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Comment by stared | Hacker News Reader

(Author here.) It's a thing I am trying to do right now: 50% for data science freelancing (which I enjoy a lot nonetheless), and 50% for my own musings and self-development, without any restrictions (whether technical, scientific or educational).

It's clearly better financially than academic jobs _and_ I am not restricted by grant topics & timelines or a place.

I am just curious what can go wrong? (I.e. I don't know personally anyone living this way.)

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The biggest dangers are going to be non-paying clients, and leads drying up. If you can't find any leads, you'll end up spending all your "self time" eaten up with business development.

Thank you for clarifying something I've been struggling with for years. I have a couple hundred project ideas and inventions written down but always have this sense that I can't work on them because they are seemingly not the best use of my time. Instead, I spend nearly the entirety of my time either immersed in the logistics of wrapping up a contract, or working to find another.

If someone could solve the business development end of freelancing, that would be more valuable to me than matchmaking. The work was never the problem for me, but the angst surrounding it.

Tools like https://freelanceinbox.com/ and 10xmanagement.com are trying to solve the leadgen problem for developers. Haven't used them, but might be worth a look.

I will see. As of now I have more leads than I can manage, but I am aware of the risk (also for this reason I rather do it part time than full switches of paid work vs side projects).

I've followed a similar path for the last three years, and it has worked out very well for me so far. I don't even want to think about how low the odds were of getting initial funding for my side project through the usual grant system; but now, thousands of academics depend on what I've built.

An alternative to freelancing is a not-too-demanding day job that you enjoy, and which is sufficient to pay the bills. It was good enough for Albert Einstein...

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