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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

#211

Post by dbancajas »

theli0nheart wrote: post #145
dbancajas wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> iled" (which I'm still kind of excited about but have no time to pursue), but I did succeed in making an App Store portfolio which brings in decent profit. can you share what you did consult on? To me consulting is very mysterious as it's a very generic term but I'm always amazed by people earning 250K-500K due to "consulting". Is it easy to do or more like being in the right place/right time/right skillset?

> can you share what you did consult on? To me consulting is very mysterious as it's a very generic term but I'm always amazed by people earning 250K-500K due to "consulting" Totally. I'm a generalist software engineer with a specialty in early stage startup tech. In addition to actually writing the code, setting up infrastructure (AWS and all that), and anything explicitly code or "DevOps" related, I also helped cli…

How did you end up on consulting? Did you have prior experience bootstrapping previous startups where you were a full-time employee? Then you leveraged that experience? Devops is pretty recent so I'm assuming you have <10 years experience?

Re: My Second Year as a Solo Developer

#212

Post by nautilus12 »

CaptArmchair wrote: post #117
nautilus12 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And no such assumption was made in the original statement.

Then why did you publicly make that statement in the first place?

I was saying "any" such hopes. IF someone had such an aspiration, then this would not be a possible course of action.

Re: My Second Year as a Solo Developer

#213

Post by Reedx »

patio11 wrote: post #79

Two cents offered because this post really strikes a chord with me, and I also spent some time chasing down rabbit holes early in my software business: These products do not appear obviously commercializable and multiple years invested into them without materially improving the businesses does not decrease my confidence in that snap judgment. You could probably talk to business owners with problems, launch an (approp…

> reflect for a moment on how much time is spent on standups at a company with 20 or 200 engineers, what one hour of their time is worth

> Your minimum commitment should be north of $1,000 per month; practically nobody can integrate with your API for cheaper than a thousand dollars of engineering time, right.

That's my thinking as well, but haven't had much luck getting companies to accept this kind of pricing. Even though it's all inbound interest (no advertising or outreach) and they're sometimes large companies.

Here are the problems I'm aware of:

1. People generally don't think about the cost of standups or meetings or per hour employee cost. That's just not something typically being considered.

2. They've compared with other APIs or use other APIs/SaaS and are used to How do you overcome these? Do you actually point out that the API is cheap compared to employee cost? Help them justify it to themselves and/or their manager?

Re: My Second Year as a Solo Developer

#214

Post by giarc »

willj wrote: post #203

Naive question by someone who’s never started a business: when bootstrapping companies while keeping your day job, how do you deal with intellectual property clauses in employment contracts, such that your employer owns the “inventions” you create in your free time, on your own equipment, unrelated to the business area you work in? I know laws vary by state, but I would find it especially disheartening if you spent y…

My employer (not a tech company but a healthcare provider) has a system whereby I submit a Potential Conflict of Interest document. They review and either give me their blessing to continue work (outside work hours obviously) or further review is to be conducted.

Re: My Second Year as a Solo Developer

#215

Post by epicgiga »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #200
epicgiga wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did both. You just have to finish reading before you start typing. See, did both again!

Free, accurate feedback isn't always fawning or even especially kind. It is certainly better than the alternatives, however. Thanks.

You will go far, sir.

Re: My Second Year as a Solo Developer

#216

Post by theli0nheart »

dbancajas wrote: post #211
theli0nheart wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> can you share what you did consult on? To me consulting is very mysterious as it's a very generic term but I'm always amazed by people earning 250K-500K due to "consulting" Totally. I'm a generalist software engineer with a specialty in early stage startup tech. In addition to actually writing the code, setting up infrastructure (AWS and all that), and anything explicitly code or "DevOps" related, I also helped cli…

How did you end up on consulting? Did you have prior experience bootstrapping previous startups where you were a full-time employee? Then you leveraged that experience? Devops is pretty recent so I'm assuming you have <10 years experience?

I graduated college in 2009, and right afterwards I worked at a startup. Then I joined an agency doing web work for the entertainment industry. That got boring pretty quickly, so after a year of that, I left and started an "incubator" with some friends. At that company, we built out MVPs and convinced friends working corporate jobs to quit and become operators. It was a cool business model but not great for cashflow, so I split off.

Slowly but surely, I found a niche in working with smart, non-technical founders who want to start startups. Turns out that most good programmers willfully ignore that market (for good reason, it's really hard to separate the wheat from the chaff).

I've been programming in some way or another since the mid-90s, not old hat by any measure, but AWS and the "cloud" was hardly present when I really started getting my hands dirty with web programming during the early/mid-2000s.

Re: My Second Year as a Solo Developer

#217

Post by komali2 »

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

How's a burger with a bun keto friendly lol. There's a big picture of a bunned burger and no mention of "by the way this specifically refers to just the patty itself."

Re: My Second Year as a Solo Developer

#218

Post by par »

willj wrote: post #203

Naive question by someone who’s never started a business: when bootstrapping companies while keeping your day job, how do you deal with intellectual property clauses in employment contracts, such that your employer owns the “inventions” you create in your free time, on your own equipment, unrelated to the business area you work in? I know laws vary by state, but I would find it especially disheartening if you spent y…

most of the time you just roll the dice. As long as what you're doing is not in the same line of business as your employer, and you part on good terms, most of the time it's fine.

Re: My Second Year as a Solo Developer

#219

Post by mtlynch »

aosaigh wrote: post #185
mtlynch wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for reading, Patrick! I'm a big fan of your work, and your Indie Hackers interview was one of the big motivators that sent me down the solo developer path. > 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. Ma…

Just a friendly passing comment, but I'm not sure you have the correct take-aways from speaking with business owners. With the quarry example, you couldn't get them on the phone. How about conferences, meetups, trade shows etc? Furthermore you probably need to search for companies that might _want_ to speak to you: younger owners, companies with less to lose etc. In the sheet metal example, it sounds like you had alr…

Thanks for the suggestions!

I think that's sound advice. The strategy I had in mind was courting industries that were physically close to me. I wasn't just calling the businesses, I was showing up at their offices to ask for meetings. My hypothesis was that there are probably plenty of profitable businesses nearby that are disconnected from the tech world, so other software companies aren't approaching them.

To clarify with the sheet metal companies, I didn't go in pitching a replacement to their existing tools. I always opened the conversation by asking them if they had processes that frustrated them, cost them money, or if their existing software failed to meet their needs. But I definitely found it hard sometimes when they asked me what I wanted to build for them and my answer was basically, "I don't know..."

Maybe it's just a matter of picking the right spot on the spectrum. It seems like you want businesses that are niche and disconnected enough from mainstream tech that big players aren't courting them as well. But they can't be so disconnected that they won't talk to you, either.

Re: My Second Year as a Solo Developer

#220

Post by Gepsens »

cs02rm0 wrote: post #120
patio11 wrote: post #79

Two cents offered because this post really strikes a chord with me, and I also spent some time chasing down rabbit holes early in my software business: These products do not appear obviously commercializable and multiple years invested into them without materially improving the businesses does not decrease my confidence in that snap judgment. You could probably talk to business owners with problems, launch an (approp…

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 I don't doubt that you're absolutely right, but this bit strikes me as hard . I've struggled to find one business owner with a problem they perceive, let alone 10 with commitments to buying a solution for the…

That's exactly what I went to solve 6 years ago, didn't work, but the space is probably more mature now
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