How many of you are self employed? What do you do? I won't count startups that are funded, but more the individual who started something for themselves. Curious to know what sustains people.
I've been self-employed for the last ~18 months. In the past I started two VC-backed startups, then was a PM at some later-stage companies before returning to entrepreneurship.
This time around, I'm building a solo "digital product studio" [1] instead of a startup. So, I'm staying one person, haven't raised money, and have multiple revenue-generating products. Product revenue doesn't cover my costs yet, so I do occasional consulting to bridge the gap.
I like the flexibility of this lifestyle. I'm based in NYC, but writing this from Tokyo where I've been doing a creative residence for the past two weeks.
And, a fun technicality - I truly self-employed in the sense that I have a salary and a payroll system. This is because my company is registered as an S-Corp in the USA, which requires the owner to be on a salary.
This is super cool! I was/am a startup founder too, bootstrapped an open source project, raised VC money, but ultimately it didn't work out. Now thinking about a solo business again and the studio model was exactly what I was looking at. How did you decide what to build?
My first product Postcard [1] is a personal website builder. I built that because I thought a personal website maker made logical sense as an indie business, and I wanted a way to stay in touch with friends after I deleted social media. But, it's hard to scale - user acquisition is the name of the game, willingness to pay is lower, the product isn't super differentiated, and I don't have a lot of experience in B2C. So, it makes money and continues to grow - but is small in absolute terms.
I decided to work on a more ambitious project that I had been thinking about for years, inspired by a product I wanted at my last startup, and by the chaos of being in 100+ slack channels at a previous job. I hate how people use Discord + Slack - they're good for urgent communications, but we need a "low-attention" version for important communications in communities and at work. So, I started building this product last Summer.
Booklet is an async, newsletter-first community platform [2]. Something like Google Groups with the polish of Slack. Booklet's far more complex than Postcard, but plays into my skills more - such as complex permissions systems, email marketing infrastructure, B2B sales, and being able to incorporate all the latest OpenAI goodies quickly. I launched it about three months ago, it has revenue, and I've been scrambling to build things in response to user feedback. I'm thinking of doing a bit of a relaunch next week as some foundational flows come together, such as full PWA support, search, and Stripe member sync.
Coincidentally - the project I launched to dogfood Booklet, called FRCTNL [3], is doing quite well. I had no intention of monetizing it, but I included a referral link to the accounting service I use. People have been using that referral link, and last quarter FRCTNL was my highest-earning product.
I'm sure in a few years I will have some great stories after the fact about the lessons I was missing in plain sight. But, things feel a little chaotic, uncertain, and fun at the moment. The core theme is building things that I want. My main insight so far has been to build unique, differentiated products that I want to use myself.
Wow! I’m working on the same thing at https://stackstudio.dev right now. Your blog post was really eloquent, it’s always inspiring when someone else shares your idea. Best of luck.
Thanks! I'm trying to do more essay writing there [1]. Most indie makers seem to have some content strategy where they share their story. I avoid social media and don't desire to become a Youtuber, so I'm focusing on writing as a content channel. I'm focusing essays on my creative process, inspiration, and specific experiences as an operator - the stuff I want to read. I'm avoiding prospective predictions about the future, being negative (an actual self-imposed rule), and talking about things that feel more like theory than practice.
The next piece I plan to publish tomorrow will be a recap of a talk I gave over the weekend, covering how most of our knowledge work practices come from factories, and ways software engineers are at the forefront of changing those industrial-era practices.
P.S. - if you're ever in NYC, come join for a dinner of Dimes Square Ventures [2], which is a little community I run for local indie makers (using Booklet!)
I have a similar story. I’ve been self-employed for the last 6 months after 14 years of startups. Started out as an engineer in TN, and moved to SF a couple years ago where I got into management just in time to help with rounds of layoffs. Got some severe burnout, quit, and now I’m working on my own products while doing consulting/contracting on the side through my agency. I live fulltime in an RV traveling the country and working remotely. At the moment, I never want to work for someone else again.
How do you find work? I've been trying to start a similar consultancy but I've had a hard time finding organizations who don't want staff augmentation.
Really cool - I’m in a similar boat, having created startups and also was a PM in senior roles at a few great companies. I’ve been consulting, which is fine, but wanted something with a little more connection to the project so I just set up https://metaluna.io and am aiming for something on the agency route. That said, I really like the way you’re thinking of a “digital project studio”. Is there a community of people doing this somewhere?
It's been a fun experience, though - I shared a house with an illustrator from LA. I spent time exploring Tokyo and working on Booklet. At the end, every resident gives a gallery - normally it's visual, such as drawings, but mine became a presentation.
> And, a fun technicality - I truly self-employed in the sense that I have a salary and a payroll system.
That's how most devs here in Norway would do it. Make a "proper" company, where you own 100 % of the shares. Then hire yourself, and pay yourself salary, withhold taxes, pay into a pension program etc. Mainly because if you make good money, it's better to leave some of it in the company (and for instance re-invest it into some index funds or something), instead of taking it out immediately as salary and getting it taxed before re-investing. But then still take enough salary to cover your expenses, get social security benefits etc.
doesn't the 'company' itself also pay taxes on the income?
For most solo folks in the US, the revenue flows directly to you. You could set up a more complex corporate structure to hold the income that you don't pay to yourself, but that corporation would itself have to pay taxes on the income too. I suspect there's not any real savings/benefit until there's enough 'leftover' money to start getting creative/flexible.
Company taxes are paid based on the profit. If you spend all the company income, on salaries or equipment or whatever, there’s no profit, and thus no taxes.
Yup, it's the same here. So there is a tax on the profit of the year that you let remain in the company, but it's a much lower tax than a wage tax. So it's better to leave it in the company until you need it, instead of paying a high marginal tax rate on taking it out as wage immediately.
Not all expenses are deductible, or 100% deductible in one year.
The biggest issue we've seen in software was the 2017 tax act, affecting software R&D starting in 2022. Depending on how you classify those expenses, you could have a sizeable tax bill, even without any 'profit'. But even hardware - that's typically going to be amortized over minimally a few years.
Bring in $200k in revenue. Spend $20k on hardware. You may only get to deduct $4k of that hardware expense in each of the next 5 years.
This is an excellent question and is, I have found, one that is being surprisingly ignored through all the hubub around section 174 / software / R&D, considering how many consulting shops and agencies are out there doing contract software development.
