Becoming a Full-Time Creator as a Software Engineer

Just a word of caution from someone who paid a ton of money to a lot of the people mentioned in the article in the last 2 years and was part of more than a few of these communities. Note these are my observations and opinions.<p>- Read any testimonials these people out with a dollop of salt. Success rates seem to be around 1-2%(if you are lucky) with most of the others leaving or barely getting by. Easier to make way more money as a software dev in an established company than in the &quot;creator economy&quot;.<p>- Copy what they do to sell their courses rather than buying their courses. Their courses are out of date, but they are still milking it.<p>- Assume any financial number you see from these people or people in similar spaces as suspect. It is either massaged or an outright lie to make it look much better than it is most of the time.<p>- Assume you are being marketed to with any content they put out<p>- There is a TON of luck. A million people put in the same hard work but do not make it. But most of these people spin it as hard work.<p>- Most of these people cannot teach. Great at marketing themselves, but not much else.

I&#x27;ve been wrecking my brain how to make $10 on anything online for a good part of the past 10 years with a couple of failed startups and even more side projects that went nowhere. I envy anyone who can do this and I think it is truly an immeasurable amount of effort to make any kind of side income let alone something that replaces your salary. But I think articles like this one advertise it like it&#x27;s something you can do in your sleep and that&#x27;s just not how it works.

Any advice I can offer are things that seemed to work for me. I got &quot;lucky&quot; and struck gold on my first idea&#x2F;project (consistently making high six figures over seven years running). I have tried other projects but none were nearly as successful.<p>1) Find your competitive advantage. I happened to work in a niche industry and learned it inside and out. I became somewhat of a &quot;domain expert&quot;. I used that to my advantage and built my product to serve that niche. What can you do better than most people? What do you know inside and out?<p>2) Serve businesses, not people. People will do anything to not pay. They tend to have more charge backs and most of the &quot;system abuse&quot; I deal with are small time freelancers trying to squeeze my product&#x27;s free offering. Don&#x27;t offer too much for free. Don&#x27;t be a charity. Serve businesses, they pay money.<p>3) Don&#x27;t be afraid of competitors. My largest customers are in fact competitors that leverage my service to better their own service.<p>4) Don&#x27;t charge too little. When I first started, my offering was incredibly cheap ($9 per-month). It certainly helped bring attention to my offering and I got a lot of customers for it, but they were cheap customers (see point #2 above). Today my lowest offering is $39 per-month and I seem to have weeded out most of the bad apples (though some still get through).<p>5) Reach out to customers directly. Don&#x27;t rely on ads, social media posts or other fluff. I haven&#x27;t done a single ad or social media post (I don&#x27;t even have social media profiles). What I did do was directly email&#x2F;message potential customers.

&gt; When I left my job as an engineering manager at Uber in late 2020, I had nothing lined up on purpose, and decided to spend the coming 6 months writing a book, and then found a startup related to platform engineering<p>All these feel-good stories should start with &quot;this is how I managed to save enough money to not worry about anything for at least 6 months&quot;

&gt; 4. Invest your savings and live off of gains.<p>this option is not really like the other 3 listed, since it&#x27;s a separate category of passive income and is non-exclusionary unlike the rest.<p>One should always be investing any excess income anyway, regardless of what path one chooses to follow. Unfortunately, the risk of having _only_ investment income to sustain you is that you cannot make risky investments, and so must have large amount of capital to produce less risky but more guaranteed returns. FIRE comes to mind when one goes down this course of action.

I think this post is a treasure trove of good advice. I’ll have to do some deeper reading of this as the advice seem solid.<p>Since I’ve quit my last job in 2018 I feel like I’ve tried it all when it comes to revenue sources:<p>* consulting - still my main source of income<p>* writing a newsletter - brings about $400-$600 a month but there are some dry days on the horizon<p>* selling newsletter merch - I’m in red every month with only one t-shirt design<p>* evaluating EU project proposals - nice side gig 1-2 times a year<p>* writing a course with a publisher - after 3 months I’m nowhere near getting a good return of investment on the time spent but it was fun and I’d do it again<p>* writing an influencer posts on LinkedIn - was a one-off thing but paid really well<p>I feel like doing too many things at one could be a problem for me and focusing on a subset of things could bring better results.<p>If you are in a position to work for yourself then I would highly recommend it.

