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My Second Year as a Solo Developer

mtlynch.io

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Re: My Second Year as a Solo Developer

#61

Post by mtlynch »

gwbas1c wrote: post #10
mtlynch wrote: post #2

Author here. Happy to answer any questions or hear any feedback about this post. Discussion from my first annual update last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19054150

Just starting to have income near the two year mark is what I assume would happen. Assuming you still need to make income at some point, how long would you go before you decided it was time to go work for someone else? Three years? Four years? BTW: I'm more interested in how you self-reflect on your entrepreneurial abilities. How do you make decisions around that? How do you prevent yourself from falling in love with…

Thanks for reading!

>Just starting to have income near the two year mark is what I assume would happen.

Yeah, I'm encouraged by Cory Zue's progress. He's a couple years ahead of me, but I'm sort of matching up with his first few years of income:

http://www.coryzue.com/writing/master-plan/#the-master-plan

>Assuming you still need to make income at some point, how long would you go before you decided it was time to go work for someone else? Three years? Four years?

Good question. At this point, I feel like I could do this indefinitely, even if I roughly broke even. The things that would change are if my life circumstances change and I need the money (e.g., having children, a catastrophic health event for me or someone in my family).

>BTW: I'm more interested in how you self-reflect on your entrepreneurial abilities. How do you make decisions around that? How do you prevent yourself from falling in love with your work if it's not going to make money?

I've found it helpful to set goals and hold myself accountable for achieving them. I do enjoy writing software for software's sake, but a lot of my satisfaction in being a solo dev comes from improving my skills on the business side. Given that, I'm probably not in danger of reaching complacency - failing to earn money would mean I'm not growing in the way that I want, so I wouldn't be satisfied with that.

Re: My Second Year as a Solo Developer

#62

Post by BlueTemplar »

xchaotic wrote: post #20

Sorry to say but this proves that for someone who actually has to work for a living ie earn money, corporate life is absolutely the correct choice. Even for Mr Lynch these experiments in charity wouldn’t be possible without the nest egg from google (which he acknowledged). To go from net 100k+ to below zero and still be unprofitable after two years is a financial disaster.

And yet, losing money for the first 2-3 years is AFAIK typical for new companies (especially those with 1-2 employees).

Re: My Second Year as a Solo Developer

#63

Post by larrik »

mtlynch wrote: post #21
hopia wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty cool how you're able to come out in the open with all this stuff like this! Having checked Zestful's page out, I got a suggestion for you. How about building a client lib ready for developers for at least a few mainstream languages? This should be rather easily achievable if you type in the Swagger specs to your API. That allows you to generate (Swagger codegen) those libs with possibly just minimal tweaking l…

Thanks for reading! >Having checked Zestful's page out, I got a suggestion for you. How about building a client lib ready for developers for at least a few mainstream languages? This should be rather easily achievable if you type in the Swagger specs to your API. That allows you to generate (Swagger codegen) those libs with possibly just minimal tweaking left on your part. This is something I've thought about. I'd re…

As someone who has done quite a bit of shopping for various services, having a language-specific library ready to go is a major factor. I doubt that someone already paying you would still need one, though, so it should probably be considered a strictly "customer acquisition" feature.

I understand your rule, but I don't think it should be that strict.

Re: My Second Year as a Solo Developer

#64

Post by theli0nheart »

liveoneggs wrote: post #51
theli0nheart wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sorry to say but this proves that for someone who actually has to work for a living ie earn money, corporate life is absolutely the correct choice. Not really. This just proves that corporate life isn't the most profitable option for the OP. You just can't make sweeping statements like this based on a single anecdote. I'll offer this to other "corporate" folk out there. I was self-employed since late 2010 until I r…

how did you get early stage stock being self employed?

Most of my consulting work was with early-stage startups. I would ofter offer a fixed cash cap (say, $50k) at an hourly rate, and any work beyond that would accrue towards a SAFE. Less risk for the founder, gave me incentive to finish the bulk of the work within the cap, but also didn't punish me if I didn't.

Re: My Second Year as a Solo Developer

#66

Post by daxaxelrod »

nautilus12 wrote: post #25

Bye bye any hopes of raising a family.

If worse comes to worse and he goes to $0 in the account, he can probably just get another job. I guarantee employers will look upon his self directed work ethic positively.

He can live his life without the regret of not trying to venture out on his own.

Edit: typo

Re: My Second Year as a Solo Developer

#67

Post by neogodless »

tempsy wrote: post #50
xchaotic wrote: post #20

Sorry to say but this proves that for someone who actually has to work for a living ie earn money, corporate life is absolutely the correct choice. Even for Mr Lynch these experiments in charity wouldn’t be possible without the nest egg from google (which he acknowledged). To go from net 100k+ to below zero and still be unprofitable after two years is a financial disaster.

If you have the savings then why not? There is probably not a better time in history than to check out from being a corporate drone, assuming you have the savings. The stock index returned 30% last year...a $1M nest egg returned $300K in a year. I don't know what his savings looks like but I assume most of it is invested and wasn't included in these numbers.

He talks about that a bit - most of his money was invested in a simple S&P 500 index fund, with some dabbling in crypocurrencies (which worked out in his case.)

Re: My Second Year as a Solo Developer

#68

Post by usr42 »

Interesting analysis. I especially like your personal goals and the "Raise prices, even if nobody's buying". This is a really valuable insight. Thanks for sharing that.

I have one question: Do you have a feeling about the market size you are in and how does this influence your planning?

Re: My Second Year as a Solo Developer

#69

Post by rs23296008n1 »

Good stuff.

I've seen a bit of negativity about this being a waste of time since you're not making equivalent money to old job. For those people: This isn’t any different from spending time earning a degree by returning to full-time study. And your attempts are growing. The compound interest from these investments in time and effort will help you regardless. Even if you fail on every business at first you'll still get so much experience and momentum you can't help but do better next time. And I doubt any will actually fail: each will have an element that wasn't good enough but still capable of being tweaked to fix it. Even if you don't fix it, you've still learnt something in the attempt.

Re: My Second Year as a Solo Developer

#70

Post by untog »

jakobegger wrote: post #8

I read your previous post about Zestful, and this years update, and I just don't understand who would buy this as a hosted API. To me, it sounds like this should be a library, not an API. For every use case that I can think of, having a library would be 100x better than an API. In my experience, APIs are generally slow, unreliable, and tend to change without notice. I don't understand what advantage an API has, excep…

I agree with you entirely, but how would you build a business around a library? It's one of the side effects of the (amazing) open source ecosystem we have these days that installing some kind of paid-for package isn't really that easy. Nor is preventing widespread pirating/reverse engineering of your library if it is successful.

Although it's wildly inefficient, a SAAS offering solves those problems.

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