As best as I can determine, through reading the IRS's guidance and consulting with an industry expert, the answer is that doing software dev as a contractor/consultant does not qualify as R&D activities that must be capitalized if you're the contractor/consultant. Here is the language with a guiding example w/ analysis. The key being that the contractor bears no "financial risk" or right to use the software for its own purposes.
SECTION 6. RESEARCH PERFORMED UNDER CONTRACT
.01 Purpose. The Treasury Department and the IRS intend to propose rules in
forthcoming proposed regulations consistent with the interim guidance provided in this
section 6, which provides taxpayers with clarity in determining whether costs paid or
incurred for research performed under contract are SRE expenditures under § 174.
.02 Defined terms. For purposes of this section 6:
-27-
(1) Research provider. The term research provider means the party that contracts
with a research recipient (as defined in section 6.02(2) of this notice) to:
(a) perform research services for the research recipient with respect to an SRE
product, or
(b) develop an SRE product (as defined in section 6.02(4) of this notice) that the
research recipient acquires from the research provider.
(2) Research recipient. The term research recipient means the party that contracts
with the research provider to:
(a) perform research services for the research recipient with respect to an SRE
product, or
(b) develop an SRE product that the research recipient acquires from the
research provider.
(3) Financial risk. The term financial risk means the risk that the research provider
may suffer a financial loss related to the failure of the research to produce the desired
SRE product.
(4) SRE product. The term SRE product means any pilot model, process, formula,
invention, technique, patent, computer software, or similar property (or a component
thereof) that is subject to protection under applicable domestic or foreign law. For
example, mere know-how gained by a research provider through the performance of
research services for a research recipient that is not subject to protection under
applicable domestic or foreign law does not give rise to an SRE product in the hands of
the research provider.
.03 Treatment of costs paid or incurred by research recipient. The treatment of costs
-28-
paid or incurred by the research recipient is governed by the principles set forth in
§ 1.174-2(a)(10) and (b)(3).
.04 Treatment of costs paid or incurred by research provider. If the research
provider bears financial risk under the terms of the contract with the research recipient,
then costs paid or incurred by the research provider that are incident to the SRE
activities (see section 4.03 of this notice) performed by the research provider under the
contract are SRE expenditures. However, even if the research provider does not bear
financial risk under the terms of the contract with the research recipient, if the research
provider has a right to use any resulting SRE product in the trade or business of the
research provider or otherwise exploit any resulting SRE product through sale, lease, or
license, then costs paid or incurred by the research provider that are incident to the
SRE activities performed by the research provider under the contract are SRE
expenditures of the research provider for which no deduction is allowed except as
provided in § 174(a)(2), regardless of whether the research recipient is required to treat
its costs as SRE expenditures under section 6.03 of this notice. For purposes of the
preceding sent...
At least in the US that's true only for a C-corp. S-corps are pass-through entities. So it works like this very simplified example:
Business gross earnings: $200,000
Owner salary: $60,000
All other expenses including employer-side payroll tax: $20,000
Year-end result:
Owner receives a W2 reporting $60,000 in wages, which is taxed for Social Security, Medicare, and a special "self-employment tax". These wages are also eligible for deductions for retirement plan contributions (but not section 125 cafeteria plan deductions).
Owner receives a K1 reporting $200k - $60k - $20k = $120,000 profit, which is taxed at the owner's individual income tax rate.
The business itself will not pay corporate tax on its profits like a C-corp would.
This is awesome! Nice work. This model was a dream of mine for a while -- I generally love being solo but even a small group of 3-6 people working on a revenue-generating digital product studio has so much potential to be super super fun. Good luck with it and keep us posted!
Same here! I've been running my own digital products (https://flat.social and some smaller ones) and bridging the gap with consulting. For me, the flexibility lead to a fully location-independent lifestyle which allowed me to work from places where I feel at my best. Currently writing this from a tropical patio in Brazil :)
After I sold my last company, I felt like my identity was overly tied to one product. So, I decided to build a company separate from the products, so that over time the products can change but I have a through line company brand.
When I started this comapny, I didn't have a product - but I had the holding company (Contraption Company). My first product was Postcard, but now I spend most of my time building Booklet. As the shift in products has happened, my professional email address has been the same, the terms of service have been shared between services, and I have a unified blog + announcements email list. This also means I can launch lightweight experiments such as "FRCTNL", and even if it's not commercially successful - I benefit from compounding returns in the brand and mailing list.
I'm self employed in NYC and its a dream of mine to travel/work in Japan. I've sort of written the idea off that unless I can speak the language its going to be too difficult. Curious if you agree or not.
I speak zero Japanese. I've met a lot of immigrants here in the last couple of weeks, and it seems that you can get to a working level of Japaneses within a couple of months. After that, it seems that working for a Japanese company IRL is the biggest determinant of becoming fluent.
I've heard that the path from temporary visa to a more permanent one is somewhat straightforward for a self-employed person if you're able to show moderate revenue from Japanese clients.
There is someone renting a room around Mount Fuji on AirBNB that advertises themselves as a systems engineer with fiber in the middle of the woods. Sounded like a great place to work to me!
I hate to have to ask this but how do you manage healthcare being a solo s-corp? I was under the impression this could only be done through a company if two unrelated family members owned the company? The only other alternative is "Obamacare"? I could be totally wrong.
Speaking as someone who has been mostly self-employed since about 2002, Obamacare is a godsend. Massively better than the old individual "underwriting" system that basically made it impossible to get coverage. Yes, health insurance is expensive, but you may be amazed that the ACA marketplace plans frequently cost less than employer plans with better market protections. The only way to do health insurance nowadays is to assume it's only for catastrophes; ie: an $8-15k deductible is nothing compared to a $250k hospital visit. Basically, you are buying a discount plan (your insurer's negotiated rates) plus a stop-loss cover. An example: I am an old fart at 63 and have an HSA plan with a $7,500 deductible. My premium is $900/mo, thus the MOST I will ever have to pay for health care in any 12 month period is $18,300. Way less than a $300k uncomplicated heart attack or a $1M cancer diagnosis. Work your tax returns right, and you can get subsidies that reduce the annual costs even more . . .
It's probably worth remembering this sort of thing when people say there is no difference between the parties. Every Republican voted against it, they almost repealed it, and apparently are gearing up for another crack at repeal https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/01/trump-o...
At your age, you'll likely be on Medicare soon either way, but some of us are still decades away.
