Anyone interested in catching up on Year 1 can click the link.

When I last left you, Code For Cash was positioned as a freelance programming jobs site, since I had recently published Software Engineer’s Guide to Freelance Consulting and built Code For Cash as a leadgen app to help programmers find jobs.

Not too much happened to the Code For Cash business in 2018. Here’s what did.

We did lots of consulting, subcontracting work to the Code For Cash community wherever we could. One thing I’m proud of us building the WorkReduce API. WorkReduce is one of our clients, and they retained us to do some consulting work. Their business, digital advertising operations, runs entirely on SalesForce, so they wanted an internal API to add higher leverage to their development process. So far the API has already been used successfully on incremental internal projects and is in the process of being deployed to clients. Security and privacy concerns were paramount, and we addressed them in conjunction with an integration test suite with 100% coverage.

Another early stage project we worked on, Legacy Concierge, was able to recruit a full-time CEO and investor. Congratulations to them. And yet another one of our clients, Fera Commerce, was accepted into YCombinator. Congratulations to them. So in terms of consulting, lots of success for both us and our clients.

In terms of updates from last year, we maintained the Code For Cash freelance leadgen app, and it still brings in a trickle of revenue. Unfortunately, in order to deliver optimum user experience, all job leads need to be manually reviewed and the human cost of that is not sustained by the current level of subscriptions. So, users have to do a bit of filtering themselves, but the source quality is still good.

We’re still selling books. In 2018, we sold 1524 books (1235 ebook, 289 paperbacks).

And we built a few SaaSaaS apps - software as a service, as a service. That’s when a client approaches you and asks for a solution to an ongoing problem, but instead of quoting a fixed price, you ask for an ongoing monthly fee. We built one to scrape prices in realtime from Amazon Sellers Dashboard (the project was canned) and another one to scrape Multiple Listing Services in order to help a home inspector market his home inspection services to seller agents. This one is live http://realestatescrape.com/ and brings in $200/month in revenue. We would like to sell this to multiple clients.

But around July, something interesting happened. Someone saw one of our Code For Cash ads and decided we might be good at helping them hire a full-time employee, rather than just a freelancer. So we quickly met with the company, learned about them, and then leveraged our awesome network of entrepreneurs, developers, hackers and intellectuals to intro a winning candidate within two business days.

Actually getting paid took about 6 months - so for a while, it wasn’t clear that this really would be such an awesome business. But then in October, another interesting thing happened. One of our existing clients asked us to help them hire a full-time employee. We delivered awesome results within just two weeks, designing and running a whole hiring process, and the client is absolutely thrilled with the results.

We didn’t get paid on that one until January.

Anyway, what I’m here to say is, it’s three years deep, and we’re still open for business.

My forecast for 2019 is murky.

Recruiting is most interesting line of business because it scales nicely and has room to benefit from technology, especially augmented reality and user experience improvements. A perennial challenge is finding new recruiting clients through cold prospecting rather than having them find us. But: we’re working on this!

It’s likely that we will continue with consulting services. We have some super big projects on the horizon, but they’re early stage and may fall through.

We will continue helping match businesses with technical freelancers for small projects :-) It’s not much money, but it’s rewarding and it keeps us plugged into the community.

Finally, we will be pursuing several small projects throughout the year. To have content to write about is one reason. To produce more small income producing channels in order to keep this independent business sustainable and growing. And to manufacture segues into really big businesses.