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I Quit Google to Work for Myself (2018)

mtlynch.io

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Re: I Quit Google to Work for Myself (2018)

#41

Post by dmos62 »

streetcat1 wrote: post #11
rozenmd wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is anyone going to find your software if you don't write about it?

It depends on your software. Here are my rules: 1) The hardest tech possible. I want to test my intellectual limits, which was not possible in the corp world. 2) The most hyped areas, today those are AI/Kubernetes. If you have a unique solution, then it should not be a problem to get early adopters. Moreover, after leaving my corporate job, I began: 1) Working 17 hours days, 7 days a week. 2) 100% software dev. To su…

I hope other people new to marketing themselves don't read this. Choosing "most hyped" market segments isn't good advice. You want to be a supplier in a market segment that has high demand and low supply. "Most hyped" in most cases means that the segment has high demand, but also high supply. "Most hyped" is where you find everyone who's following the big obvious trends. It's better advice to position self where there is demand, but too little supply. If talking about tech, it's often tech that's trending in the client circles, but somewhat obscure in the contractor circles. This implies that where the bulk of contractors are isn't interesting, unless you have something that makes their offers obsolete.

Re: I Quit Google to Work for Myself (2018)

#42

Post by tuesday20 »

raverbashing wrote: post #7
tyingq wrote: post #5

It appears it isn't going terribly well so far: https://mtlynch.io/keep-growing-never-profit/ https://mtlynch.io/solo-developer-year-1/ But, he doesn't seem discouraged. I'm guessing whatever equity he had means he has a fair amount of time to figure it out.

Thanks for posting those, they're really insightful I think the whole premise of relying solely on Amazon Affiliate links might be the weakest link of the chain > I received applications from over 30 writers, did paid trials with about 10 of them, and never managed to bring costs below $46 per article. There certainly are writers who work for $15 per article, but they churned out barely-intelligible garbage Yup

There was a comment here few weeks ago, from someone in Africa. They are making 6000 a month from a quiz site, of all things.

The most important thing in that comment is - for the first two years, the site made no money. Then one of their quizzes went viral.

Maybe this person gave up too soon? The keto site looks good and is useful, maybe if it sticks with it, it might make decent profit?

Re: I Quit Google to Work for Myself (2018)

#43

Post by bathtub365 »

joeblau wrote: post #23

The promo process story hits home with me. I was trying to get promoted a few years back at my company. Over the previous 4 years, I built out a lot of systems, fixed critical bugs in our software stack, stayed late during crunch mode ensuring on time shipping, and volunteered to debug issues upstream issues impacting our software. Our team was customer facing so back-end bugs always surfaced in our product. I was a…

What about the third option of building it for a different company?

Re: I Quit Google to Work for Myself (2018)

#44

Post by streetcat1 »

rando_guy_here wrote: post #30
streetcat1 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on your software. Here are my rules: 1) The hardest tech possible. I want to test my intellectual limits, which was not possible in the corp world. 2) The most hyped areas, today those are AI/Kubernetes. If you have a unique solution, then it should not be a problem to get early adopters. Moreover, after leaving my corporate job, I began: 1) Working 17 hours days, 7 days a week. 2) 100% software dev. To su…

17 sounds a bit hardcore, maybe you are very young:) I'm currently doing the exact same route, but at about maybe 14. For those who doubt, please don't until you try it. I have no idea why, but I can actually put 14 into my own project and I feel completely great. I work maybe 6 days a week like this, get up in the morning and just code until I crash. I'm about a year into it now and I honestly don't feel any burnout…

I am approaching 50. Not a problem.

When you are working for yourself, there is a "no man land" period, where you are trying to switch the economics from selling your time, to selling the product. So you want to work as hard as possible.

Re: I Quit Google to Work for Myself (2018)

#45

Post by streetcat1 »

seibelj wrote: post #28
streetcat1 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on your software. Here are my rules: 1) The hardest tech possible. I want to test my intellectual limits, which was not possible in the corp world. 2) The most hyped areas, today those are AI/Kubernetes. If you have a unique solution, then it should not be a problem to get early adopters. Moreover, after leaving my corporate job, I began: 1) Working 17 hours days, 7 days a week. 2) 100% software dev. To su…

17 hour days, 7 days a week? Writing the hardest software possible? I don’t believe you.