I truly am waiting for Medicare (traditional only, no Advantage plans as those are a complete rip-off). I can tell you though, I've been continuously on the ACA since it started selling plans in 2012 and it's always been better than anything I could cobble together before. It's fantastic to be able to decide how and where I want to live my life without being locked into a shitty job or tied to a crap insurer because you can't pass underwriting to get on a different plan.
Also, I am on the highest ACA premium tier because of my age. Someone who's 35 could get the same policy I have for about $400/mo., unsubsidised.
Thank you - as someone with a bit of disability and facing future hip surgery, that's a helpful perspective. You're not far off on my age; I actually aged off my parents insurance right around the time the ACA passed and so I was able to get back on because of that law which extended parental coverage until 26. I'm currently quite happy with most aspects of my employment which includes my health insurance, but that situation never seems to last.
Hasn't change, it's pretty terrible but my accountants thought it was marginally better. I've heard that some people get an office outside the city (such as Hoboken) to "work" outside the city.
Me! I started my solo, startup law practice almost by accident via a Hacker News comment years ago. It's now my primary source of income.
It's hard, but less hard than what startup founders do. It's nice having control of my schedule, but the flip side is that there's never a day off. Personally, I think being self-employed is great for people who naturally work really hard and want to capture the full output of their labor.
I don't think I could ever go back to full time employment for someone else. It's addicting having your own business that actually cash flows!
Do you have any tips for starting out trying freelancing gigs? I think the main issue would be visibility for me, I still need to build a protifolio that speaks for my skillset, because right now I don't think I have much demonstrable skills outside of a traditional hiring interview pipeline.
The reality is that being self-employed requires building business skills and being able to sell your skills. I previously founded a VC-funded developer marketplace, and the people that won all the jobs were the great communicators - not the most experienced (or inexpensive) developers.
Fractional work is a nice in-between where you ideally have a retained part-time contract, paid weekly or monthly, so that you aren't constantly looking for new projects.
Exactly this. I remember back when elance was a thing I signed up and I won my first gig in 2 days. I asked my client why he choose me (charging $1k) when others were bidding to do the job for $50 and he said he liked the message I sent him... Communications is everything.
I’be been self employed for ~1.5yrs after quitting my job to build a GUI for Kubernetes [1]
It’s not easy to get started, but im very happy with this change after being a FTE for 15yrs. It’s a refreshing experience having to talk to customers to understand their pain points and then build something for it
I’m also doing some part time freelancing, so with my products + freelancing I’m earning way more than as a FTE
Hey I bought aptakube! Very neat product, doesn't suffer from any of the issues that the other GUI k8s apps have. I found it on an awesome-tauri github list.
However I still rely on k9s due to the key bindings and plugin system being irreplaceable. That could change, I'd really like to do things like toggle FluxCD resources or do other custom actions directly in aptakube.
I’ve been thinking of building custom UI for popular CRDs like FluxCD/Argo/others, but I need to get a few highly requested features out of the way first.
I've been a self-employed Ops-Engineer/Sysadmin for hire/Sysadmin-as-a-service for 14 years now, after doing the same as an employee for a consulting company for the 10 years before that.
I don't know. Usually clients talk to me to see if we click, ask questions and decide if I can help or not.
On one hand I have been doing software development for a long time, 40+ years of coding (currently Go), 25+ years as a manager (CTO, DoE, HoD,...) in large enterprises and startups. Founded three startups, one fizzled out, one went belly up in 2001 and one sold successfully.
But I learn something new every day.
On the other hand I have no training in coaching - but have been doing it for some years now. You decide.
I generally call bullshit on coaches, but with that sort of experience you may be one of the few who can actually advise.
I always find it extremely difficult to believe a 20 or 30-something can provide meaningful coaching advice, most of it is going to end up being a combination of theory (what they think) and things they've read (their interpretation of others experience).
I'm self employed for around 10 years now. Before that I was employed as frontend developer for around 7 years.
I started self employment as software consultant, which worked pretty well despite not having any connections from my previous employment. I only needed one or two projects a year to sustain my lifestyle. Getting two companies a year to accept your application isn't hard. If you write at least 5 applications a month, you need a success rate of less than 5%.
I changed to technical writing later, because text is less of a struggle than code, and educational articles that explain how to use software (e.g., services, tools, SDKs, frameworks, etc.) are paid pretty well, especially compared to the non-technical writing tasks. Regular software consulting projects take months and can haunt you for years. An article takes a few days and after that you can do other things you find interesting.
Via technical writing, I got into other kinds of text related jobs the software industry offers, like social media management (e.g., Twitter/X, newsletters, blogs) for companies with developer audiences.
Usually I work less than 20h a week and I can do it from everywhere, which allows me to travel often and having enough time off to enjoy it.
How do you get clients for tech writing, if I may ask? Are you maintaining a stable pool of companies and doing work as they need it, or do you always have to fish for new opportunities?
I've been authoring sw dev books that target a niche audience, and I've done some writing for the company that develops the sw itself. I'm wondering whether to expand to other areas, too—I've got the feeling that 2024 is going to be a rather challenging year, financially speaking.
As all articles I wrote under my own name (some are ghost writing) are implicit advertisement, most clients approached me after they read some of my pieces.
Over the years I got a hand full of stable clients. Some want content every month, some every quarter, etc.
Then there is word of mouth. The people I work with at my client companies are usually in the content business, so they need constant influx of quality content and know many other people who need it too.
I also work with a tech content agency, they always have a few articles a month I can work on, if business is slow.
- I have a Business Analyst/Product Mgr background. I've never been a developer, but I can read code well enough and get a good idea of what's going on. Do I have a chance of breaking into this? How would I go about doing so (other than the obvious like trying to do it as part of my day job)?
- Do you worry LLMs are going to put you out of business?
- Very broadly speaking, could I make $150k doing this?
In my experience, the success stands and falls with how well you can grasp technical topics and explain them to people who have less time than you to learn them.
I know a bunch of good writers, who never got far, because their technical understanding wasn't enough to write guides/tutorials/explainers.
"Do you worry LLMs are going to put you out of business?"
Not yet. I use LLM every quarter to write an article, and they've always been bad.
"Very broadly speaking, could I make $150k doing this"
Probably.
An article makes you between $500 and $1000, depending on the length and quality. If you could write 200 a year, that could work.
Curious about this. How did you manage to build up a consulting business without prior contacts? You say you wrote applications, but normally companies aren't soliciting consultants in a public fashion (other than fiver/upwork which seem to be a race to the bottom).
I am based out of India
70% of my portfolio is in equity mutual funds, and the rest in safe instruments.
