Ask HN: Become a freelancer/contractor or keep working on product in free time?
After reading through the recent thread on freelancer rates (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3420203) I'm once again considering making a go of freelancing, but am worried that it will take my focus away from the product I'm building in my free time. Here's my situation:
I'm 26 and I have an awesome day job. We do rails consulting and I'm surrounded by incredibly bright people in very good working conditions. There's really nothing to complain about. The pay is good, but not enough for me to save for anything substantial before I turn 30 (or fulfill my goal of moving back to Japan with my wife before I turn 30 either).
To achieve my goals, last May I started work in my free time on a side project ((blog.)japanalicious.com). It's subscription-based app that helps you learn to read Japanese. I'm not convinced that it will be the product that will help me achieve my income goals but it's serving to teach me a hell of a lot about building/desigining a product and marketing. Because it's in my free time, it's like a startup in ultra-slow motion; sometimes it feels like I'm making hardly any progress and that perceived momentum is important for morale.
At the same time, freelancing/contracting/consulting is something that I think I could be good at. I'm not afraid of networking with clients, figuring out how to provide value and then charging accordingly for delivering it. I may be overconfident with this, but I'm pretty sure that given a couple of years I could build up enough of a client base and savings to move back to Japan and do remote work exclusively.
I read a lot of comments from people on HN who have apparently decades more experience and I keep seeing the theme of 'transitioning to selling my own products'. If the end goal is to make your own products, then perhaps I should just keep working on the products and skip the contracting/consulting phase entirely? This obviously assumes that I am extremely lucky and japanalicious (or one of my next few ideas) is successful in making me in the region of 10,000 USD per month.
So for those experienced technical consultants/freelancers, in my situation what would you do? If you could go back in time to your 26-year-old self, would you just focus on building products or would you still go the route of freelancing first?
Thanks in advance for all feedback.