davidscolgan

I've had pretty good luck with buying a new ASUS laptop every year or so and then giving the old ones to my family. They definitely don't last as long as a Mac, but the specs are often comparable and I prefer to run Windows/Linux in a VM than OSX.

Not sure if this is a good mindset to have, but I feel less worried about lugging a ~$1000 laptop around town compared to a $3000 Macbook. It feels a little less like a priceless object and more like a "disposable" tool (as disposable as a $1000 object could ever be).

Also the keyboard is perfect and isn't the Mac's, which I can't really deal with.

Currently I'm rolling with a Zenbook UX430U, primarily because it was the one with 16 gigs of ram.

If the service is writing code, I won't give them the work if they end up wanting a refund. If the service is something monthly, I'd only offer a guarantee on the first month. So I'd say it would still definitely work for freelancers/consultants. Jonathan Stark has a lot of material about this subject that covers more of the nuances.

I don't really need access to your database unless there's an emergency and I need to make bugfixes. At the beginning if there is a need to get to know each other more first I can just get read-only access to your code and be around on calls.

I agree with you. SaaS is in my opinion the hardest way to make money as a developer. Not only do you have to make working software, you also have to do every other thing a freelance business requires.

The path I often see is:

Developer builds an app in private with no monitization strategy or "we'll put on ads", releases to crickets/not very many users, and nothing then happens.

The question is then asked "why won't anyone buy my software?" Answer: "because you made something nobody asked for."

My recommendation is, instead of starting with a SaaS you come up with yourself and try to sell it to people, start with the audience. Learn about them and try to find a problem they'd pay money to solve.

To make things automatically twice as easy, sell to businesses instead of individual non-business owners. You can sell a $500 a month service to a business that solves a business problem. My family values software at less than $1.

If the problem you are solving is something the audience might also want to learn how to do, start a mailing list around the idea and teach them about the thing. Make info products, and services around helping them do the thing. Create a consulting service to manually do what your SaaS app might do automatically. Then build an app to automate the process.

Audience -> Freelance/Consulting -> Info Products -> Software.

Each of these steps are necessary for all the following steps anyway. Building a SaaS first is like jumping into senior year as a freshman - you _could_ learn everything all at the same time but that may take a lot of effort and frustration.

This is one of my soapbox issues because I have spent so much of my side project time flailing around doing exactly the opposite of what I said above and never making a dime from it.

Thanks! I've worked with a lot of smaller companies that really don't _need_ more than one developer, and in fact are more efficient and effective with only one developer, but still have expressed a this fear of losing that one developer since they know so much.

That is something else I can offer with this service: an impartial 3rd party who is technical and can give sanity checks for non-technical business owners.

SEEKING WORK - Remote

Are you the owner of a software system that has a single developer working on it? Are you worried about what would happen if they left?

With a single developer on your team, your Bus Factor is one - one person has all of the knowledge about your project in their head.

Finding, vetting, hiring, and onboarding a new developer is time consuming, and if your developer is suddenly unavailable and there's a bug on prod, you are dead in the water.

---

Hi I'm David Colgan. I offer bus factor increase as a service. I'll increase your team's size from one to two without the burden of a second full time developer.

For $1000 a month, I'll provide on-call emergency support if your lone developer leaves.

I'll sit in on any communication between yourself and your developer and look over all code committed to your Git repository to stay up to date on the project, and over time build up externally hosted documentation of how your system works and maintain that documentation.

In the event that your developer suddenly leaves and there is a bug on prod, I'll be on-call to fix it. I'll also help you find, vet, hire, and using the documentation I've built up onboard a new developer. I'm in a number of freelancer communities and have a growing mailing list targeting freelance developers I'll share your opening with.

If interested, email me at david@lessboring.com. To see more of my stuff, www.lessboring.com. Cheers!

I love working in rooms that have complicated views out the window. Cityscapes, forests, busy roads, or a giant power grid complex like this. Coffee shops and coworking spaces are great for this when getting my own space with a view is more complicated and expensive.