The Indian stock markets have given good returns and my equity portfolio has been doing 17% CAGR (10% inflation-adjusted)
But I have planned for conservative returns of 12 percent overall
I apologize if this is a stupid question but why wouldn't everyone be investing in India with these returns being standard? In the US we would assume a conservative rate of 7%
The 12% returns are not adjusted for inflation or depreciation. Historically, India had a much higher rate of inflation than the US. And the rupee has continuously lost value against the dollar.
US 10 year treasury yields are ~4% while Indian treasury yields are ~7%.
I'm virtually self employed, started about one year ago. Taxes are HIGH where I live, it's a little cheaper for employer to subcontract, so he pays the same overall, I got a raise. I currently have probably one of highest pays for my region, so would have to move to other city to earn more. Plus I do some freelancing in free hours, to bring some more money. Bought a little too big home for my means (it was just before everything suddenly went 2x, "finished" it just before pandemic), so I'm spending everything I get. I earn twice what some of my friends get, but they have more for "life".
Independently wealthy after working 10 years in the Bay Area. I live in Amsterdam now, but I still consult on for startups if the project seems fun, good to have some extra money for the nieces and nephews.
That's exactly how it goes though. You put something together on an idle Tuesday evening and you end up as the person running a 30 people company if you're not very careful about it. Success has a massive price tag.
As someone with a likely ADHD, it's very hard to plan for multiple things in my head, I can usually focus only on one big event at a time: product release, party event, plan romantic date, etc. So, usually I do have to choose onlu one thing to prioritize in the short-term.
Apologies for the late answer. I'm 58 and I still struggle with this. Time management, especially with multiple high priority competing interests is super hard, more so when there are other people involved.
I am. I founded PG Support (https://pgsupport.dk).
We are a small team of experienced PostgreSQL consultants.
I really like having close contact to customers as well having a very high variance in the type of work that I do.
I also run DebianSupport (https://debiansupport.com) from which we provide professional services for Linux. Mostly Debian and Ubuntu but not exclusively so.
Having used Linux extensively since 1997 and PostgreSQL since 2000, I really like working with both pieces of technology. And I love being able to provide value from my skills and experience.
I am for a couple years now. I do consulting work [1] around Rust/Embedded Systems/Systems Engineering, usually helping teams that are either kicking off a project (so helping with planning, scoping, and backfilling knowledge gaps), or people who want help building a proof of concept (so: just build it for me asap) for existing companies exploring new ideas or for startups that are working on demos for investors, etc.
I've been active on both the open source and commercial side of embedded Rust since the beginning, so it's been fun to watch it grow both as an ecosystem as well as from a commercial adoption perspective. Doing consulting makes it easier to help do more open source docs + support in the open, and seems to be one of more sustainable ways to do OSS in my opinion, if you can swing it.
Just found out about your podcast and I quite enjoyed learning how esp-idf came about. Great content!
> James talks with Scott Mabin about how he joined the Espressif team and got involved in embedded Rust, the working culture in chip manufacturing companies and preferences about designing and building mechanical keyboards.
Self employed means you're a "one man band" and you have no intention of changing it. A startup is when you may start on your own, but you want to grow it, have employees etc.
I decided long time ago the former makes me a lot happier than the later.
Technically yes, but in practice we would call you a founder on this situation.
In common parlance self-employed is something reserved to people who do free-lancing or have small bootstrapped business:
I have a personal list of criteria that I use to differentiate from the non-freelancing self-employed and the startup founder.
1 - No direct subordination relationship with a customer, you are a service provider, not a contractor.
2 - Focus is on revenues, profit and low debt, not growth above everything.
3 - No founding from venture capital investor. If you have a partner most probably she is also part of the operation, or expect to have a return on their investments from what the company sells, not by the company being sold.
4 - You draw a salary, if any, from the operation. There's no other source of money for you to survive other than your personal economies (see 2 and 3)
Me as well! I've started working at startups as an employee about ~6 years ago.
And did my first freelance project about 3 years ago. Mostly doing FullStack with a FE focus. From then I've been working on and off due to studies.
It certainly has its upsides and downsides. Here in Germany, freelancing allows one to somewhat escape generally low salary for employed software developers (as compared to the US). But what I don't enjoy is the distance to the actual issue/customer at hand. It's on average a much more corporate form of work.
And the last couple months have been very slow in terms of demand.
I've been bootstrapping orbitalhq.com for a few years now.
Pretty standard bootstrap story - used consultancy to get us out the door. These days, we're (nearly) self sustained through license revenue, with a small amount of consulting (1-2 projects a year).
It's been a tough ride, and in hindsight, I wish I hadn't pivoted away from consulting quite as early as I had, however we've managed to stay alive, so - so far - independent, which has been nice.
Seconded. Was doing it for a year and it feels great, most of the times. I slept in a wrong position tonight and now my back hurts. I’ll either wait the crisis out or… idk tbh, thought of working for animal shelter. The world doesn’t motivate me to do anything atm.
I've been self employed for 3 years now. I help companies get started with machine learning. ChatGPT is the best marketing for me: everyone and their dog wants ML because of ChatGPT.
I left my job in 2014 (worked for a semiconductor company), muddled around for 4+ years with not much to show before writing programming ebooks allowed me to earn a living. Fast forward to 2024 and I'm still only earning about 1/3 of what I used to earn (without even considering inflation, what my salary could've been now, etc), but it works for me.
I make video games [1] and TikToks [2] about them. I’m a solo game dev doing the coding, design and business/marketing stuff. I’ve worked in mainstream games and as a CTO at a few companies but my passion is making small games I can prototype in a few days and release within a week or so. After trying a lot of different roles the satisfaction of building something hundreds of thousands of people play that I have total control over is deeply fulfilling.
What's your experience with tiktok? How well does it perform in terms of attracting people to buy your stuff? Do videos besides plays on popular memes du jour do any good?
It’s been amazing. I’ve had about 30% of people that follow me join my Discord which is 10x higher than I expected. Meme videos do the best but a loyal fan base see and enjoys my regular dev style videos too. I do the same on Reels and Shorts with less success. But I enjoy learning which videos do better on each platform.
I have been self-employed since 2008, when I quit my job in software engineering to go all-in on my software business (that dated from 2003). That failed spectacularly, because I only focused on technology and not on the value I was creating, and with few customers, I had to do on-site contracting for more than a year before going on full-time parental leave.
