Becoming a Full-Time Creator as a Software Engineer
blog.pragmaticengineer.com
blog.pragmaticengineer.com
- 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 "creator economy".
- 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 Their courses are out of date, but they are still milking it.
- 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.
- Assume you are being marketed to with any content they put out
- 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.
- Most of these people cannot teach. Great at marketing themselves, but not much else.
The “Excel Girl” also spins it as manifesting. You can see more of that at r/lawofattraction, or you might be familiar with The Secret (2006).
"Man, I really want to make some side money"
"Good news! Look at my book|podcast|article|youtube|etc on how to do that!"
It's like writing a "how to get rich book" explaining you should write a "how to get rich book" to get rich... an informal/unstructured pyramid scheme.
So yes, they teach you how to build iOS apps. But those apps have a negative ROI.
- Willing to flood social media. Something is only good in moderate, if everyone doing the same, the ecosystem becomes uninhabitable.
- Willing to be a bullshit person
Apparently he tried doing a big rewrite a couple years ago to fix the UX and whatnot, but his income dropped to 1/3rd of what it was after the change. Probably people spent less time on the site. So he put it back how it was.
I built four SaaS products while working full time as a software dev, I have started companies, tried some side hussles, I am a smart chap but I was never blessed with opportunity and luck at the time I was putting in the effort. Then I burned out, and now I am just happy to be enjoying software for a living again. It would take a really captivating idea for me to start another software side gig, and only if a concrete opportunity arises. For now I am happy working on being prepared to sieze that opportunity by building cash, skills and a network, rather than actively working on one that doesn't yet exist.
I don't know much about business, but I think you need business chops to build a business.
The guiding principle is simple, but in practice it can be hard and complex.
Make something cheaper, its also a good starting point for a lot of "inventive" startups (Spacex is spacex, cause they are cheaper than others). However you don't have to be inventive, just do similar/same thing but cheaper.
Ok, I want to make compilers. People want them but don't want to pay for them ...
So if you release something competitive to TBB+MKL for AMD, then you're in business ;) But be warned, it's like millions LOC and 500MB of pure compiled binaries to get to that level of functionality.
If you are really serious about $10 (and not some other larger number), here are some tips:
* Pick a topic you know really well (programming, cooking, sea diving, whatever)
* Make an infographic (get started on the topic of your choice, some specific and useful practical tip, etc) - picking a template from free tier Canva will go a long way in producing a good looking graphical post (you can even do animations)
* Put this up under pay-what-you-want model on sites like Gumroad (so, minimum price free but users can pay if they wish) - see https://mathspp.gumroad.com/l/cheatsheet_list_comps_101 for an example
* Post a sample on sites like Twitter, Reddit, etc (just the nice looking graphic, add a link to Gumroad later in comments if the posts start getting attention)
* Make a video to show demos (if applicable)
* Be consistent! Give it your best shot for topics you are really confident about. Listen to feedback. Learn and Build in Public for better reach (see https://swyx.io/learn-in-public and https://chriscoyier.net/2012/09/23/working-in-public/)
If you want an example for someone making a living by doing things like this, check out Julia's https://wizardzines.com/
It doesn't take that many $100 purchases to be a respectable income source
>Hello! It looks like you're in India, where this zine might be expensive. If you need it, please use code <redacted> at checkout to get 70% off the regular price.
(Content creator here.)
But I don't work directly on any of the topics in the zines, I just like to understand things, or at least understand them enough that I can hang information on what I already know.
Regarding RoI, that depends on your needs. I left my job in 2014 due to various reasons. I tried and failed at many things for about 5 years. Then I tried selling ebooks and the second book clicked for me. Now I earn more than I need (with the caveat that I live alone in outskirts of a second tier city with an average monthly expense of just about $150).
There would be no money left over for other categories of spending like shelter or transportation.
See https://learnbyexample.github.io/curated_resources/linux_cli... for more learning resources on Bash scripting.
Buy Me a Coffee on the other hand has actually gotten me some money (~€50). People find some niche stuff I wrote, it helps them, they click on a prominent link at the bottom, leave a tip, and that's it. I intentionally mimic tips one might give offline: no attachments, no benefits, I don't spam your email months later.
But if I were to try this full time (I don't have the consistency for it), my difficulty would be much higher simply by not being in a country supported by Stripe. There's all sorts of cool new stuff in the area I've discovered over the years, but basically all of them only support payouts over Stripe while I'm pretty much limited to PayPal, so tough shit!
With nearly zero Twitter followers, posting to Twitter is a black hole. Even posting to reddit is posting to a black hole unless you get really lucky (lots of upvotes and engagement).