&gt; My newsletter is the #1 paid technology newsletter on Substack.<p>good for you but is this another survivorship bias thing...<p>reminds me of the 4-hour workweek, getting rich by giving advice others how to get rich<p>added: if you try to be in the creator economy, you will always be at the whim of some gatekeeper like youtube or instagram who can erase 90% of your income in an instant

Gergely parents many of the pros of being a full-time creator but there are drawbacks as well.<p>- (US) government doesn&#x27;t necessarily incentivize self employment<p>- Buying a house is a pain. I make more than I ever made working for the man but few want to give me a loan.<p>- Unless you have a saas, income can be variable.<p>- You get to do the fun stuff... But also the other stuff (payroll, marketing, ...)<p>That said, it would be very hard for me to go back to working for the man. The flexibility, creativity, and community are wonderful.

I tried this for two years and even wrote a book to help people get into tech. I realized I didn’t want to be another person who gives generic advice and I decided to make content and write books for me instead.<p>I think the main thing the author leaves out in the article is that building the audience is the more important thing when starting. Once you have enough “webs” out there via articles, videos, interviews, freebies, newsletter, meetups, etc then you can consider building products for your audience. Arguably you can start as soon as your audience shows interest, but you need an audience first to know that.<p>I’m a nobody in the social media world and I was able to sell a $200 course to many people. I ended up refunding everyone because I realized I didn’t want to be a tech influencer&#x2F;guru&#x2F;coach&#x2F;etc.

Has anyone who posted a &#x27;Show HN&#x27; had success with a paid product and <i>no prior audience or following</i> when their product launched?<p>Building an audience remains a difficult business task. It would be inspiring to hear success stories of products which launched with no following or prior audience.

It doesn’t seem possible until you do it. I couldn’t imagine my book over iOS would net what it has, but a bit of luck and trust built up over the years made it a success for me.<p>The challenge, as I see it now, is how to prove you’re not out for a quick buck. Because everyone is selling something at this point - for better or worse.

I&#x27;ve been running a technical podcast focused on interview prep&#x2F;insights for the last two years that has OKAY traction but is still a long way from making me any money. It&#x27;s hard! It cost me money. About $500 a month right now, not counting my time. I enjoy doing it but I&#x27;ve certainly had tough months when I wanted to stop.<p>Doing freelance work has been the easiest way to bring in some extra cash as an engineer but damn do taxes really hurt that extra income.

This is gold!<p>I&#x27;ve been following Gergely&#x27;s journey for quite a while. Personally I learn a ton from Gergely&#x27;s writings &#x2F; tweets.<p>As a fellow one-person business [1], the only thing I&#x27;d like to add here (after running my business for ~5 years so far) is that you are allowed to be flexible.<p>Businesses are different. Everyone&#x27;s background &#x2F; finance &#x2F; skills are different. It&#x27;s okay that you are doing something different from what you&#x27;ve read from the Internet.<p>For example, it&#x27;s totally okay to do (or not do) micro-services for your little SaaS on the get go. It&#x27;s also okay to try venture-backed route for a while then switch to do &quot;lifestyle business&quot;. It&#x27;s also okay to hire (or not hire) employees early. There&#x27;s not one single formula that works for every one-person business.<p>Persistence really pays off long term. Good things might not happen until year 5.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.listennotes.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;the-boring-technology-behind-a-one-person-23&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.listennotes.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;the-boring-technology-behin...</a>

Such motivational posts incline me to write a book on how to write a book to make money online ;)

Nice, I like this.<p>Till now I considered running a B2B business as only being a SAAS catering to businesses, and therefore requiring dedicated resources on standby e.g. customer service, an on-call rotation, compliance to various things that other businesses care about etc which seem like quite a drag for a one or two person venture.<p>Looks like there are other ways to run a B2B without too much friction

<p><pre><code> &gt; What are things people and businesses pay for? </code></pre> I think this is missing the &quot;to fix annoyances, remove frustrations, save time&quot; bullet point.<p>That&#x27;s basically all my own one-person business does (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lunar.fyi&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lunar.fyi&#x2F;</a>), it allows people to add adaptive brightness on external monitors, turn off individual monitors from the keyboard etc.<p>Things that are simply frustrating to do daily without software help, either because the monitor buttons are hard to press, options hidden under a lot of menus, or a multi-step process is needed.<p>And people are paying for it, even though it doesn&#x27;t help them make money, it doesn&#x27;t educate or entertain them, and it definitely doesn&#x27;t help them sell anything.

