tech companies. I differentiated myself by 1) setting my weekly rates at approximately half of the market norm, and 2) handling all the foregoing roles on my own. On kickoff calls I could confidently speak about the end-to-end process both technically and logistically. In particular, I prioritized getting technical cofounded on kickoff calls in one-to-one or one-to-two settings, doing technical deep dives to demonstrate value, and consolidating all the answers into a single half hour call. For the most part, this was extremely effective - founders enjoyed having a single person to speak to who could fluidly transition between both "languages" for them.
After the first few clients, I started asking each founder directly for a referral to other founders they knew who might need help with security. Within the first year I no longer had to do any sales; all new clients were coming in through passive referrals, and my personal compensation well eclipsed my former salary. I focused on getting early champions and repeat clients who would excessively evangelize my service. In return, the folks who sent me referrals early on have been promised a lock into the low weekly rate for the life of my consultancy, and at this point I've raised my rates enough that my pricing has nearly reached parity with the large, enterprise consultancies. However, I've entirely avoided large enterprise companies, and I keep the sales cycle to a few weeks at the most (with a few outliers here and there).
Now having said all of that, if I'm being fully honest with myself I feel that much of the success of my consultancy comes from being very lucky - particularly in the beginning, with respect to finding initial clients. I don't think it's at all typical to achieve a fully passive sales funnel in year one of a new consultancy. But I don't have any sense of how much that achievement is attributable to my own networking skill and business savvy (or excellent technical work) rather than to being in the right place at the right time.
Had a noncommercial side project (website) while working at university and later as a freelancer. It became more popular and got some press coverage, then VCs came knocking on my door. I gave in to the 3rd offer. Business model was tacked-on later (it was the year 2000), but was logical and works to this day.
I recently launched a website for those who want to download their Instagram photos, videos or stories for offline use. I am hoping it attract user and get early attention. https://www.savefromweb.com/
Left my job to become a consultant (to my former company initially), did that for 5 years, then used the money I made and saved to bootstrap my current project. Still did some part time consulting on the side for a couple of years until we raised.
I had a full-time job, and my side gig was only 10 hours per week that I was doing in addition to my FT job. Then I went full-time as a contractor for my side gig.
I was and still am working full-time, but I try to put a new side mvp project out every roughly every 6 months which can (hopefully) generate revenue. Ive been doing this for about 2 years, and am launching hopefully my third "successful" project in April.
My most recent project ( https://projectpiglet.com/ ) is an AI financial predictor - I started with scripts in 2013 - 2014, I then rewrote it recently to launch as a web service. So you can say it started as a side project, made me money (100% yoy), then after I felt it was validated, I went to expand.
My first project ( https://easy-a.net/ ), was built as a weekend project to help some friends. It lets you know the grade distribution of every course, semester and professor of the universities in the system. Further, it provides estimated workload, probably exit grade for you, etc. My friends needed it because they couldn't get in to see a CS advisor at UIUC at the time, because they only had one advisor for ~ 1600 students.
The two I have today (aka the remaining "successful" MVPs) are gowing at an alright pace based on how much I put into it. And although I don't plan on leaving my job yet, I'm sure in the next couple years.
For reference, I did $3k the first year from my projects, $7k the second, and this year I'm on track for ~$25k+. I think I've heard it called the hockey stick of death.. where it isn't profitable enough to sustain itself, but it's growing... Slowly. It's a pain for SaaS. But I try to improve the products because they are both growing constistently.
The project I'm about to launch is built off my most recent platform ( https://projectpiglet.com/ ). I think I can build at least four apps off of it - which I why I built it. More MVPs to try for the market!
List of ideas that haven't made it (yet at least):
- pearlywhiteparcels - toothbrush deliveries (similar to Dollar shave club), couldn't find enough partners with dentists (probably didn't want you to clean your own teeth lol)
Just an observation: On project piglet, the red price slashing gives me a perception of "desperation". My opinion is get rid of it and just make them nice simple numbers (whatever those prices end up being) without the drastic price slash.
I decided to quit my full-time job in Feb and go 100% start-up.
Two of the largest risks I considered before taking the plunge was career risk, and financial risk.
For financial risk, I’m from Waterloo Canada, which is a relatively low-cost area. I’m doing some part-time contracting to pay off the bills just to break even. I am okay to lose out on the opportunity cost of earning more money at a full-time job. I treat that as an investment in the future cash flows of the company I’m trying to build.
For career risk, I think working on a start-up can actually make you more employable and increases your future earning potential. At a start-up, you work like hell and are constantly learning. If you believe your salary should be an accurate reflection of the market value of your skills, and you work to improve those skills, then your market value should increase accordingly.
Reading Nassim Taleb’s book “Antifragile”, gave me a lot of confidence. One of the central ideas from the book is to put yourself into environments where there is an asymmetrical bias for positive payoffs. I.e. you can’t get randomly unlucky and die from entrepreneurship, but you can get randomly lucky and do very good.
For those of you curious, my company is https://www.hodlbot.io After I realized I was spending too much time rebalancing my portfolio, I made a trading bot.
For the MVP, it uses trade-only API keys to diversify your portfolio into the top 20 cryptos by market cap on Binance. It rebalances monthly.
Well, the process of buying a vacation home was frustrating. This was back in 2002 and most real estate brokerages did not have websites, and if they did, they were static and outdated. This led to a conversation with my business partner...and we ended up buying a really good domain related to my vacation home search and launched a website for realtors. We called it our side project.
When the used laptop market turned into the used VCR market, we shifted all of our eggs to our side project basket.
Today we own a real estate brokerage with 20 offices and are pretty much considered the leaders in the lake home sales market in the Midwest. We're on track to hit a $Billion in annual sales in the next couple of years (did about $300M last year). Neither of us were Realtors (I'm still not). It's been an interesting ride so far.