It's a chicken and egg problem. How do you get the word out when nobody listens to what you have to say?
https://datastation.multiprocess.io/blog/2022-06-11-year-in-...
How close is your approach to what they described, and did you actually make <$10?
That would make it a lot less enticing :)
If you don't have a following you don't have social clout. If you don't have social clout you are in that bottom tier where people don't see the need to engage with. I don't expect that high clout people like Jim Cramer or Elon Musk engage, but in general especially Twitter is a black hole. I had good experience with getting followers on LinkedIn and Medium, but that was mainly based on a lot of work that I had put in to engage with people and write content. At some point in time, I was in the top 5% business writers in the world. Yet, from a monetization perspective that was a flat 0. So given that experience, I might be the worst social marketer since I am not being able to earn 10 bucks on common social media.
Is your product worth paying for? Is it even worth someone’s time to look at it or download it for free?
Is it the type of thing that you yourself have paid for in the past? (E.g. if you’re making infographics about cooking, ask yourself, when’s the last time you gave someone money because of their cooking infographics). Would you pay for your own product?
If you can’t imagine a scenario where you would pay for your own product, then why would anyone else?
I think the main culprit is that Twitter specifically is an extremely saturated space and that content discovery is really hard for pretty much everyone who is not in the top 1%.
For example: https://twitter.com/willmcgugan/status/1533056162417070081
>Just read How DNS Works by @b0rk. I love how easily digestible this is. A 10 minute read and i feel I have a solid understanding of DNS! And I’ve been a web developer for more than a decade.
a few hundreds of hours of programming without any validation whatsoever
Folks will launch courses that net $1m a year, sure. But what you miss is the years beforehand building goodwill with their community by helping out, writing articles, attending conferences and giving talks, etc.
I do this myself with React at https://maxrozen.com, and most folks that end up buying my book found my site dozens of times first.
It's definitely possible to grow it to a replacement salary (I know several full time YouTubers now) but it does require a certain amount of luck and a huge amount of effort. Not really different from any other endeavour...
I used to be able to (late 1990s/early 2000s) make a living on a mixture of niche websites, affiliate marketing, CPC arbitrage, and similar; but it just started drying up as more people gravitated to social media platforms, and unless you can skill up on social media marketing while getting lucky with their algorithms, you probably won't get far.
I decided to just move on because I never really liked the platforms and wanted stable employment for a while, but even now that I would be willing to risk the unpredictable income, it's nigh on impossible to get anything rolling. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
My advice is to remember the situations where _you_ have spent $10 online and just analyze what was in place to help you spend that money.
- Find a problem people have, ideally something they are paying to solve now (this includes hiring people to solve it).
- Write down/screenshot the places online/offline where you have seen people indicating that they have this problem and are paying to solve it.
- Make a solution that is different in some way that is important to some subset of people (e.g. "X, but it works with Linode" or "Y, but it's in Portuguese"). Sometimes, the people posting/asking about solutions to the problem will ask specific questions that tell you how to differentiate.
- Post your solution in the same places you saw people talking about the problem
This has worked for me in the past, hopefully this approach will help you. The key point here is obviously that you know where and who to sell to before you make anything, so you are more likely to be able to sell your offering once you make it.
Heck, I had a couple blog posts that made HN front page and still I didn't think that people would actually pay me money for that content.
Then a couple months ago I realized I could take one of those posts about interview advice to software engineers and turn it into a more in depth video lecture. I was amazed to see people actually buying it (sold $7k worth of that course!)
In case it provides inspiration, I wrote about what it was like making the course here: https://twitter.com/ZainRzv/status/1525211786710077449
1) Find your competitive advantage. I happened to work in a niche industry and learned it inside and out. I became somewhat of a "domain expert". 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?
2) Serve businesses, not people. People will do anything to not pay. They tend to have more charge backs and most of the "system abuse" I deal with are small time freelancers trying to squeeze my product's free offering. Don't offer too much for free. Don't be a charity. Serve businesses, they pay money.
3) Don't be afraid of competitors. My largest customers are in fact competitors that leverage my service to better their own service.
4) Don'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).
5) Reach out to customers directly. Don't rely on ads, social media posts or other fluff. I haven't done a single ad or social media post (I don't even have social media profiles). What I did do was directly email/message potential customers.
Thanks in advance.
I don't really share my service publicly and maintain a high level of privacy (hence no social media, etc).
LOL ;)
I value your protectionism yet I hoped to receive constructive feedback. I was only interested about your tech stack, marketing and processes b/c I'm prospecting to become a creator too perhaps in a different niche but definitely ETL-based.