Why not, if you bootstrap, it makes total sense.

The other option is to raise money, but then you switch from a developer to manager.

Re: I Quit Google to Work for Myself (2018)

#46

Post by tuesday20 »

ainar-g wrote: post #2

> Wait a second. I was in a business relationship with Google. > It may sound strange that it took me two and a half years to realize it, but Google does a good job of building a sense of community within the organization. To make us feel that we’re not just employees, but that we are Google. > That conversation made me realize that I’m not Google. I provide a service to Google in exchange for money. People, and espe…

My dad had just one job all his life, for 33 years. While he didn’t become rich, he did enjoy relative peace of mind, pension etc.

Of course everything is relative, but there was a time where companies had a little bit of concern to their employees, however small it was.

Those days are gone. These days, companies don’t even pretend. A very small percentage of people are going to do well, for the vast majority it is just slavery, plain and simple

Re: I Quit Google to Work for Myself (2018)

#47

Post by streetcat1 »

zrail wrote: post #33
streetcat1 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on your software. Here are my rules: 1) The hardest tech possible. I want to test my intellectual limits, which was not possible in the corp world. 2) The most hyped areas, today those are AI/Kubernetes. If you have a unique solution, then it should not be a problem to get early adopters. Moreover, after leaving my corporate job, I began: 1) Working 17 hours days, 7 days a week. 2) 100% software dev. To su…

Increasing focus != increasing hours, if that’s even an appropriate goal.

This depends on your capacity for deep work (I.e. how long can you concentrate). So there are no generalities here.

Re: I Quit Google to Work for Myself (2018)

#48

Post by streetcat1 »

dmos62 wrote: post #41
streetcat1 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on your software. Here are my rules: 1) The hardest tech possible. I want to test my intellectual limits, which was not possible in the corp world. 2) The most hyped areas, today those are AI/Kubernetes. If you have a unique solution, then it should not be a problem to get early adopters. Moreover, after leaving my corporate job, I began: 1) Working 17 hours days, 7 days a week. 2) 100% software dev. To su…

I hope other people new to marketing themselves don't read this. Choosing "most hyped" market segments isn't good advice. You want to be a supplier in a market segment that has high demand and low supply. "Most hyped" in most cases means that the segment has high demand, but also high supply. "Most hyped" is where you find everyone who's following the big obvious trends. It's better advice to position self where ther…

Right, I always advocate startups to compete with google/amazon. You cannot create hype as a startup, you must ride an existing wave (at least for hard tech).

However, you must start dev before the area is hyped and hit the market at the right time.

Also, you must target areas where the big players cannot and will not compete (for example, multi cloud, edge , privacy).

Re: I Quit Google to Work for Myself (2018)

#49

Post by izacus »

vxNsr wrote: post #32
izacus wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like a feature, not a bug - it prevents extroverts who suck up to a boss always stepping over introverts who do a better job.

And yet in one short article the OP perfectly summed up who google sucks at making long term software that continues to work. People often say that google rewards for new projects and ideas vs maintaining the old, I didn’t really understand what that meant until he explained it here. Doing good work is meaningless, the only that matters is what some faceless committee thinks. What’s odd is that the committee doesn’t…

Remember that you're reading an anectodal accounting of a single person who got rejected while working in a single team. There might be bias there :)

Re: I Quit Google to Work for Myself (2018)

#50

Post by hugodutka »

seibelj wrote: post #28
streetcat1 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on your software. Here are my rules: 1) The hardest tech possible. I want to test my intellectual limits, which was not possible in the corp world. 2) The most hyped areas, today those are AI/Kubernetes. If you have a unique solution, then it should not be a problem to get early adopters. Moreover, after leaving my corporate job, I began: 1) Working 17 hours days, 7 days a week. 2) 100% software dev. To su…

17 hour days, 7 days a week? Writing the hardest software possible? I don’t believe you.

I sometimes wonder whether big corp hire people to lurk in HN comments and make self-employment seem worse than it really is.
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