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Comment by marpstar | Hacker News Reader

I had partnering with a marketing agency for awhile doing implementation of their designs in WordPress. After a few years of clients breaking their sites doing upgrades and other ad-hoc questions/enhancement requests coming via email, I got tired of sending $100-200 invoices, so I started selling "WordPress Maintenance" as a product. It's not fun or sexy, but don't underestimate the number of organizations willing to pay $3K/year to be able to email you for advice, install plugins, add custom post types, and keep things up to date. I've got ~12 clients now (started with 4 in 2017) and it's an "easy" $30K every year.

FWIW, I work exclusively with local clients. Local clients, in my experience, are more willing to pay more to local people.

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For kicks I once saved a local company I was working at about $30k by installing a wordpress caching plugin.

Their website went down when they got some international attention, and the consultants they hired designed a "solution" which involved big dedicated machines to host their (essentially text+image) wordpress site. The site wasn't my job at all, but when I overheard the price (and read their engineering plan) I asked for admin access and told them 10mins later to fire the consultants.

The director of engineering (an awesome guy) advised that I register a business and not use my name, then he hired me under pseudonym as their new consultant and I billed them at twice the rate they were paying me during the day for a few hours here and there at night (in retrospect, a total steal for them as I was an intern..)

That director of engineering sounds SO cool. What a chill dude.

Ya most fun workplace due to it being basically 15 best friends who've worked together for many years. Even the CEO was their buddy from college.

Now I'm in big tech and while it's astronomically better for my career, I absolutely loathe it socially. Not sure it's worth it (holistically), and look forward to someday joining a local medium sized company with average achievers + personalities.

That's awesome! I'm still in undergrad and naturally I want that big FAANG+ payday, but, I think building a company or just working with people I really like would be much nicer. But now that you've seen both sides, do you see your self moving?

Yes, waiting for a promotion and maybe some stock vesting, then I can't wait to move. As much as I love money, I'm financially stable enough. Going to force myself to prioritize other things. Good luck.

Yeah, my dad left a very very lucrative SWE role to work as an entry level NASA employee because he loves Space so much. Honestly, he seems pretty happy with the shift.

What's your responsibility of things go south and the wordpress gets hacked? Do you have liability insurance or any other protections in place?

Anyone providing professional services should have liability insurance.

Furthermore, unless a service provider has been acting negligently or has given some sort of guarantee like "With my services, your WordPress instance won't be hacked.", they usually can't be held responsible for actions and outcomes that are out of their control.

Specifically, I believe you are looking for E&O (errors and omissions) insurance. Make a mistake doing something, or mistakenly not do something, and it will cover your liability up to whatever coverage you buy.

As you say, willful negligence, malicious acts, false advertising and fraud are of course not covered.

> don't underestimate the number of organizations willing to pay $3K/year ... it's an "easy" $30K every year.

So 10 then :)

“That’s a trick we engineers call ‘math’” - Dilbert

Recently found myself in the same business. Early similar to you. Small business', strictly local.

I've got a couple high level questions for someone more seasoned than I.

Could I email you?

anything at sandtoken dot com

Any tips on how to find clients? Many websites are flooded with ultra-low cost developers.

Which is why local businesses still want someone they know and can see/trust.

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