I'm currently sitting in my apartment that looks out into a wall and wondering how I can figure out a better arrangement. I feel like especially when working from home, the view really has an actual effect on my productivity.

Hey Abi! It's been really cool to follow Pull Reminders. I've been bringing it up in conversations a lot lately as an example of a solid one-person founder technical SaaS. Hope it continues to succeed! Thanks for all of your in public work on it. Cheers!

Hey Malcolm, cool to have you chime in! I've appreciated reading your stuff around the internet and your IndieHackers interview was really cool.

I noticed you have a coaching offering as a higher tier on Complice - have you had much success with finding takers on that? I'm currently working on a coaching practice of my own and have wondered how effective "coaching as the top tier of a SaaS that helps you do the thing I'm coaching you about" works.

I believe complice.co is also a profitable one/two person team productivity app that makes a few grand a month.

https://www.indiehackers.com/product/complice

I've been pretty impressed with pullreminders.com - it is a Slack bot that alerts you for unreviewed pull requests. Seems to actually solve a real need and since the author, Abi Noda, has been pretty open about talking about it, seems it's been pretty profitable.

More info:

https://www.indiehackers.com/product/pull-reminders

Friendly reminder that the important components of a successful SaaS is marketing, marketing, marketing, and code, so how to market the app should be considered just as important as how easy it is to code.

I'd probably recommend you take whatever your idea is and offer it as a consulting service that you do yourself manually. If people won't buy that, they won't buy your app, and you can prove the idea without doing any coding at all. Once you have an audience for the service, you can just sell the automated version.

You can certainly install a windowing environment into the virtual machine. I've done this a few times when I actually needed a windowing environment inside of Linux for complicated servers or doing things across multiple ports. It works just fine, and VirtualBox even has a "seamless" mode where it sort of feels like you have windows from both environments.

If you can set up Linux, you can set this up too.

Oh cool, thanks so much for posting this. I've just ordered a pair.

I've always wanted the ability to just "turn down" the sound of everyday life. I've actually wondered if some of my social anxiety has come from hearing sounds a little more intensely than some people, since after a hearing exam I apparently have super good hearing.

At times I've done audio recording without a monitor to hear my own voice. The result is me having in earbuds while speaking, and so I can't hear myself as well.

I noticed that I spoke louder and more confidently. So I've wondered if wearing something like these could be an effective way to help with social anxiety? Guess we'll see. Cheers!

Speaking of tech Slacks, here is a nice list I saw recently: https://github.com/ladyleet/tech-community-slacks

Glad it was helpful! My stuff's in my profile. Also happy to chat over email if you have any other questions. Cheers!

I've done freelance web development for a number of years now. In general, the best jobs have all come from inbound leads instead of outbound leads. Upwork and cold emailing and door to dooring can work but require a lot of effort and I don't find the clients to be as high quality as when they come to me.

I much prefer when clients come to me. For this to happen, you have to increase your "luck surface area" - the more you demonstrate competence and value in public, the more chances that clients will find you and reach out.

1. Participating in online communities like Hacker News. I once said in a comment "oh hey, I was a digital nomad for a couple of years and did part time Django work." To which someone replied, "Are you still doing part time Django work? I need someone." They have been my best customer for the past year. Also, make sure your HN profile has your freelancing information in it.

Post every month in the who's hiring freelancers thread. I've gotten a few gigs there.

See if your city has a city-wide slack channel. Chicago where I am has a very large one and hanging out there has exposed me to a number of opportunities.

2. Be helpful. Someone from my college once asked me how to freelance, so I took them out for coffee and spent three hours discussing the ins and outs. Three months later he emailed me saying "I decided not to but do you want this client I found?" That client ended up paying me around $12,000 in the end. People like reciprocating help.

If I see someone asking a question about freelancing, I usually try to give a good answer. Some people use Twitter and post little tips. Some people give talks at local meetups.

3. Bring up often that you freelance as it makes sense. Don't be obnoxious, but let people know what you do. Nobody can ask you to freelance for them if they don't know that you freelance. My longest and best client ever knew that he needed a developer, and went back to my university and asked "do you know any freelancers?" I was the only one the professors knew who had said they were going to freelance, so they referred me.