I then rebooted my software project, launched a landing site and started talking to prospects (hundreds of them), before I set out to pivot my existing product to something that might gain traction. (I wound up throwing away 95 percent of the code.) I spent 2014 through 2019 with the product in beta, barely making a living off of a few enterprise support contracts and doing freelance photography (and depleting my savings), but spending at least 80 percent of my time on building the product and getting it to a finished state.
(Some people seem to be able to build a product in a weekend that gets eager customers. I'm not one of those people, choosing to build something that was, in retrospect, much too big of a project for one person. I probably also spent too much time polishing the product before commercializing it, likely due to a fear of failure.)
In 2019, the product was finally commercialized as a SaaS service. I remember thinking that I either wanted it to be a spectacular success, or a spectacular failure (so that I could focus on other things, after close to 20 years).
It was neither, but has been growing steadily ever since. I would have made much more money working for someone else, but the freedom is unparalleled. I get to set my own hours and focus on things I consider important. I enjoy doing everything from support calls and UX work to building a compiler and a type system (that I have mentioned before on HN).
I also have no one I need to answer to, other than our customers. That has been important over the past couple of years, when a series of health emergencies in my family has diverted my attention elsewhere. I have been very fortunate to be able to do so, focusing on what's important, without having to ask permission to cut down on work temporarily.
Overall, I wouldn't trade this for anything. This year, my product will gain a sister product in a more lucrative field (I'm hoping), and I have plans to commercialize my compiler, both as a service and as a traditionally-licensed library. So I'm excited to stay solo and keep working on building the business.
Thanks, it certainly has been. After only a couple of years in the software industry proper, though, I felt I had seen all I needed to see. Crunch time. Arbitrary, ill-informed management decisions. Management who didn't believe in the product the team was passionate about. Products canceled through no fault of anyone working on it. Office politics and bickering.
With my own business, I gain agency. If the product fails, it's because I failed to market it properly, or the product vision was bad and did not resonate with enough customers, or because I failed to execute on that vision. When all the decisions are out of your hands, and you can't even see what prompted them, they can feel capricious and arbitrary.
With my own business, I am in control. I don't have one boss, I have hundreds of them. And as long as I continue to provide them with value, I get to continue doing what I'm doing. I like those terms.
Yes, to all of that. But: the amount of control is directly proportional to how fat your wallet is, as it gets leaner you lose some of that agency so make sure you never even go close to depleting your reserves. That's a lesson I learned the hard way at some point and it causes me to be pretty cautious from a financial perspective. So far so good ;)
I have no doubt luck was involved. I hit the market at a good time and gained traction quickly. I have done zero marketing and customers come in through word of mouth and via search engines. Surely there was luck in there.
As for choosing the idea-- that was more systematic. I chose a service that solved a real pain point for many companies in a specific industry. I chose it because it because:
1. There were many competitors (10+). That meant someone was making money, and more importantly, someone was spending money.
2. The industry/customers had a very clear channel for early word of mouth/traction (ie, it was easy to reach the customers and say "hey look at this solution for X").
3. A cottage industry exists around the industry. There are many "influencers" and training seminars, conferences, etc. Once my service gained some traction it was easy to stick around because people kept talking about it at conferences. I also gave access to these "influencers" for free.
I'd say stick to B2B, and look for 1-3 from above.. those are ideal for a solo-SaaS product.
As @lorenzk said, thanks for sharing your experience on these things.
You also taught me something meaningful, and you didn't even have to do anything!
I was curious about what kind of product you've made and started stalking your comment history to see if I got some clues about it.
I eventually reach a comment from you (on a thread about a dev. who got his Apple account cancelled) to which I replied ... like ... this ... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38395858
<clown face>
I wish I could hide under a rock now, lol; but on the positive side I feel like I learned how/why one should be more measured in general, to avoid ending up looking in situations like these.
Congrats for shipping whatever it is that you do, and thanks for the life lesson on the side!
I'm doing full time freelancing in the UK and loving it tbh, but sometimes it can get a bit difficult to handle.
I was doing typical employment until October 2023 while doing some part time freelancing. The company had layoffs and I decided to do more freelancing while I look for the next job. Then the freelancing pay became double or more what I'd make from normal employment, so I am unlikely to get back to "being an employee" unless the situation changes significantly.
Initially I was worried about being able to find enough gigs to be able to make enough income to survive, but now my main struggle is to not take on too many responsibilities at once to be able to keep the clients happy, and even had to turn a few people down because I'm getting too busy...
I do get some spare time for myself to work on my own things, a few of those projects do bring income, but my main income source and the thing that takes most of my day is the freelancing.
I hired an accounting company to take care of taxes and stuff.
Most of my clients are in the UK.
I work partially through Toptal and some through my network.
I am working on my second startup. The first startup was bootstrapped hardware company. We released a few electronic devices. I worked on the first product part-time. Just before it was released, I decided to leave my job and work on the company full time.
I worked on the second product full time for about a year. It was profitable, but I never scaled the business up enough to make a living from it. I went back to work full time.
By this point, my appetite for hustling on the weekend to build a business in a market with limited growth potential had diminished. I focused on paying off my mortgage and saving money. After a few years, I had saved enough money to be able to cut back my hours and focus more on my hobbies and passion projects.
I've been working on my current startup Emurse full time since the end of 2020. I am covering costs with the revenue from my first startup and living off savings. We're getting ready to launch the first paid product soon.
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[ 35.6 ms ] story [ 463 ms ] threadThis time around, I'm building a solo "digital product studio" [1] instead of a startup. So, I'm staying one person, haven't raised money, and have multiple revenue-generating products. Product revenue doesn't cover my costs yet, so I do occasional consulting to bridge the gap.
I like the flexibility of this lifestyle. I'm based in NYC, but writing this from Tokyo where I've been doing a creative residence for the past two weeks.
And, a fun technicality - I truly self-employed in the sense that I have a salary and a payroll system. This is because my company is registered as an S-Corp in the USA, which requires the owner to be on a salary.
[1] https://www.contraption.co/essays/digital-product-studios/
I decided to work on a more ambitious project that I had been thinking about for years, inspired by a product I wanted at my last startup, and by the chaos of being in 100+ slack channels at a previous job. I hate how people use Discord + Slack - they're good for urgent communications, but we need a "low-attention" version for important communications in communities and at work. So, I started building this product last Summer.
