I’m essentially a full stack / product engineer for hire. I’ve done proposal type projects but I try and avoid them, I think it’s harder (almost impossible) to land clients with well-scoped projects. I find it easier to find companies that just want a product engineer they can throw tasks at, fix a problem, or augment a team to get a release done faster.

I bill monthly, and get paid by bank transfer (is there any other way?).

My two profitable SaaS have combined a few hundred active subscribers, maybe 5% of what I can make consulting. They are low-cost consumer products, so I’d need 5k active subscribers before I would think about not consulting. Without a breakthrough in marketing, I don’t see how I’ll ever get there.

My main bottleneck is I don’t really know how to market them sustainably. Most customers have come from HN or word of mouth.

My next software product will be high-price ($200-500, ideally a subscription). But there’s no free lunch. Most high-price software is feature heavy, especially enterprise apps. That is potentially months of unpaid development work without any guarantee of success. Very difficult for me because I have a family to support. The trick for me is to find something where the MVP is not too time intensive to build, but provides hundreds of dollars a month in value to other businesses.