4. Work in public. I have a mailing list where I write about how to freelance. I recently got an email from a reader saying "hey, we like your emails. Want to work for us?" One of my current best clients.

One of my colleagues has found good work from an open source Django library he maintains. His client of over 7 years was using that library and reached out because of the link to my colleague's website in the Readme.

I once got a client from sitting in a coworking space. A guy I had talked to and told about my freelancing said, "hey I'm getting a full time job, want my client?" Client for 3 years.

5. Keep in touch with everyone. This is a little more labor intensive, but super powerful. Using a spreadsheet or a CRM, regularly send emails to people you've met. Try as much as possible to provide value when you do, whether just asking how they are, giving encouragement, showing them useful articles, or making them aware of opportunities you think they'd benefit from. Don't try to sell, just build relationships. If at some point you need work and don't have anyone, you'll have a large network of people who remember you and will be sympathetic.

---

So, is the answer to be a digital nomad, take college grads out for coffee, have an email list, tell your college department you freelance, go to a coworking space, and maintain an open source library?

Well, no. If you had asked me to tell you two years ago how I would get all of my current clients I would have never been able to predict the exact methods. But as I said, a high "luck surface area" is what makes this work. Doing some combination of the above can make you a pretty "lucky" person.

All of my current clients came to me, and they are all wonderful to work with, pay well, I never have to chase down invoices, and selling to them is way easier because they are already sold on hiring me from what they've seen me do before contacting me.

My strategy has for a long time been to run Windows 10 for all of my browsers and games and paint programs and then run a virtual machine of linux with VirtualBox. I just use terminal Vim, so I run the virtual machine headless and ssh into it with a cygwin terminal.

It's a bit janky but no more janky than actually running Linux on a laptop. No worries about my HDMI projector connection working, no fighting with wifi, games on Steam work, and I get a full Linux for development.

The magic comes from proxying my development servers (like Django's) through the guest machine into Windows. I've got it set up so that if I type `localhost:8000` into any Windows browser, it hits my virtual machine's localhost.

So yeah, complicated, but from what I can see it gives me the best setup I know of with the least amount of fighting with the operating system.

I started out my career building these sorts of websites, making $3000 Wordpress custom themes. The secret sauce was my lead source who had super developed business sense and social skills, and went out and wined and dined clients and sold them these sites. He went on to build an agency and I was the first freelancer he hired. I'm pretty sure he was pitching wide reaching marketing and strategy help to these clients, and a website was just one part of that.

If a business just wants to make a simple website themselves, I see absolutely no reason not to just use Squarespace or equivalent. I agree with others in this thread that this kind of website has become completely commoditized when taken in a vacuum.

I've done much better as a solo freelance software developer doing webapp development - Django/Vue is my current stack of choice but any full stack can work. The advantage this has over building design-heavy sites for small businesses is that this kind of dev still has a long way to go before being commoditized, and in general is worth north of $100/hr.

I can't speak much to the military things in this post, but I will just add that as someone who also tried to make money from video games for quite some time in the recent past, it's _such_ a hard way to make money.

Web development has not been nearly as "fun", but it's been so much more lucrative. If you want to make video games as a business, I'd say make your money first with "boring" work and then making a video game can be fun since you don't have to have the financial pressure overhanging it. You hear the indie darling success stories like Undertale, Stardew Valley, etc. But I imagine that the common case is: "Spend lots of time, then nothing happens."

I escaped the 9-to-5 with freelance web development. I never actually had a full time job because I decided I never wanted one when I was doing a summer job in college that required me to sit in one place programming for 6-8 hours a day. I discovered Hacker News around that time and the idea that I could make money on my own and was hooked.

I started out doing what basically amounts to working in an agency. A business guy I graduated with wanted to start a marketing company and he got the jobs and I built the websites. It was still a contract setup and I made $50 an hour because Hacker News told me that $50 was a good starting rate so I asked for it and he gave it to me.

