I never understood what self employed means vs a startup. If I start a Delaware C and raise 20M am I self employed?
Ask HN: How many of you are self employed?
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Re: Ask HN: How many of you are self employed?
#22Me 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.
Re: Ask HN: How many of you are self employed?
#23I'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 application…
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.
Re: Ask HN: How many of you are self employed?
#24I never understood what self employed means vs a startup. If I start a Delaware C and raise 20M am I self employed?
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.
Re: Ask HN: How many of you are self employed?
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I run this free community for fractional tech workers - come check it out: 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…
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.
Re: Ask HN: How many of you are self employed?
#26I'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 occas…
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.
Re: Ask HN: How many of you are self employed?
#27I'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.
Re: Ask HN: How many of you are self employed?
#28I'm self unemployed, lol.
Re: Ask HN: How many of you are self employed?
#29I was self employed for about 10 years until one of the startups I did along the way turned into something and now I have to work there.
This reads quite funny: “god damn it, one of my projects was successful, so it ruined the fun”
Re: Ask HN: How many of you are self employed?
#30I'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 do advisory work and development too.