Thanks.
I don't really buy into gimmicks or tricks to differentiate my emails. You can read a lot of "tricks" out there, but they come across as inauthentic to me and that isn't how I wanted to establish a business relationship.
The thing I did was send very targeted emails (to people I honestly believed would benefit from my service) and every email was personalized (and I don't mean using a template and swapping out variables). I sent each and every email from scratch, one at a time.
I did read a few books on sales outreach and prospecting ("Predictable Revenue" and "Predictable Prospecting"). They were helpful and I did pick up a few ideas from them, but I mainly took the knowledge and paved my own prospecting/outreach strategy from it.
With that being said, I haven't done any outreach in over three years. All of my customers come to me, mainly referred to my service by existing customers. Or customers that leave a company and advocate for my service at their new company.
All these feel-good stories should start with "this is how I managed to save enough money to not worry about anything for at least 6 months"
Saved the difference and I had about 3-4 years of savings. Decided to "risk" 6 months of it and dip into it.
this option is not really like the other 3 listed, since it's a separate category of passive income and is non-exclusionary unlike the rest.
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.
In the case of: 4. Invest your savings and live off of gains.
I think the joke is some of these creators may just be those people, filling the time by creating.
It's an answer to the question, "I wanna start creating but where does (fill in favorite creator) get the money for the equipment or the time for all this? Why am /i/ struggling?
Ala, peggy hills bookstore in king of the hill.
Peggy struggling: how did you ever sell enough books to pay the rent?
Former owner: o I inherited money whose interest covered the rent.> You could use these savings to invest in stock markets, day trade with them, and - hopefully - make a profit.
I wouldn't recommend his advice..
Since I’ve quit my last job in 2018 I feel like I’ve tried it all when it comes to revenue sources:
* consulting - still my main source of income
* writing a newsletter - brings about $400-$600 a month but there are some dry days on the horizon
* selling newsletter merch - I’m in red every month with only one t-shirt design
* evaluating EU project proposals - nice side gig 1-2 times a year
* 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
* writing an influencer posts on LinkedIn - was a one-off thing but paid really well
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.
If you are in a position to work for yourself then I would highly recommend it.
That being said, this isn't advice. It's an admission that being lucky enough to have a few seed clients land in your lap (and taking that opportunity) is the optimal way to start consulting (imo).
good for you but is this another survivorship bias thing...
reminds me of the 4-hour workweek, getting rich by giving advice others how to get rich
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
so there is a logical error of assuming that the advice given is more valuable or actionable - which imo it isn't, after reading the article.
Some additional info if the topics interests you: Survivor bias can be described as both a cognitive and motivational bias. First, it relies on the widespread conception amongst human beings that reproducing someone else's trajectory/decisions eventually leads to an equivalent outcome (cognitive error). Second, we all share a profound need to feel that we understand the world that surrounds us (motivational).
Think about the alternative: without this bias, we would be consciously aware that our success (or survival) cannot be singularly attributed to our effort or our ability to reproduce trusted strategies. This would likely push us towards feeling increasingly powerless in our ability to achieve our goals (or survive), and eventually drive us into a depressive state (the "whatever" mindset). At this precise moment I should bring religion to the discussion, but I will not because it will take me too much time.
Self-help literature almost exclusively operates by exploiting the survivor at two levels: authors often are themselves convinced that anyone who reproduces their recommendations will be similarly successful, and at the reader level, because without people telling us that we can succeed, there would be simply no hope.
Hope I answered your question :)
- (US) government doesn't necessarily incentivize self employment
- 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.
- Unless you have a saas, income can be variable.
- You get to do the fun stuff... But also the other stuff (payroll, marketing, ...)
That said, it would be very hard for me to go back to working for the man. The flexibility, creativity, and community are wonderful.
Can you explain here? I've found the US govt to be very incentivizing to "small businesses", which includes self employment. I'm thinking of tax breaks, cheap/free loans, and other financial items. I will say the amount of red tape & paper work is ridiculous, especially if you plan to move or do business in more than one state.
> 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.
Once you run a business for 2 years, this goes away. It is an incredible eye roll though when you first run into it if you're running a successful business.
> You get to do the fun stuff... But also the other stuff (payroll, marketing, ...)
You may be well aware of this, but for anyone else, hire this out as much as possible. That's one of the most important things I would tell anyone. Know what you enjoy & are good at. Hire everything else out. That can even be management/ceo/etc.. You don't need to run the business if you don't want to. "The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It" is a great book on this topic.
> Unless you have a saas, income can be variable.
This one is tough. It can be easy to increase business volume but then you need to hire more help often which brings it's own challenges & may require more business volume. Finding a good balance here is tricky for sure.
