freelancelot

Makes sense, thanks for sharing your insights.

That's nice! This way you build your skillset and have a way to demonstrate it!

Thanks for your reply.

>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.

I think that is indeed the target for most of product oriented solo entrepreneurs. And stretch goal being getting bought out or acquired.

Do you do market research for product ideas/customers willing to pay?

This is my primary motivation, flexible hours.

Your retainer + weekly deliverables arrangement sounds nice. Do you propose this to your client? Do you expect payments weekly? What medium do you get paid in?

Why do you suppose your SaaS products don't match your engineering rates?

Are you not charging enough or are these products not providing enough value as you can as an engineer?

Perhaps a low volume high price service might be the ticket? Have you tried increasing prices?

How much is the difference in the SaaS revenue/profit vs contract income? (%)

Thanks!

That is very cool. This makes me really happy to read, because it shows that you need to find the point in life where you find happpiness, and balance with money, autonomy and peace of mind. Thanks for sharing.

Do you write these books yourself? Are these all on one/similar tech? Do you learn new tech to be able to write books on them?

EDIT: I see you have links in profile, that answers some stuff.

Thanks for sharing and good to hear that you're making it work!

The beauty of your success is that you are in advertising, and so you advertised yourself successfully enough to get word of mouth of referrals, and so you must be good!

How do you go about looking for clients that are interested in your services? Do you wait for them to come to you through word of mouth? How do you expose your availability and skillset?

I like that definition of self-employed.

How does one handle collecting payments if the contract work is remote?

How do you even begin to market yourself for a contract/consulting project? Unlike a product, you can't place ads, or use traditional advertising, you would instead need to do things like beef up your linkedin/twitter/github?

I can see that thought where the actual coding work would only be a small part of it.. and I suppose that's something to think about.

The product route sounds very shiny and the one discussed most, but that puts me off. I do not enjoy the thought of writing twitter/linkedin posts to advertise stuff, nor do I enjoy hiring SEO and doing much marketing.

My hope is that avoiding the product route will allow me to get away with not having to worry about all this stuff, but I get the feeling there's no escaping it.

I'll copy paste some questions I posted to another comment here, if you feel like answering:

- how do you seek out new clients, are there job boards/discussion boards for these types of jobs? Or perhaps you just reach out to companies that seem to be doing interesting work?

- how do you prove to them that you can earn their contract?

- how do you even begin to match the project requirements and what you can bring to the table, and if needed, bring / integrate an additional member/team/contractor? Is that handled by the project manager at the company?

Thank you confirming my suspicions. The whole startup culture seems very product focused, but it's really hard to find more information about the self-employed contractor style of work.

As a newbie to this world, the biggest questions I have are:

- how do you seek out new clients, are there job boards/discussion boards for these types of jobs? Or perhaps you just reach out to companies that seem to be doing interesting work?

- how do you prove to them that you can earn their contract?

- how do you even begin to match the project requirements and what you can bring to the table, and if needed, bring / integrate an additional member/team/contractor? Is that handled by the project manager at the company?

I have many questions, but basically, if you know a good place to get a primer on this, please share! Thank you.