491–500 of 685 posts
Working on two other projects — one's a hobby, and one's a SaaS that's scratching my own itch.
I have a one-person lifestyle business. I like it primarily because it gives me the flexibility to live anywhere in the world. I hated my old desk job and the idea of 2 weeks vacation every year. I run a SaaS product that integrates with ERPs. I pretend to my customers that I have a team (so much so that I have multiple email addresses to people that don't exist that actually just forward to me). One of our customers…
What happens if you get hit by the proverbial bus? Do you have contractually binding SLAs with your customers?
So in many places they are routinely measured very conveniently for the vendor, or even completely ignored. Or the credits or whatever compensation mechanism is just complicated enought that you don't get money. Or worst case for the vendor they return up to 20% of the cost of the contract.. for the month in which the incident happened.
I really wish this wasn't the case..
Protip: never bet anything on an SLA.
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I don't think I'll ever quite understand this mentality that "not having a job"=="sitting at home all day". Do people not have hobbies of any kind? They really only find meaning in pursuit of money?
Not everyone has a hobby or passion and that's totally fine.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07FQ2PFNN/
I take it's probably a roundup of his newsletter but I found the book half way decent with mostly fresh insights that is, it wasn't heavily recycled compared to most books on this sort of thing.
I sell carnivorous plants online. It's not my main job/revenue so it doesn't fit your description of successful. It could certainly be my main income but I like keeping it as a side job. Here's a few things I do that made it "successful": - Obviously, selling good quality product is the most important thing. - Offering rare species that are hard to find elsewhere - Having a good website that works, is well organized…
I run https://updown.io since 2012, a website monitoring service I created. I'm working about 5-10 hours per week on it. It makes about $6,000 per month and is still growing linearly. I also keep a full-time job alongside for now as an engineering manager. The key for me is to take time, make something useful, delight your clients, and don't try to become uber or airbnb.
Can you explain who you customers are and why they want to know the stats for uptime and would be willing to pay for it?
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Good question, my career is very important to me. It gives me an identity. I just can’t sit at home all day. I’m gonna die with boredom.
I don't think I'll ever quite understand this mentality that "not having a job"=="sitting at home all day". Do people not have hobbies of any kind? They really only find meaning in pursuit of money?
Everytime I see these threads I end up feeling inadequate. For the rest of the folks like me, I will share a small tidbit of wisdom: Starting a business is really hard and it's totally OK to just go work for Salesforce. You do you.
It's not just really hard. I think the hard part most people can get by. It's the luck part that a lot of us are missing. You have to be lucky enough to be that 1 person who catches the train at the right time. Imagine the odds of that. That's what gets me. It's not necessarily how hard you work. It's the window of opportunity that most people miss.
This is simply not true. It's a myth. And the only time it is true is when you're born into an underprivileged background (I was born into a working class family with little money) or environment (in a rough part of England.)
Look, life is easy: we all have hopes and dreams, problems and pain points. We want to make the hopes and dreams come true whilst we resolve the problems and take away our pain points.
Business is easy: make or do something that helps people bring their hopes and dreams to life. Make or do something that solves a problem for someone. Make or do something that takes away a person's pain point(s).
Luck doesn't make or break your business: hard work does. Time. Patience. Persistence. Being smart with money. And yes, to a point, having some money that can be used to bootstrap, but for most people on this site, that's not an issue.
A year or so ago I had a choice: take home my daily contracting pay rate (which is a lot) and keep it in investments, or find some problems to solve and invest it in a business.
I now have two businesses: I continue to contract whilst building training and managed services around the technologies being used because businesses and people need those things. And I brought my brother in law onboard the business (made him a director) and invested in him building a VR workshop service that helps teachers deliver complex, hard-to-teach aspects of the Australia science curriculum.
Luck is a factor, for sure, but it's not the main ingredient in your success. Yes I do get that being in the right place at the right time can land you a big deal, investment, or something else that sets you off, but thinking along those lines is equivalent to thinking that the only way to get rich is to win the lottery.
Good luck.
My business is in my bio, don't want to link it here. Pays about the same as my previous job at Microsoft did, but with a lot less involvement — I haven't touched the main code in about a year now. I probably spend about two or three hours a week on customer support, that's it, really. No marketing spend, all word-of-mouth and Google. The idea came about when I wanted to post to Instagram, but the API didn't allow it…
How did you get access to Instagrams posting images API? Was it a long wait?