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.
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/guru/coach/etc.
It was my first product I ever charged for after two years. I had a few grand in pre-sales to incentivize me to do it too. But on reflection, I felt like I was almost "stealing" from these people who needed it more than I did. They were just getting started on their learning journeys to get into tech. I already have a Big Tech salary, I should probably be the last person who needs someone's money. While one of my goals is to work for myself as a one-person product / business, this was not it.
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.
Sold over 4,000 copies in the last 4 years - probably with help of luck (some people wrote reviews of the app) and also probably because people search for "porn hub" as "video hub".
https://videohubapp.com/ - and it's open source - https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App
Admittedly, I had a really hard time getting any traction for this project. Cold e-mailing media folks had some limited success but no sales impact. Same for HN and Product Hunt. But eventually Apple noticed and gave me a banner ad in the iPad App Store, which netted me about $10k overall.
Not exactly a success in absolute terms, but it made money with no prior audience.
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.
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.
1. Formed an LLC
2. Filed for S-Corp status
I've been following Gergely's journey for quite a while. Personally I learn a ton from Gergely's writings / tweets.
As a fellow one-person business [1], the only thing I'd like to add here (after running my business for ~5 years so far) is that you are allowed to be flexible.
Businesses are different. Everyone's background / finance / skills are different. It's okay that you are doing something different from what you've read from the Internet.
For example, it's totally okay to do (or not do) micro-services for your little SaaS on the get go. It's also okay to try venture-backed route for a while then switch to do "lifestyle business". It's also okay to hire (or not hire) employees early. There's not one single formula that works for every one-person business.
Persistence really pays off long term. Good things might not happen until year 5.
[1] https://www.listennotes.com/blog/the-boring-technology-behin...
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.
Looks like there are other ways to run a B2B without too much friction
> What are things people and businesses pay for?
That's basically all my own one-person business does (https://lunar.fyi/), it allows people to add adaptive brightness on external monitors, turn off individual monitors from the keyboard etc.
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.
And people are paying for it, even though it doesn't help them make money, it doesn't educate or entertain them, and it definitely doesn't help them sell anything.
Essentially that economy is all about being perceived as an expert and manipulating naive/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.
They make posts on HN, Indiehackers, Reddit, etc. trying to sell themselves as sympathetic by using the guise of "sharing their story" but they're actually just finding more customers. Btw, I don't mean that sharing your project on HN is sleazy, of course not. But it's quite obvious when you're lying with a blog post for example, and actually using the mirage of a real discussion to point eyes at your money makers.
That said, I think there's a subset of those people who do provide real value and don'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's something to try to emulate. Stop worrying about "how do I make $1000 per month in passive income?", and instead build something useful or fun without pressuring yourself (or others, for that matter). Be practical, not hopeful and needy.
Some examples I can think of right now, though some of them are actually not making any money AFAIK:
- A cool library of playlists for programming sessions, run by Datassette: https://musicforprogramming.net
- Fabien Sanglard's awesome books explaining classic game engines: https://fabiensanglard.net/gebbdoom/
- Custom Thinkpads that look retro but are beefy bois, by XY Tech: https://www.xyte.ch/mods/x210-x2100/
- Cheap, no non-sense email service, made by a solo dev: https://purelymail.com/
- Nice repository of tips and info for software engineering teams, made by a burnt out team leader: https://principles.dev/
- The original AdBlock, which I believe was made by 1 or 2 devs and just had a donation box when it first started: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/adblock-%E2%80%94-...
- Had to add this classic from the Diablo 2 days, BoBaFeTT's trainer: https://www.geocities.ws/free_bobafett/main.htm
All of these projects have one interesting thing in common: there's no pretense. They had an idea for some tool or service and decided that they could provide it. I'm sure that most of these projects grew out of stuff they were tinkering with anyway and probably weren't things where they spent too much time obsessing over market fit.
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's trying to build an empire of sorts rather than provide immediate value.
Just want to make a small point that people often pay not for the information but for how it's packaged. Ideally I buy things that take free information & package them in a condensed way that I can learn easier & quicker.
true.
but the fact that every and all information is be encoded within pi[1] does somehow not slience the intellectual property debate.
probably because arrangement and presentation also have value.
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.
It's a grind.
> whenever I run a sale, it’s usually $297 typically, but when you cut it in half, it looks nice at $149
When asked why her courses were priced at a 'weird' number like 297. That'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.
Free Excel tip: use =ISEVEN() to check whether a number will halve to a whole number.
Recruiting seems so broken that I've been tempted to do it myself.