Ask HN: How to be independent as a developer?

The key for me to being my own boss has unfortunately just been being willing to be poor. Because my own startups or other people's self funded startups that I end up working on when I have to take a contract quickly because I am too broke usually don't make much money.

One way to meet lots of people who have problems to be solved is on Upwork. Of course most of those are not opportunities to be co-founders and actually could easily bankrupt you due to the slave-labour type atmosphere there. But some of them are real opportunities for sure if you can avoid that.

My current startup (which again I am just _barely_ scraping by) is built on a less popular cryptocurrency called Algorand (actually afraid to mention it, that one or cryptocurrency in general seems to be hated here). I did a project for someone from Upwork (self funded startup, subsistence level pay) and then just started hanging out in Discords and such.

I directly asked the community what sort of new tool they thought they needed. The few responses seemed to be "we have good tools already, don't need". So then I kept hanging around and found out that most of them were hiring a programmer for every art project. Even though the programming task was mainly just running the same script.

So I built a web application and then had many people (who I thought I had already asked if they needed a tool) come on my Discord server and tell me how much my tool had been needed.

But I think it boils down to picking up some hobby or business as if it was your actual job and then trying to make tools to facilitate it. In general the users for some reason can't or won't give you useful advice about what to build. Although actually they may be able to tell you what problems they are having if you can get them to talk. But don't listen to their solutions just their problems.

3.????

4. Profit!

I miss the old days of /.

You might try getting into sales or pre-sales support. These roles expose you to the sales side of business, which is important on its own, but more, it will allow you to meet and observe lots of salespeople.

Many will have the ambition necessary to consider partnering up with you, and some of those will also be dedicated and honest. Maybe most, even, and maybe you'll find one of those who you really like as well.

The pre-sales part is important. Post-sales support will not expose you to the right kind of interactions with the salespeople, and will not allow you to develop your own sense of what makes something an opportunity vs. a waste of time.

You can keep up on your software skills part-time, because you'll be learning a bunch of other important skills full-time. You'll also find out what kinds of problems customers are trying to solve, and what's actually important to them.

Expect to spend a few years doing this. The combination of the ability to deliver software that solves a real problem, along with the ability to explain its features and benefits in a way that really connects with the customer's problem, is solid gold stuff. Add in a sales partner that can go out and dig up candidate opportunities, and you can see the potential.

I assume that comment is directly related to the very, very weird parallel world of Lamborghini-leasing fake gurus that promise to teach anyone 'how to easily make millions from dropshipping in 1 month from scratch' and such.

My immediate reaction was not so cynical since rwalling's comment came across as sincere, fake gurus tend to prey on users of less moderated online properties, and none of those gurus can boast hundreds of hours of informative content even after you pay orders of magnitude more than this for a 'course'.

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