Hired 2 while Earning $0

This week I have hired two developers. Very exciting but a little scary.

Last November I quit my CTO job because the owner of the company voted for Trump. Should I post that here? Will that loose me potential future business? Don't care - I think life is about integrity. I've done a lot of things I am not certain were the right decision... but quitting that job was definitely the right thing to do.

Onward! I'm relaunching my prior company of Programming Labs. I ran that software development company for 15 years from 2000 to 2015. During that time I had 4 to 6 programmers working for me at any given time. Most of my clients were other software development companies that hired us to handle tasks outside their areas of expertise.

However this time I decided Programming Labs and software development will be the secondary focus. The primary focus is going to be launching the Wizards Toolkit.

The Wizards Toolkit will be a low-code solution for companies and developers. It is based on PHP, SQL, Javascript and MaterializeCSS.

On Monday I hired a CSS/HTML developer in New Zealand! She's working on making the user interface both beautiful and developer-friendly. With her help I hope to have the Wizards Toolkit ready for beta launch some time in May.

Yesterday I hired a video editor to work on my YouTube videos. Six weeks ago I started a YouTube channel as a marketing method for the Wizards Toolkit. Currently I'm focusing only on videos for "the business of Programming" which I hope will be truly useful information for developers. I doubt this channel will ever bring clients to Programming Labs, but in the future I expect it will attract attention to Wizards Toolkit. Having this video editor should allow me to publish videos much faster and gain subscribers.

The future revenue from YouTube from ads, merchandise, affiliate marketing... I'll pursue all that as secondary revenue streams. The only real reason for the channel will be to create tutorials for Wizards Toolkit and attract subscribers.

Whereas I expect 90% of subscribers to the Wizards Toolkit will do all the coding themselves, most likely 10% will request to hire Programming Labs to assist with some of the coding. For first stage that's what I'll do. Later I hope to have a list of developers (maybe found on indiehackers?) which are knowledgeable and skilled with the Wizards Toolkit so I can pass all new clients to them.

My end goal is to solely spend my time updating and enhancing the Wizards Toolkit.

So... I have my savings. I have my 401K which I hope to never have to borrow from. I've hired two staff. Let's see if I can launch Wizards Toolkit and start generating revenue before the savings run out. If not, then I'll have to re-list my Upwork profile and do some side jobs until this takes off.