Then I got into doing Django web development and charged around $90/hr because I got a lead and I didn't really want the work so I said, "My rate is $90/hr" and he said "okay" and from then on my rate was $90/hr. (Ha!) I just recently got $125/hr in a recent project.

Starting when I was still sort of in college helped a lot. Living in small town Indiana where the college was and this company started out helped a lot lot. Rent at the time was $150/month with a roommate. Having very low expenses meant I could experiment more and not have to worry as much about paying rent. Not having any dependents helped too.

The biggest advice I have to anyone who wants to go out on their own: learn business skills. If you already know how to develop, you may think that's all you need. It's a meme at this point that "If you build (a SaaS) they will come." No, they really wont. You need marketing, marketing, marketing, and coding to build a webapp.

This is why I recommend people start out freelancing first. Then go into building consulting services. And _then_ build products. Freelancing is so much easier to make money with. Any competent developer can get $100/hr+ with some networking. That will teach you how to talk to clients and how to sell yourself. All things you need if you are going to sell products, but it's way easier and you don't also have the burden of designing a good product.

Consulting services are very lucrative, but require even more business sense. If you can business and code at the same time, you are in a verrrrry small percentage of people, and have superpowers.

Build your audience somehow. You'll need one if you are going to sell a product. Make the product first as a service that "doesn't scale". That is, manually implement the business outcome your software would give your customer manually yourself.

Then if you feel the need build a product based on your consulting business. Create rungs on a "product ladder" - free content you put out, paid info products, higher price consulting services, and then at the very top automate all of it in software. It's a model I've seen a number of people do that will be a lot "less risky" than quitting your job and building a webapp blind without anyone watching.

I tried this once. I quit all my freelance work for a year and lived off of savings. I then proceeded to not make anything anyone wanted and just ended up spending all of my money. Then I got back into freelancing and have money again.

In general, this strategy is: "Have safe money and risky money". Your employment is safe money. It's boring, but safe. If you want to get out on your own with less risk, figure out a way to get more time but keep that safe money (maybe try to reduce hours, maybe try to reduce your commute, maybe try to work 4 days a week), then pick up freelancing part part time. Then once freelancing becomes "safe money", quit your job. Work on freelancing part time and build a business that is "risky money".

This is what I'm now doing and I have managed to make a reasonable living while having a lot more time to pursue ventures I'm passionate about. I still spend about 20 hours of my day doing "boring" web development work, but it pays for the rest of my life. I'll probably always keep at least a little of that work because it pays so well for the time put in.

Happy to talk about this more, this subject is of great interest to me and is something I've thought about a lot. My email's in my profile if you want. I think your mindset is more reasonable than many people seem to think, and I wish you the best in your quest to find work you love. It's a long term process but in 10 years of doing this I wouldn't have it any other way.

Second reading this book at some point. I think what originally hung me up about it was that it isn't really prescribing an exact system, just a series of general ideas that you can use in whatever system you are using. It can be used with Trello or Asana or Omnifocus or pen and paper. But generally the idea of projects and an inbox and the someday maybe list are great. In short, get things out of your brain taking up cycles and into a system you trust.

Similar Warren Buffet's methodology - consider your top 25 priorities. Then pick the top 5. The next 20 are your "avoid at all costs" list, since they will always try to distract you.

I really like the idea of working on large and also small projects, since just sticking to one and only one thing is not always feasible.

If you are building something software related, just using Github like you might on any paid gig or employment project is a solid idea.

The thing I love the most about the Bullet Journal idea is how simple and quick it is. Productivity systems that require a bunch of maintenance and fiddling never seem to work for me.

I very much identify with the struggle of lots of different projects. Another thing that's helped me recently is to make it "impossible not to" do the thing I want to do. I managed to solve my exercise problem by hiring a personal trainer. Now I lose $80 if I don't go to the gym at a specific time on Monday and Friday. I've not missed a day in months. I've wondered if with certain ways of arranging my environment if working on projects could be similarly solved in that they require no motivation or willpower because there's no other option.

