Comment by jollofricepeas
5 years ago
Still working my day development job and now doing about $150k/month in a side project with 10 employees.
- make lists and use them!
- block lunches use them for meetings
- have day job pay your healthcare
- day job work stops on time! no meetings before 9 or after 5
- leverage your “No” to all frivolous time wasters
- focus on day job, side project, family, one hobby for exercise (4-6 hrs/ week)
- get really good at delegating and automating tasks
- hire overseas contractors to do menial, repetitive tasks that can’t be automated
- don’t sell software instead find something “real” that can be enhanced with software
- identify a customer and charge upfront; it’s the only way you’ll learn
Care to share what you are building?
> don’t sell software instead find something “real” that can be enhanced with software
Expand? :)
We sell paper.
I’d focus on anything other than software but use software development principles to make some part of the business more efficient whether it’s idea generation, product development, manufacturing or marketing.
I wonder if he sells printed silkscreen T-shirt’s? And found a way to automate some of the labor.
Very interesting! My day job is selling something "real" (stone slabs). What sorts of margins are you making in paper?
Paper has the highest margins outside of software and maybe sunglasses but none of the regularly recurring revenue or growth rates
That sounds very interesting! Care to explain a bit, what is something real? How do I tell?
Real means a physical product where the consumer knows they have to pay upfront for the good. It really can be anything provided there’s a market.
Locate a nice size consumer market where they hasn’t been much innovation and the consumer is passionate. Then run low-cost tests.
Examples: - Stance with socks - Curves with women’s gyms - There are a ton of examples but what as engineers you want is a good that can be sold via the internet