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rozenmd

How is anyone going to find your software if you don't write about it?

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It depends on your software. Here are my rules:

1) The hardest tech possible. I want to test my intellectual limits, which was not possible in the corp world.

2) The most hyped areas, today those are AI/Kubernetes.

If you have a unique solution, then it should not be a problem to get early adopters.

Moreover, after leaving my corporate job, I began:

1) Working 17 hours days, 7 days a week.

2) 100% software dev.

To sum up, if you leave the corp, you must increase your focus.

Welcome to burnout, then. That is not sustainable, and you can't create a profitable solution in a time frame that this amount of work would pay off without horrible (personal) costs.

In my experience, burnout seems to be a result of poor sleep, poor nutrition, lack of autonomy, lack of recognition, etc. This is especially true if working harder won't lead to greater rewards, like if you have a fixed salary or if your compensation is fairly independent from your actual work.

Many of these are more likely to occur when working at a big Corp, so working by yourself can help you avoid this.

Right, "17 hours a day, 7 days a week" in the "hardest tech possible" fits the bill then.

I hope other people new to marketing themselves don't read this. Choosing "most hyped" market segments isn't good advice. You want to be a supplier in a market segment that has high demand and low supply. "Most hyped" in most cases means that the segment has high demand, but also high supply. "Most hyped" is where you find everyone who's following the big obvious trends. It's better advice to position self where there is demand, but too little supply. If talking about tech, it's often tech that's trending in the client circles, but somewhat obscure in the contractor circles. This implies that where the bulk of contractors are isn't interesting, unless you have something that makes their offers obsolete.

Right, I always advocate startups to compete with google/amazon. You cannot create hype as a startup, you must ride an existing wave (at least for hard tech).

However, you must start dev before the area is hyped and hit the market at the right time.

Also, you must target areas where the big players cannot and will not compete (for example, multi cloud, edge , privacy).

17 sounds a bit hardcore, maybe you are very young:) I'm currently doing the exact same route, but at about maybe 14. For those who doubt, please don't until you try it. I have no idea why, but I can actually put 14 into my own project and I feel completely great. I work maybe 6 days a week like this, get up in the morning and just code until I crash. I'm about a year into it now and I honestly don't feel any burnout at all, if anything I'm becoming more energized and excited as my project nears a production quality and launch nears. You can work much harder and longer for yourself than you can for a check, I swear it's true. I was pretty burned after a standard 40-hour at my last job, I work twice as hard now and I feel great. Weird but true.

I am approaching 50. Not a problem.

When you are working for yourself, there is a "no man land" period, where you are trying to switch the economics from selling your time, to selling the product. So you want to work as hard as possible.

I’ve experienced the same, though not 14 hours consistently. Are there any steps you take to avoid burnout? Also, are you coding all day? Or writing content etc?

Yes, I'm coding all day, but I'm very nice to myself and only do it if I feel up for it. I just naturally have 14 hours in me because it's my own business, which was the really surprising thing after seeing how 40 elsewhere made me feel. I think starting this without the skills to fully pull it off was really key. The learning I've had to do along the way has been really rewarding and has really broadened me out as a tech professional, so there has been this constant positive development in myself as I progress, which keeps me getting up ready to try hard again. No job I've ever had motivated me like this. One other thing I think is key is proper goals. I'm not shooting for a "startup", I want a small business. I want to put something out that actually solves a problem, does it well, and make an honest living off it. I don't think I will ever sell my company for 100 million, but I do think I can make a living and offer myself a nicer working life than I've experienced in the corporate world. That is motivation enough for me.

17 hour days, 7 days a week? Writing the hardest software possible? I don’t believe you.

I sometimes wonder whether big corp hire people to lurk in HN comments and make self-employment seem worse than it really is.

Why not, if you bootstrap, it makes total sense.

The other option is to raise money, but then you switch from a developer to manager.

Increasing focus != increasing hours, if that’s even an appropriate goal.

This depends on your capacity for deep work (I.e. how long can you concentrate). So there are no generalities here.

Woah, 17 hour days???!!

Can I ask what you’re building? It is very hard to be productive that long, hence the question

Yes. I am creating a new auto ml platform for Kubernetes, in Kubernetes - I.e. via CRDs.

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