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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

#351

Post by balfirevic »

poulsbohemian wrote: post #307
quickthrower2 wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I’ve tried another similar site and people’s expectations are a bit loony, usually they want to pay the price you would charge a single customer for 1 year as a SaaS for you to develop the entire solution! Maybe non software folks don’t get the difference between say paying Atlassian $1000/month or whatever it is for Jira and paying a dev $1000 to develop a JIRA clone, because it probably seems like the same thi…

Recent client: "I took a fortran class back in college, so let me know if you need any help." Therein lies the problem: They know lawyers, doctors, accountants, heck even plumbers are going to be expensive because they are educated / trained and/or they get you out of an identifiable tight spot (the IRS isn't happy, water is coming into the house, I'm having a heart attack, I'm getting sued, etc). Software developers…

> Outside the FAANGs technical people are viewed as fungible.

Fungible does not mean low-paying. Plumbers are mostly viewed as fungible, however expensive they may be.

Re: My Second Year as a Solo Developer

#352

Post by catblast »

rickitan wrote: post #330
qmmmur wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The arts is full of people expressing themselves for pay below the poverty line, often not expected or wanted as remuneration for their expression. Treating business as expression and calling it the same thing as actual art is quite oblivious to the reality.

I made the original comment, and I think we see the world in a different way. This is how I see it: Creating a business is a creative act. It involves logic and rationality as much as intuition and imagination. I do think it's an expression of yourself, you're packing all you've learned into something that you think will be valuable to other people. Your personality is reflected in your product, so is your voice. Ult…

> It involves logic and rationality as much as intuition and imagination.

Yes, because this applies to virtually every human endeavor (even though I find tech types have a tendency to discount the former in areas outside their expertise).

The thesis of this old post is the counterpoint: https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm

Re: My Second Year as a Solo Developer

#353

Post by PedroBatista »

Aeolun wrote: post #349
jrumbut wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone on Upwork or whatever other job board would complain if they were out there asking for custom work and you showed up with a ready-made product. Beyond that, every business owner kvetching on Twitter. Problems are everywhere! Certainly can be very hard to get 10 business owners with the same problem to all line up and pay thousands for your software, but problems are easy to come by. Edit: filteri…

People on Upwork also expect to pay $200 total instead of per month.

$200?! Can you do $50?

Re: My Second Year as a Solo Developer

#354

Post by anonymoushn »

marvin wrote: post #348
tempsy wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I misread and thought he meant outside of SF :) Work for one of the big tech cos outside of US is probably your best bet.

What companies are those? Meaning, employing software engineers and paying 300K per year for roles that are not executive-level.

I'm currently at Indeed Japan and I'm pretty sure I can make ~300k as an IC in 1 promo or >>300k as an IC in 2 promos. Of course, at the corresponding level at Facebook in Menlo Park, I'd make 200k+ more...

Re: My Second Year as a Solo Developer

#355

Post by euro_expat »

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…

Yeah, you are right here. It sounds nice to talk with business owners, but you'd be doing it for months to get any valuable insight. Better to build something that you can probably sell and talk with people in the course of selling it, not upfront. You can always pivot a bit once you're in a market.

Re: My Second Year as a Solo Developer

#356

Post by rorykoehler »

dhruvkar wrote: post #208
chowes wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the OP, but what I have struggled with here is the feeling of being a "solution looking for a problem". It's a step before where you're at. It's not that I can't identify owners, it's that I can't identify _problems_. I am lacking the domain experience to even have the first conversation, and it feels like paying people to ask "so tell me everything that is wrong with your business" is the wrong way to do it. I k…

I hear you. I was in Software for a couple of years and I only saw software/IT problems. But these problems usually had a variety of solutions and only some glue was required. Now I've been in the natural stone industry for 4 years and I can't count the number of problems to which the solution is "add more people". So much data entry and data extraction from PDFs ERP/CRM/Other software. 100s of man-hours spent on som…

There was a post on here a couple of weeks ago that spoke about this. Essential reading for indiehackers imo http://reactionwheel.net/2015/10/the-deployment-age.html

Re: My Second Year as a Solo Developer

#357

Post by roytang »

cambalache wrote: post #324
rickitan wrote: post #224

I see a lot of comments criticizing your path and progress. Making remarks like "why didn't you stay at Google". I applaud your decision, effort, and perseverance. I admire your risk taking and having skin in the game. Trying to make it out on your own. People forget the journey is not just about the money. It's about learning, growing and bringing your ideas to life. Being an artist, and expressing yourself through…

Nice words, similar words were said to me. Now I am broke and semi-unemployable. So onlookers beware.

May I ask why you find yourself semi-unemployable? I'm in kind of a similar position as the OP in that I have a significant nest egg so that even if I spend a few years derping around and failing at a bunch of things, I figure that I just need to stop before that nest egg gets anywhere near dangerously low and go back to looking for freelance or consulting work, even at lower rates, should that become necessary to survive. I'm asking about your situation in case there are other pitfalls I need to be wary of.

Re: My Second Year as a Solo Developer

#358

Post by rorykoehler »

tappio wrote: post #347
patio11 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the problem that you can’t identify owners, that you can’t successfully get in touch with business owners, that you can’t convince them to talk to you, that you can’t get signal from those conversations, or that you are accurately getting the signal “Actually literally nothing could be better about my life.” Draw the funnel diagram, with numbers if necessary. Having talked to many devs who believe similar, I think…

I believe that people tend to forget always one thing: the business owners don't know their problems _worth solving_. This fact is most of the time overlooked. In my experience business owners tend to talk about problems that are impossible to solve, or problems that are trivial. Typically, when you actually find problem worth solving, it is not merely a software. You are looking at whole processes that need to be ch…

> when you actually try to present the new solution to the organisation, you will face resistance. People don't like change.

This struggle is real. People also don't understand that software development is a process of continuous optimisation, learning and improvement. They won't accept a good solution only a perfect one.

Re: My Second Year as a Solo Developer

#359

Post by cambalache »

roytang wrote: post #357
cambalache wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice words, similar words were said to me. Now I am broke and semi-unemployable. So onlookers beware.

May I ask why you find yourself semi-unemployable? I'm in kind of a similar position as the OP in that I have a significant nest egg so that even if I spend a few years derping around and failing at a bunch of things, I figure that I just need to stop before that nest egg gets anywhere near dangerously low and go back to looking for freelance or consulting work, even at lower rates, should that become necessary to su…

I am right now an illegal alien in a country (not the US). My home country monthly wage is 5 dollars or so, so returning is not an option unless I can get a remote job.

Re: My Second Year as a Solo Developer

#360

Post by mtlynch »

m0zg wrote: post #268

What Got Done is basically Google's internal Snippets. I wish there was an on-prem setup to do that. The idea is basically every week you write, in free form text, what you've done, and possibly what you're planning to do, and your team mates get to view it, and subscribe to updates conveniently. If you're anything like me, you will find this valuable not only day to day, but also when the review time comes and you n…

I wish I'd found you when I was trying to gather enough customers to make What Got Done a business!

Yeah, I loved Snippets as well. I wrote a little ode to them last year.[0]

>I wish there was an on-prem setup to do that.

What Got Done is open source now. The standard version has a dependency on Google Cloud Firestore, but I have a working branch that runs on Redis.[1] You'd need to implement a new auth solution because What Got Done depends on UserKit, which is still in closed beta, but you can still use their dummy backend (configured in What Got Done by default) which accepts "password" for any username.

[0] https://mtlynch.io/status-updates-to-nobody/

[1] https://github.com/mtlynch/whatgotdone/tree/redis-persist

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