Booklet is an async, newsletter-first community platform [2]. Something like Google Groups with the polish of Slack. Booklet's far more complex than Postcard, but plays into my skills more - such as complex permissions systems, email marketing infrastructure, B2B sales, and being able to incorporate all the latest OpenAI goodies quickly. I launched it about three months ago, it has revenue, and I've been scrambling to build things in response to user feedback. I'm thinking of doing a bit of a relaunch next week as some foundational flows come together, such as full PWA support, search, and Stripe member sync.
Coincidentally - the project I launched to dogfood Booklet, called FRCTNL [3], is doing quite well. I had no intention of monetizing it, but I included a referral link to the accounting service I use. People have been using that referral link, and last quarter FRCTNL was my highest-earning product.
I'm sure in a few years I will have some great stories after the fact about the lessons I was missing in plain sight. But, things feel a little chaotic, uncertain, and fun at the moment. The core theme is building things that I want. My main insight so far has been to build unique, differentiated products that I want to use myself.
[1] https://postcard.page
[2] https://booklet.group
[3] https://frctnl.xyz
The next piece I plan to publish tomorrow will be a recap of a talk I gave over the weekend, covering how most of our knowledge work practices come from factories, and ways software engineers are at the forefront of changing those industrial-era practices.
P.S. - if you're ever in NYC, come join for a dinner of Dimes Square Ventures [2], which is a little community I run for local indie makers (using Booklet!)
[1] https://contraption.co/essays
[2] https://dimessquareventures.com
https://almostperfect.jp
However, the current "version" of Almost Perfect is ending in about a year, and I think they are fully booked until then:
https://www.instagram.com/almostperfecttokyo/p/C2PCMtpS_wq/
It's been a fun experience, though - I shared a house with an illustrator from LA. I spent time exploring Tokyo and working on Booklet. At the end, every resident gives a gallery - normally it's visual, such as drawings, but mine became a presentation.
That's how most devs here in Norway would do it. Make a "proper" company, where you own 100 % of the shares. Then hire yourself, and pay yourself salary, withhold taxes, pay into a pension program etc. Mainly because if you make good money, it's better to leave some of it in the company (and for instance re-invest it into some index funds or something), instead of taking it out immediately as salary and getting it taxed before re-investing. But then still take enough salary to cover your expenses, get social security benefits etc.
For most solo folks in the US, the revenue flows directly to you. You could set up a more complex corporate structure to hold the income that you don't pay to yourself, but that corporation would itself have to pay taxes on the income too. I suspect there's not any real savings/benefit until there's enough 'leftover' money to start getting creative/flexible.
The biggest issue we've seen in software was the 2017 tax act, affecting software R&D starting in 2022. Depending on how you classify those expenses, you could have a sizeable tax bill, even without any 'profit'. But even hardware - that's typically going to be amortized over minimally a few years.
Bring in $200k in revenue. Spend $20k on hardware. You may only get to deduct $4k of that hardware expense in each of the next 5 years.
As best as I can determine, through reading the IRS's guidance and consulting with an industry expert, the answer is that doing software dev as a contractor/consultant does not qualify as R&D activities that must be capitalized if you're the contractor/consultant. Here is the language with a guiding example w/ analysis. The key being that the contractor bears no "financial risk" or right to use the software for its own purposes.
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/n-23-63.pdf
SECTION 6. RESEARCH PERFORMED UNDER CONTRACT .01 Purpose. The Treasury Department and the IRS intend to propose rules in forthcoming proposed regulations consistent with the interim guidance provided in this section 6, which provides taxpayers with clarity in determining whether costs paid or incurred for research performed under contract are SRE expenditures under § 174. .02 Defined terms. For purposes of this section 6: -27- (1) Research provider. The term research provider means the party that contracts with a research recipient (as defined in section 6.02(2) of this notice) to: (a) perform research services for the research recipient with respect to an SRE product, or (b) develop an SRE product (as defined in section 6.02(4) of this notice) that the research recipient acquires from the research provider. (2) Research recipient. The term research recipient means the party that contracts with the research provider to: (a) perform research services for the research recipient with respect to an SRE product, or (b) develop an SRE product that the research recipient acquires from the research provider. (3) Financial risk. The term financial risk means the risk that the research provider may suffer a financial loss related to the failure of the research to produce the desired SRE product. (4) SRE product. The term SRE product means any pilot model, process, formula, invention, technique, patent, computer software, or similar property (or a component thereof) that is subject to protection under applicable domestic or foreign law. For example, mere know-how gained by a research provider through the performance of research services for a research recipient that is not subject to protection under applicable domestic or foreign law does not give rise to an SRE product in the hands of the research provider. .03 Treatment of costs paid or incurred by research recipient. The treatment of costs -28- paid or incurred by the research recipient is governed by the principles set forth in § 1.174-2(a)(10) and (b)(3). .04 Treatment of costs paid or incurred by research provider. If the research provider bears financial risk under the terms of the contract with the research recipient, then costs paid or incurred by the research provider that are incident to the SRE activities (see section 4.03 of this notice) performed by the research provider under the contract are SRE expenditures. However, even if the research provider does not bear financial risk under the terms of the contract with the research recipient, if the research provider has a right to use any resulting SRE product in the trade or business of the research provider or otherwise exploit any resulting SRE product through sale, lease, or license, then costs paid or incurred by the research provider that are incident to the SRE activities performed by the research provider under the contract are SRE expenditures of the research provider for which no deduction is allowed except as provided in § 174(a)(2), regardless of whether the research recipient is required to treat its costs as SRE expenditures under section 6.03 of this notice. For purposes of the preceding sent...
Business gross earnings: $200,000
Owner salary: $60,000
All other expenses including employer-side payroll tax: $20,000
Year-end result:
Owner receives a W2 reporting $60,000 in wages, which is taxed for Social Security, Medicare, and a special "self-employment tax". These wages are also eligible for deductions for retirement plan contributions (but not section 125 cafeteria plan deductions). Owner receives a K1 reporting $200k - $60k - $20k = $120,000 profit, which is taxed at the owner's individual income tax rate.
The business itself will not pay corporate tax on its profits like a C-corp would.
Here's a video one of the residents made about the program I did:
https://vimeo.com/350701368
https://hq.booklet.group/posts
When I started this comapny, I didn't have a product - but I had the holding company (Contraption Company). My first product was Postcard, but now I spend most of my time building Booklet. As the shift in products has happened, my professional email address has been the same, the terms of service have been shared between services, and I have a unified blog + announcements email list. This also means I can launch lightweight experiments such as "FRCTNL", and even if it's not commercially successful - I benefit from compounding returns in the brand and mailing list.
