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Having the courage to take the plunge is admirable, and that's enough to get $1/month from me. Congratulations on making such a big decision!

One thing I'm curious about: the current ~$400/month from Patreon (minus fees) isn't close to enough to cover a similarly comfortable standard of living in New York, and I imagine that this would affect your "runway", if you will. Are you able to live and work off of savings, or will you be relocating for a lower cost of living?

Apologies if this comes across as prying into your financial details. I'm more just curious about the process. Again, congrats!

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Thanks for the support :)

As much as I love NYC, it may be practical to relocate somewhere with a lower cost of living. Alee & I will reevaluate when the lease is up. She's in grad school, so who knows where that will take her? I'll probably just live where she needs to for her career.

Hey Andy, dev/ops nerd turned marketer here. First of all, AWESOME that you quit your job and are attempting to make a go at this! Huge congrats!

I would recommend you put in a couple higher levels on the Patreon and think about what people would want from you. For instance, I ran a popular blog and asked my readers what they would pay monthly for. Turns out one of the biggest requests was just a private webinar (I hate that word, so you could call it something else, like "knowledge brain dump") once a week. I ran them for 60 or 90 minutes and took questions at the end. In fact, I may do this again in the future, since I continue to get requests for it long after the fact.

People here have expressed how articulate you are when describing the language. Setting up a group at say $19/mo or even $49/mo where you deep dive into software dev, practical applications of Zig, and/or programming languages in general "live" once a week might be something people are willing to pay for, and would get you "out of the red" more quickly.

Totally agree. I happily have my company pay good money if the software shows to be really useful. And I refer to give that money to small devs instead of Atlassian, Oracle or others. Yearly plans are also easier for me to pay. Dealing with monthly is a little bit of a pain.

Andy congratulations! I decided to support you a while ago on Patreon, because I believe in the philosphy behind Zig and all of the real work you have put into it. Your other projects bolster this in me. I want you to succeed, and I think success will also come to me indirectly by committing to Zig in my future projects. I want to write an array language, like J [0] that I use, in Zig, and a Zig library for geometric algebra along the lines of the C++ library Versor [1], and the JS library ganja.js [2]. Also rewriting your DAW in Zig may make me try and write a modest imitation of Extempore [3] in Zig! Now I have to devote more time to learning Zig. Maybe I need a baseball cap with Zig on it ;)

  [0]  jsoftware.com
  [1]  http://versor.mat.ucsb.edu/
  [2]  https://github.com/enkimute/ganja.js
  [3]  https://extemporelang.github.io/

That's what I did. I used to work remotely and followed my now fiancee to Yakima, Washington. I saved so much money there...

Nyc can be cheap if you share an apartment with someone and live in any borough but manhattan.

He writes in Patreon that reaching $1000 will allow him to "work on Zig full-time for 3 times longer", so I'm guessing he's burning some savings and every extra dollar will just extend that for some time.

Follow up question: What do you do about health insurance? The cheapest (read: catastrophic coverage) on Oscar is several hundred per month last time I checked.

The 3rd goal on https://www.patreon.com/andrewrk is

> $3,000 per month Fully sustain full-time work on Zig.

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