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Ask HN: How many of you are self employed?

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Re: Ask HN: How many of you are self employed?

#281

Post by addictedcs »

Solo founder at Emysound[1]. Started 10 years ago as an open-source project, building an algorithm for audio fingerprinting. Added a commercial offering, selling storage built specifically for audio fingerprints, targeting enterprise customers. Since the offering was too technical (it's hard to sell solutions to problems that are too narrow and domain-specific), pivoted to more "business-oriented problems". This last year's pivot is a chance to finally grow. Running a business in single-player mode is, at times, too stressful. Aside from the technical part, which I very much enjoy, I need to wear marketing, sales, and customer support hats.

[1] - https://emysound.com [2] - https://github.com/AddictedCS/soundfingerprinting

Re: Ask HN: How many of you are self employed?

#282

Post by oooyay »

mauvehaus wrote: post #254

I am a self-employed furniture maker. I'm that guy who somewhat infamously no longer builds software[0]. About a year ago I moved my operations from a makerspace to my own shop. That's come with its ups and downs. On the one hand, I know which idiot last used a tool: me. On the other, I would no longer see other humans besides my wife most weeks. To keep sane I also work one day a week at a bike shop fixing bikes. It…

Hah I remember seeing this issue. It made me chuckle. I also do wood working part time, it's kinda funny how similar software and woodworking are. I'm hoping to open up a hobby shop one day that teaches both software and woodworking. Congrats to you on following your dreams.

Re: Ask HN: How many of you are self employed?

#283

Post by darajava »

throwaway2203 wrote: post #269
darajava wrote: post #129

I am working on https://audiodiary.ai as a solo founder, I recently have been getting enough income to just about cover my living expenses and haven’t received any funding and didn’t do any marketing, with 9k users so far since launch last May. It’s fulfilling and great to see people use and love a product I’ve built. I’m obviously highly motivated to grow so it keeps me busy.

Looks cool. Would love to know pricing and how/where you store data?

Pricing depends on the country but have addressed that in another comment! The privacy policy explains how we store data but will make this clearer and more upfront. I store recordings separately from user info in an S3 bucket and the database is hosted in digital ocean. Recordings are sent to OpenAI for ephemeral analysis and transcription.

Re: Ask HN: How many of you are self employed?

#284

Post by V-2 »

lifestyleguru wrote: post #225
V-2 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The IT sector in Poland (again) is a booming one, and most of the services are effectively exported, as we're talking outsourcing. I guess it translates into the lack of political will to curb the practice, too, as the government would risk that self-employed programmers (and whatnot) may not fall in line, but mostly log out of the system instead, registering their companies abroad, for example. I guess the governmen…

In developed countries IP means submitting patents and real research which build the company's position on the market. That's why they have strong companies and brands. The Polish "IP box" is creating and submitting PDFs with git diffs of Java and TypeScript written for these companies. Just remember to remove passwords and secrets from them, guys.

Not all intellectual property is patented. Anyhow, you don't include git diffs. You cannot, even if you wanted to - the code is not your property. The whole point is that you're selling your intellectual property rights. It also means that the tax office pretty much has to rely on your word that the work is innovative in nature. Obviously they'd be in no position to tell the difference anyway.

Re: Ask HN: How many of you are self employed?

#286

Post by devgoth »

petecooper wrote: post #227

>How many of you are self employed? +1. Self-employed since 2006. Previously at Sophos. >What do you do? I'm a technical generalist, and it's slowly killing me. I need to specialise in…something. >Curious to know what sustains people. Fear of eviction & a broken anhedonic treadmill. Coming up to 20 years of that, there's a lot of damage to fix, frankly.

I feel the same way regarding being a generalist. I’ve been a software generalist with a focus on web dev for my entire career but as I progress in my career I see the benefit of specializing. I can definitely see the benefit of specializing as a self-employed/freelance software engineer.

Re: Ask HN: How many of you are self employed?

#287

Post by pmontra »

t_mahmood wrote: post #262
pmontra wrote: post #258

Self employed since 2006. Currently working for a couple of customers. Three of them would be too much, no meaningful weekly deliveries for at least one of them. Current stacks: Django with server side rendering and Rails with a Vue.js frontend. Side projects on my home servers in whatever fits short time slots and small footprints: Lua with OpenResty, Python with customized http.server POST and GET methods, Ruby and…

How do you manage? I have difficult managing two clients. How do you switch context, and make sure your are fairly distributing time and focus for each client, while not getting overwhelmed. My psychiatrist suspected ADHD, so probably that's why context switching is difficult for me. How do you make yourself to stay on the task and meet deadlines?

Two consecutive days for a customer, tree days for the other one. Ideally it would be 2+2 and 3 free days but it's difficult to find a new customer that is happy with only 2 days.

Anyway, yes context switching can be a problem. That's why those days must be consecutive. Furthermore, I write down in a text file a few lines about what I did every day and how many hours I spent. My file goes back to October 2012. That's very useful to bill customers at the end of the month and to restart from the previous week. I also write short TODOs in the same file about what I'll have to do the next week when I'll be back on the project. Git commit messages and slack chats also help to get back into context.

What else... I have a virtual desktop per customer, with editor windows, terminals, browser windows open all the time. Not having to restart everything every week and finding all pieces in the same place probably helps too. It surely costs some RAM but it's cheap. My laptop has 32 GB, 18.9 used by programs right now according to htop.

Re: Ask HN: How many of you are self employed?

#288

Post by sriram_sun »

S-Corp, W-2 for myself. I do pretty mundane programming related stuff for safety critical systems (med device and am always looking for interesting stuff). Been remote consulting averaging 1-2 clients since mid 2017. Here's my profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sriramsundar/. Worked full time for about 15 years prior.

Re: Ask HN: How many of you are self employed?

#290

Post by dbrueck »

ultra-jeremyx wrote: post #250

Interesting thread. Anyone here in the U.S. and supporting a family? The main hurdle for me starting my own business is cost of healthcare. I haven't looked too deeply into options, but I assume I'd be taking on a huge cost to support a spouse and children.

Be sure to make complete use of any subsidies you can get through the marketplace.

For example, if you saved up some money to live off of while you get your business going, it's very possible that your net income for the year could be negative (or at least very low), so with a spouse and kids it's feasible that your insurance premiums could be $0.

Of course, once you start making money, you'll want to dial back and eventually stop using the subsidies, otherwise come tax time you'll have to pay them all back for that year.

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