The good news it that Japan seems to be in desperate desire of skilled foreigners, and announced plans this week for a digital nomad visa: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2024/02/02/japan/society/d...
I've heard that the path from temporary visa to a more permanent one is somewhat straightforward for a self-employed person if you're able to show moderate revenue from Japanese clients.
Is such a thing even possible?
At your age, you'll likely be on Medicare soon either way, but some of us are still decades away.
Also, I am on the highest ACA premium tier because of my age. Someone who's 35 could get the same policy I have for about $400/mo., unsubsidised.
This article has good details:
https://www.collective.com/blog/health-insurance-for-s-corps
It's hard, but less hard than what startup founders do. It's nice having control of my schedule, but the flip side is that there's never a day off. Personally, I think being self-employed is great for people who naturally work really hard and want to capture the full output of their labor.
I don't think I could ever go back to full time employment for someone else. It's addicting having your own business that actually cash flows!
Source: https://scrapingfish.com/blog/indie-hackers-revenue
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37419830
The reality is that being self-employed requires building business skills and being able to sell your skills. I previously founded a VC-funded developer marketplace, and the people that won all the jobs were the great communicators - not the most experienced (or inexpensive) developers.
Fractional work is a nice in-between where you ideally have a retained part-time contract, paid weekly or monthly, so that you aren't constantly looking for new projects.
It’s not easy to get started, but im very happy with this change after being a FTE for 15yrs. It’s a refreshing experience having to talk to customers to understand their pain points and then build something for it
I’m also doing some part time freelancing, so with my products + freelancing I’m earning way more than as a FTE
[1] https://aptakube.com
However I still rely on k9s due to the key bindings and plugin system being irreplaceable. That could change, I'd really like to do things like toggle FluxCD resources or do other custom actions directly in aptakube.
Great product!
I’ve been thinking of building custom UI for popular CRDs like FluxCD/Argo/others, but I need to get a few highly requested features out of the way first.
On one hand I have been doing software development for a long time, 40+ years of coding (currently Go), 25+ years as a manager (CTO, DoE, HoD,...) in large enterprises and startups. Founded three startups, one fizzled out, one went belly up in 2001 and one sold successfully.
But I learn something new every day.
On the other hand I have no training in coaching - but have been doing it for some years now. You decide.
I always find it extremely difficult to believe a 20 or 30-something can provide meaningful coaching advice, most of it is going to end up being a combination of theory (what they think) and things they've read (their interpretation of others experience).
- a crotchety 45+ year old
I started self employment as software consultant, which worked pretty well despite not having any connections from my previous employment. I only needed one or two projects a year to sustain my lifestyle. Getting two companies a year to accept your application isn't hard. If you write at least 5 applications a month, you need a success rate of less than 5%.
I changed to technical writing later, because text is less of a struggle than code, and educational articles that explain how to use software (e.g., services, tools, SDKs, frameworks, etc.) are paid pretty well, especially compared to the non-technical writing tasks. Regular software consulting projects take months and can haunt you for years. An article takes a few days and after that you can do other things you find interesting.
Via technical writing, I got into other kinds of text related jobs the software industry offers, like social media management (e.g., Twitter/X, newsletters, blogs) for companies with developer audiences.
Usually I work less than 20h a week and I can do it from everywhere, which allows me to travel often and having enough time off to enjoy it.
Over the years I got a hand full of stable clients. Some want content every month, some every quarter, etc.
Then there is word of mouth. The people I work with at my client companies are usually in the content business, so they need constant influx of quality content and know many other people who need it too.
I also work with a tech content agency, they always have a few articles a month I can work on, if business is slow.
- I have a Business Analyst/Product Mgr background. I've never been a developer, but I can read code well enough and get a good idea of what's going on. Do I have a chance of breaking into this? How would I go about doing so (other than the obvious like trying to do it as part of my day job)? - Do you worry LLMs are going to put you out of business? - Very broadly speaking, could I make $150k doing this?
In my experience, the success stands and falls with how well you can grasp technical topics and explain them to people who have less time than you to learn them.
I know a bunch of good writers, who never got far, because their technical understanding wasn't enough to write guides/tutorials/explainers.
"Do you worry LLMs are going to put you out of business?"
Not yet. I use LLM every quarter to write an article, and they've always been bad.
"Very broadly speaking, could I make $150k doing this"
Probably.
An article makes you between $500 and $1000, depending on the length and quality. If you could write 200 a year, that could work.
But that's how I found my first clients. After 2-3 clients from such platforms, word of mouth did the rest.
I only went for projects that went 3-6 months, so I didn't need that many per year.
Saved enough money to generate 80 percent of my last drawn salary from my investments.
Now focusing on creating my own fintech web app, with generative ai integration.
I like the feeling of working independently and years of corporate job had taken taken toll on mental health.
Currently building skills in fullstack web development and generative ai. Would take freelance job for some extra cash
But I have planned for conservative returns of 12 percent overall
On the other hand my own portfolio has a mutual fund that invest in US stocks for more diversification.
US 10 year treasury yields are ~4% while Indian treasury yields are ~7%.
The long term inflation rate has been 7 to 8 percent and bonds have returned par with inflation rates
Here's to hoping you succeed. The thing I messed up: personal relationships due to business success.
As someone with a likely ADHD, it's very hard to plan for multiple things in my head, I can usually focus only on one big event at a time: product release, party event, plan romantic date, etc. So, usually I do have to choose onlu one thing to prioritize in the short-term.
I really like having close contact to customers as well having a very high variance in the type of work that I do.
I also run DebianSupport (https://debiansupport.com) from which we provide professional services for Linux. Mostly Debian and Ubuntu but not exclusively so.
Having used Linux extensively since 1997 and PostgreSQL since 2000, I really like working with both pieces of technology. And I love being able to provide value from my skills and experience.
I've been active on both the open source and commercial side of embedded Rust since the beginning, so it's been fun to watch it grow both as an ecosystem as well as from a commercial adoption perspective. Doing consulting makes it easier to help do more open source docs + support in the open, and seems to be one of more sustainable ways to do OSS in my opinion, if you can swing it.
[1]: https://onevariable.com/
> James talks with Scott Mabin about how he joined the Espressif team and got involved in embedded Rust, the working culture in chip manufacturing companies and preferences about designing and building mechanical keyboards.
https://onevariable.com/blog/cwj-ep016-scott-mabin/
I decided long time ago the former makes me a lot happier than the later.
