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Ask HN: How to be independent as a developer?

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Re: Ask HN: How to be independent as a developer?

#11

Post by bombcar »

bluehatbrit wrote: post #7

People have problems, go and meet people. Pick an industry you think you might be interested in exploring and then start attending their meetups and events. Speak to people, ask them what their problems are. 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 s…

This is huge - get away from the tech industry and you'll find various amounts of problems to be solved, and if you can generalize it enough, you can get something successful.

Here's one I thought of and haven't found a solution for yet - a cheap "vendor portal" where vendors can submit invoices. Everything that exists apparently is enterprise and tens of thousands of dollars; which is out of reach of individuals and small businesses.

Re: Ask HN: How to be independent as a developer?

#12

Post by rglover »

> What's the best way to meet someone who has a problem that needs to be solved?

What problems do you have? Solve those first (even if it doesn't lead to success, that prevents you from spinning your tires).

> Alternately how do you meet someone with a complimentary skill set that has similar goals?

Assume that you won't, start down the path of solving your chosen problem and if someone appears who's thinking aligns, pursue a partnership if it makes sense.

> Any intermediate steps I should consider?

Read "Do the Work" and "The War of Art" by Steven Pressfield. Those two (short) books have done wonders.

Re: Ask HN: How to be independent as a developer?

#13

Post by whiddershins »

At risk of stating the obvious, Paul Graham has written extensively on the subject of finding startup ideas.

http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

What you are describing should actually be easier, because you wouldn’t necessarily need it to be able to scale.

Re: Ask HN: How to be independent as a developer?

#14

Post by gwbas1c »

> I'd like to 'do my own thing' yet don't know how. I'd like the 'thing' to be entrepreneurial along the lines of: this was hard to do before and now it's easy vs this is brand new/revolutionary.

If you're going to be a solo developer-entrepreneur, assume that you're going to spend 1/3rd of your time coding, 1/3rd of your time finding customers, and 1/3rd of your time interacting with your customers. Also assume that you'll be too busy to write complicated / interesting / creative software.

What I suggest is that you instead focus on getting real good at choosing who you work with: This can either be who you partner with in a startup, who you work for in a small company, or who you choose as a client. Remember, "entrepreneurial" can mean working in young business unit in a larger company, or joining a company that's so small that you need to jump out of your developer role from time to time.

> Alternately how do you meet someone with a complimentary skill set that has similar goals?

What I do is, when I look for a job, I favor early stage startups where I can work directly with the founders. It often takes legwork to find these jobs, but my most recent one I found on the monthly "Who's Hiring" thread on Hacker News.

Re: Ask HN: How to be independent as a developer?

#15

Post by is_true »

I've doing my own thing since I'm 14.

I've done a few things, but the most important is why do you want to do your own thing.

I run a couple of services, I categorize them in: Projects that I can work on whenever I want and projects that my require my attention whenever something goes wrong.

I mostly aim for the former, as I like to have free time to explore ideas. But I have one of the latter because it is really good at paying the bills.

Re: Ask HN: How to be independent as a developer?

#16

Post by artemonster »

In a couple of minutes someone would start telling you about some unsolved problems in whatever niches where you can offer a solution. Without any slightest hint on how to even get in touch with such „niches“. From my long journey of scraping indiehacker, reddit and IRL stories most found their „niche“ either by pure chance doing something tangent or by directly solving their own personal problems and scaling the solution to broader audiences. Bad news if you are just a regular 9to5 codemonkey with below-average social circle :/

Re: Ask HN: How to be independent as a developer?

#17

Post by throwaway743 »

ronyfadel wrote: post #6

Do you have problems that need to be solved? Do you have the skills to solve them? That's how I started. Plus, looking at my own problems gives me extra motivation to fix them.

I'm currently on this path, been developing/designing for the last year and a half, and will be launching my product relatively soon.

The issue I've been facing lately is self doubt. There's definitely a market, it solves a problem for that market and myself, and the product has shaped up to be something that I can be proud of and share/help with others. But there's this nagging contrasting feeling that's hard to describe, that could very well be fear of the unknown.

What's your experience been like developing a product that solves a problem ypu faced? What was your journey leading up to its release? How'd things work out after release?

Re: Ask HN: How to be independent as a developer?

#18

Post by ge96 »

artemonster wrote: post #16

In a couple of minutes someone would start telling you about some unsolved problems in whatever niches where you can offer a solution. Without any slightest hint on how to even get in touch with such „niches“. From my long journey of scraping indiehacker, reddit and IRL stories most found their „niche“ either by pure chance doing something tangent or by directly solving their own personal problems and scaling the sol…

I had a similar idea regarding scraping but directed at forums where people are asking "is there a way to do this" or "how would I make this?". Then I would make it. I'm not sure though how to gauge if it's worth pursuing maybe frequency of mention/recurrence.

Re: Ask HN: How to be independent as a developer?

#19

Post by shudza »

Let me tell you a little secret... You don't need to be a developer to be an entrepreneur, you are not in advantage to other non-dev entrepreneurs, and you are most probably worse entrepreneur than others.

The better entrepreneurs are the ones with sales, marketing and growth hacking skills, the ones who "fake it till they make it", etc. If you are all that, you are probably a not-so-good dev anyway.

If you wanna be an entrepreneur, learn how to be one, not how to be a better dev. Once you are a good entrepreneur, you'll get funds and hire good devs, that's the only valid way. If you can't get funding, you never had a chance anyway. (unless you are 0.01%)

Re: Ask HN: How to be independent as a developer?

#20

Post by philbo »

rwalling wrote: post #8

I have been talking + writing about this topic for about 15 years. It's a bigger topic than one could cover in a HN comment, so here are a few resources I'd recommend: - 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.…

How to be independent as a developer:

1. Write a book

2. Promote it to chumps on the internet

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