Cheers, and thanks for posting this question. Just writing out some of my ideas here is helpful since I'm certainly working on this right now too.

Something that helped me regarding this - I took some time and made a document that contained every project on my plate. I realized I was trying to do 11+ projects of significant size. And as such I was really doing not much at all from worrying about not working on all the projects I wasn't working on right now when working on another project. Ack! But it's so easy to fall into that, especially for ambitious people like OP.

Another thought I once realized - I think early on in my career I heard about Agile and thought it meant "not planning at all". This seems to _not_ be true at all but I think it made me subtly opposed to planning. I now see that it is more about shorter iterations, and The Twelve Week Year talks a lot about effective "just in time" planning, on a day, week, and quarterly basis.

Freelancers generally charge higher rates than employees because you don't get benefits, don't usually work 40 billable hours a week, have to do a number of the things your boss was doing behind the scenes, and have to pay the taxes that your employer was paying (self employment tax). If you want some specific numbers, I started out charging $50 an hour when I was right out of college. Then I raised it to $70, then $90 after 3 years. I just recently got $125 an hour for the first time after 8 years.

But I've never been an employee, and I'd count any time you spend at a company as years of experience.

In general my thoughts on rate:

$10/hr - you need to be told exactly what to do $25/hr - some self-direction, you can do some things yourself $50/hr - you are inexperienced, but can get things done on your own $70/hr - you have middle experience and can usually get things done on your own $100/hr - you are a professional and can get things done on your own and figure things out on your own. You actively take away stress from the client instead of adding to it.

If you think that in this job you can in your professional experience do everything your colleague wants (and it sounds like you can and have years of experience), I'd say that your rate is now $100/hr. If you want to charge by the project, for now just estimate how many hours you think it'll take and multiply that by $100. Add a multiplier based on how much uncertainty you think there is in the project.

If those 25 days are 5 hours of work each, $100/hr * 5 * 25 = $12,500. Let's round that up to $15,000 because if you are anything like me, your estimate is probably a best case scenario. Adjust the numbers for your situation.

But, if you've been an employee and a consumer your whole life/career, you may be surprised at just how much money flows through an established business. Numbers you might be very uncomfortable charging for may be completely reasonable. From what I've seen, $100/hr is completely reasonable for a competent professional freelancer.

And the fun part is, the higher your rate (to a point) actually increases your credibility in the eyes of the client. I once actually had someone say to me after I recommended a freelancer to him, "Is this person you recommended not any good? His rate is only $60/hr." Ha!

Charge more, especially in a B2B context. Happy to discuss this with your further, my email's in my profile.

In short, part time remote freelance web development. Do it for 10-20 hours a week depending on how much money you need/want. Do whatever you want with the rest of your time.

I've been doing this for 8 years (the entirety of my professional career).

I've had times when I worked about 10 hours a week and nomaded around Europe.

I've had times when I wanted to build a thing, so I spent 30 hours a week working on the project and 10 hours a week on freelance. The thing didn't work out but it didn't matter because I had "safer" money coming in from freelancing.

I've had times when I wanted more money, so I worked about 30 hours a week on freelance to build up some savings.

I absolutely love this lifestyle and have basically complete control of my time now other than the time I put into freelance. I currently work about 3-4 hours in the morning in my home office and then do whatever in the afternoons. Currently my afternoon project is a website for helping other developers switch from full time employment to this part time lifestyle (www.lessboring.com).

If you can succeed at full time development employment, you can succeed in freelance, you just have to learn some social skills and some business skills depending on how much you know about those areas. The people I see who are struggling as freelancers seem to basically think they can operate exactly as an employee and succeed independently.

OP, I'd be happy to talk with you specifically over email or the phone about your situation. My email's in my profile. I've basically determined that my life goal is to help people get better jobs they actually enjoy, and as a developer you have way more options than most people since development is such a valuable skill right now.

One idea: Start a mailing list about a topic that you know and that other people want to learn. Write to them once a week with a valuable piece of information. Once you hit 200 subscribers write an ebook that summarizes everything you say in your letters in one place.