I&#x27;ve always found the &quot;hey Twitter friends, I wrote a guide, buy it for $90 now!&quot; stuff super unethical anyways. First of all, the information they sell that way is 100% available for free somewhere else or is useless. They&#x27;re usually mediocre in their fields, but have chops for social media marketing.<p>Essentially that economy is all about being perceived as an expert and manipulating naive&#x2F;unsuspecting people with marketing tactics without ever actually providing any value. The entire focus of that community seems to be on MRR rather than products or solutions.<p>They make posts on HN, Indiehackers, Reddit, etc. trying to sell themselves as sympathetic by using the guise of &quot;sharing their story&quot; but they&#x27;re actually just finding more customers. Btw, I don&#x27;t mean that sharing your project on HN is sleazy, of course not. But it&#x27;s quite obvious when you&#x27;re lying with a blog post for example, and actually using the mirage of a real discussion to point eyes at your money makers.<p>That said, I think there&#x27;s a subset of those people who do provide real value and don&#x27;t play the MRR game. Instead they treat it more like a hobby (or craft) and just build shit while being practical about income. IMO, that&#x27;s something to try to emulate. Stop worrying about &quot;how do I make $1000 per month in passive income?&quot;, and instead build something useful or fun without pressuring yourself (or others, for that matter). Be practical, not hopeful and needy.<p>Some examples I can think of right now, though some of them are actually not making any money AFAIK:<p>- A cool library of playlists for programming sessions, run by Datassette: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;musicforprogramming.net" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;musicforprogramming.net</a><p>- Fabien Sanglard&#x27;s awesome books explaining classic game engines: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fabiensanglard.net&#x2F;gebbdoom&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fabiensanglard.net&#x2F;gebbdoom&#x2F;</a><p>- Custom Thinkpads that look retro but are beefy bois, by XY Tech: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.xyte.ch&#x2F;mods&#x2F;x210-x2100&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.xyte.ch&#x2F;mods&#x2F;x210-x2100&#x2F;</a><p>- Cheap, no non-sense email service, made by a solo dev: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;purelymail.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;purelymail.com&#x2F;</a><p>- Nice repository of tips and info for software engineering teams, made by a burnt out team leader: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;principles.dev&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;principles.dev&#x2F;</a><p>- The original AdBlock, which I believe was made by 1 or 2 devs and just had a donation box when it first started: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;adblock-%E2%80%94-best-ad-blocker&#x2F;gighmmpiobklfepjocnamgkkbiglidom" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;adblock-%E2%80%94-...</a><p>- Had to add this classic from the Diablo 2 days, BoBaFeTT&#x27;s trainer: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.geocities.ws&#x2F;free_bobafett&#x2F;main.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.geocities.ws&#x2F;free_bobafett&#x2F;main.htm</a><p>All of these projects have one interesting thing in common: there&#x27;s no pretense. They had an idea for some tool or service and decided that they could provide it. I&#x27;m sure that most of these projects grew out of stuff they were tinkering with anyway and probably weren&#x27;t things where they spent too much time obsessing over market fit.<p>IMO worrying about social media audiences, email lists, profit, market fit, exposure, pricing, etc. is a sign that you should be looking for VC funding rather than building a product. Those things can work as well, but you have to be someone who&#x27;s trying to build an empire of sorts rather than provide immediate value.

I&#x27;m on a similar journey as the author — quit my job at FAANG and started a solo software consulting business — and as others have mentioned in this post, this path of contention creation is non-linear and no &quot;formula&quot; exists — and will never exist.<p>A friend of mind, guitar instructor, went from being teaching synchronously in-person for 15+ years to building out his audience. Only after 2 years did he start becoming profitable.<p>It&#x27;s a grind.

I think the most actionable advice is: Bringing a sizable audience to a new social platform makes it easier to reach #1 in the rankings. Once you do, other things become exponentially easier.

Followed the link to the Miss Excel story, it&#x27;s pretty wild overall, but this just stood out to me:<p>&gt; whenever I run a sale, it’s usually $297 typically, but when you cut it in half, it looks nice at $149<p>When asked why her courses were priced at a &#x27;weird&#x27; number like 297. That&#x27;s just wild coming from someone who self-reportedly makes up to 6 figures a day teaching people how to use software for basic arithmetic.<p><i>Free Excel tip</i>: use =ISEVEN() to check whether a number will halve to a whole number.

Author forgot one of the most profitable income streams for solo creaters, paid speaking events.

interesting that he recommends starting a one-person business but the last section of the article are listings for &quot;featured pragmatic engineering jobs&quot;! do you believe in your own advice?

Funny he don&#x27;t mention recruiting engineers hate it but is what the OG&#x27;s did.

who tryna build a new social app