My Second Year as a Solo Developer

Someone who solves or even slightly mitigates either of these issues will have a viable business. I know that for the "ensure the dev is competent" side of things there are many consulting companies that live and die by their reputations, but generally these don't usually scale up beyond a certain size, and when they do their reputation deteriorates. I am not aware of any businesses that attempt to solve from the flip side and weed out problem clients (if anyone is aware of such a service, I would be interested).

As if that wasn't enough of a challenge, if you do manage to connect quality devs to quality clients, there's the issue of sufficiently monetizing that relationship: you can charge a finder's fee or similar when you first connect them, but once a client finds a dev they like they will probably stick with that dev. So in that business you can lose business because you match people too poorly (and they leave because you can't help them) and you can lose business because you match people too well (and they leave because they've now found somebody they trust so they don't need your services anymore).

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

>You could probably talk to business owners with problems, launch an (appropriately priced; hundreds to thousands of dollars per year) product against those problems, build contingent on getting 10 commits to buy, and be at +/- $100k in 12 to 18 months. Many people with less technical and writing ability have done this in e.g. the MicroConf community. If you want the best paint-by-numbers approach to it I've seen, c.f. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otbnC2zE2rw&t=2s

Thanks, I'll check out that video!

I hear that advice a lot from people I respect, and I put a lot of effort into that over the past year, but I was never successful.

The biggest problem I ran into was that there's this "disconnect problem." I know I'm a competent developer and can build niche solutions to $10k problems, but I don't know which companies have $10k problems. I can guess at it, but they sometimes don't even realize their $10k problem has a software solution. The companies also don't have incentive to talk to me to explore the possibility if I'm just a developer off the street.

In 2019, I tried to do this with stone quarries[1], sheet metal shops[2], and email copywriters[3], but the first two mostly wouldn't talk to me and the latter didn't seem to have enough opportunity for a niche business.

>I would encourage you, to the maximum extent compatible with your sanity, to prioritize "Will this get me more customers?" over behind-the-scenes investments like CI/CD which are very appropriate to Google but will under no circumstance show up in next year's report as One Of The Most Important Things I Did This Year.

I get a lot of pushback about my love for CI/CD, and it always puzzles me. Is CI/CD seen as difficult or time-consuming? For me, it's such a net positive on my time and mental energy to know that basic functionality works before I push to prod. There have been many times where CI has caught breaking changes that I'd otherwise have to catch by waiting for customers to complain or manually smoke testing my product after every push. And I don't have to do much to set it up - just slap in a Circle CI config.yml and flip a button.

>I would suggest devoting approximately zero cycles to cost control. You don't have a cost problem and no amount of cost control will bend the curve of your current businesses to sustainability. You have a revenue problem. Your desired state in the medium term will make it economically irrational for you to think for more than a minute about a $50 a month SaaS expense; marketing and sales gets you to that desired state, not cost control.

Thanks, I agree completely and you succinctly articulated a feeling I've long struggled to put into words.

I often get pushback about spending O(hundreds) of dollars on non-essential expenses, and it always feels like it's missing the forest for the trees.

[1] https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2019/05/#an-app-for-rocks

[2] https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2020/01/#sheet-metal-resea...

[3] https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2019/06/#taking-on-google-...

To be quite honest: He's spending all day playing.

That's a position I envy quite a bit.