1 - No direct subordination relationship with a customer, you are a service provider, not a contractor.
2 - Focus is on revenues, profit and low debt, not growth above everything.
3 - No founding from venture capital investor. If you have a partner most probably she is also part of the operation, or expect to have a return on their investments from what the company sells, not by the company being sold.
4 - You draw a salary, if any, from the operation. There's no other source of money for you to survive other than your personal economies (see 2 and 3)
And did my first freelance project about 3 years ago. Mostly doing FullStack with a FE focus. From then I've been working on and off due to studies.
It certainly has its upsides and downsides. Here in Germany, freelancing allows one to somewhat escape generally low salary for employed software developers (as compared to the US). But what I don't enjoy is the distance to the actual issue/customer at hand. It's on average a much more corporate form of work. And the last couple months have been very slow in terms of demand.
Pretty standard bootstrap story - used consultancy to get us out the door. These days, we're (nearly) self sustained through license revenue, with a small amount of consulting (1-2 projects a year).
It's been a tough ride, and in hindsight, I wish I hadn't pivoted away from consulting quite as early as I had, however we've managed to stay alive, so - so far - independent, which has been nice.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39261936
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39261975
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39260479
I do advisory work and development too.
I left my job in 2014 (worked for a semiconductor company), muddled around for 4+ years with not much to show before writing programming ebooks allowed me to earn a living. Fast forward to 2024 and I'm still only earning about 1/3 of what I used to earn (without even considering inflation, what my salary could've been now, etc), but it works for me.
[1] https://attackmove.io/playit
[2] https://tiktok.com/@attackmove
For the rest of the week, I'm bootstrapping a language learning app.(https://vokabeln.io/)
I'm lucky enough not having to pay rent and also living expenses in Czechia are not that high.
I then rebooted my software project, launched a landing site and started talking to prospects (hundreds of them), before I set out to pivot my existing product to something that might gain traction. (I wound up throwing away 95 percent of the code.) I spent 2014 through 2019 with the product in beta, barely making a living off of a few enterprise support contracts and doing freelance photography (and depleting my savings), but spending at least 80 percent of my time on building the product and getting it to a finished state.
(Some people seem to be able to build a product in a weekend that gets eager customers. I'm not one of those people, choosing to build something that was, in retrospect, much too big of a project for one person. I probably also spent too much time polishing the product before commercializing it, likely due to a fear of failure.)
In 2019, the product was finally commercialized as a SaaS service. I remember thinking that I either wanted it to be a spectacular success, or a spectacular failure (so that I could focus on other things, after close to 20 years).
It was neither, but has been growing steadily ever since. I would have made much more money working for someone else, but the freedom is unparalleled. I get to set my own hours and focus on things I consider important. I enjoy doing everything from support calls and UX work to building a compiler and a type system (that I have mentioned before on HN).
I also have no one I need to answer to, other than our customers. That has been important over the past couple of years, when a series of health emergencies in my family has diverted my attention elsewhere. I have been very fortunate to be able to do so, focusing on what's important, without having to ask permission to cut down on work temporarily.
Overall, I wouldn't trade this for anything. This year, my product will gain a sister product in a more lucrative field (I'm hoping), and I have plans to commercialize my compiler, both as a service and as a traditionally-licensed library. So I'm excited to stay solo and keep working on building the business.
With my own business, I gain agency. If the product fails, it's because I failed to market it properly, or the product vision was bad and did not resonate with enough customers, or because I failed to execute on that vision. When all the decisions are out of your hands, and you can't even see what prompted them, they can feel capricious and arbitrary.
With my own business, I am in control. I don't have one boss, I have hundreds of them. And as long as I continue to provide them with value, I get to continue doing what I'm doing. I like those terms.
I have no doubt luck was involved. I hit the market at a good time and gained traction quickly. I have done zero marketing and customers come in through word of mouth and via search engines. Surely there was luck in there.
As for choosing the idea-- that was more systematic. I chose a service that solved a real pain point for many companies in a specific industry. I chose it because it because:
1. There were many competitors (10+). That meant someone was making money, and more importantly, someone was spending money.
2. The industry/customers had a very clear channel for early word of mouth/traction (ie, it was easy to reach the customers and say "hey look at this solution for X").
3. A cottage industry exists around the industry. There are many "influencers" and training seminars, conferences, etc. Once my service gained some traction it was easy to stick around because people kept talking about it at conferences. I also gave access to these "influencers" for free.
I'd say stick to B2B, and look for 1-3 from above.. those are ideal for a solo-SaaS product.
As @lorenzk said, thanks for sharing your experience on these things.
You also taught me something meaningful, and you didn't even have to do anything!
I was curious about what kind of product you've made and started stalking your comment history to see if I got some clues about it.
I eventually reach a comment from you (on a thread about a dev. who got his Apple account cancelled) to which I replied ... like ... this ... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38395858
<clown face>
I wish I could hide under a rock now, lol; but on the positive side I feel like I learned how/why one should be more measured in general, to avoid ending up looking in situations like these.
Congrats for shipping whatever it is that you do, and thanks for the life lesson on the side!
Yes, you never know who you could be talking to. Reminds me of the trial lawyer advice of "never ask a question you don't know the answer to".
I was doing typical employment until October 2023 while doing some part time freelancing. The company had layoffs and I decided to do more freelancing while I look for the next job. Then the freelancing pay became double or more what I'd make from normal employment, so I am unlikely to get back to "being an employee" unless the situation changes significantly.
Initially I was worried about being able to find enough gigs to be able to make enough income to survive, but now my main struggle is to not take on too many responsibilities at once to be able to keep the clients happy, and even had to turn a few people down because I'm getting too busy...
I do get some spare time for myself to work on my own things, a few of those projects do bring income, but my main income source and the thing that takes most of my day is the freelancing.
I hired an accounting company to take care of taxes and stuff.
Most of my clients are in the UK.
I work partially through Toptal and some through my network.
I can't complain too much about it!
I worked on the second product full time for about a year. It was profitable, but I never scaled the business up enough to make a living from it. I went back to work full time.
By this point, my appetite for hustling on the weekend to build a business in a market with limited growth potential had diminished. I focused on paying off my mortgage and saving money. After a few years, I had saved enough money to be able to cut back my hours and focus more on my hobbies and passion projects.
I've been working on my current startup Emurse full time since the end of 2020. I am covering costs with the revenue from my first startup and living off savings. We're getting ready to launch the first paid product soon.