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What's the best way to meet someone who has a problem that needs to be solved? Alternately how do you meet someone with a complimentary skill set that has similar goals? Any intermediate steps I should consider?
I found another job, and quit my previous, and as part of negotiating contract, I said that I wanted to invoice rather than receive a salary. I had a good reason, but mostly, I just insisted that this was best for me. Secondly, asking for the contract to not require you to be in a specific physical location.
If you want money for work, in some way, you have to do someone else's thing, too.
If you want to do your own thing, that comes with risk. But you can use a portion of your time allocated to that risk while getting paid for doing someone else's doing some other part of the time. Make sure your contract does not prohibit you from working on other things, or at least other things not in the same domain.
As cliche as it is, you’re the someone that you need to solve problems for. I’ve thought about taking low paying jobs in random industries just to find itches to scratch, but haven’t pulled the trigger on that.
In regards to the other stuff, if you want to be entrepreneurial, stop thinking of yourself as a developer. Maybe check out the book “The E-Myth”.
Industry events, co-working spaces, LinkedIn, social gatherings of all sorts
> Alternately how do you meet someone with a complimentary skill set that has similar goals?
startupschool.org has a cofounder matching platform you might useful.
> Any intermediate steps I should consider?
Consulting can be a good starting point since you learn how to run a business, while simultaneously generating some revenue and exposing yourself to real business problems.
Also check out The Mom Test and the lectures on startupschool.org about finding a good idea.
Either:
-Use your experience as an employee: you might have already seen some enterprise pain points, and you have contacts!
- Go freelance and work for clients: you will discover a lot of pain points that need to be solved with real customer waiting for a solution!
> Alternately how do you meet someone with a complimentary skill set that has similar goals? Any intermediate steps I should consider?
Lots of opportunities: meetups, conferences, local groups, coworkers, etc.
That's how I started. Plus, looking at my own problems gives me extra motivation to fix them.
A great place to start is finding industries where most people you meet describe themselves as "not technical" or "bad with technology", they're often massively underserved. You'll know you've hit gold when you speak to multiple people across several businesses who all use some behemouth spreadsheet to run one of their core business processes.
- If you're looking for free info about this, subscribe to Startups for the Rest of Us (podcast) and/or https://www.youtube.com/microconf. Both have hundreds of hours of audio/video content on starting startups, with an emphasis on being a developer.
- If you're willing to spend $10 on a Kindle book, Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup (Amazon, BN.com, etc) is the book I wrote to answer the exact question you are asking.
This journey is long, but fun. I wish you the best of luck!