The point of no return. I just quit my job.

Be prepared for a rougher ride than you expect and, when things inevitably get difficult, be very upfront with your wife always. She is taking just as big a leap of faith as you are so don't ever leave her behind. Make sure she is always a real and valuable part of Team Jenson.

Great advice. My wife was the one suggesting that we do this :) I know this will be a rough ride, but I'm not going for world domination. We've prepared, and we're in it together. The fact that we don't have any money issues helps a lot.

We're quite fortunate because we live in Denmark. Taxes might be high (which I don't mind), but we do have the benefits of a remarkable public welfare system.

We've made the necessary preparations so that it doesn't need to be a stressful nightmare.

Welcome to the club, mate! 👏🏻

Thanks :)

This year, i believe, will the year of indie hackers!!

I agree

Thanks :)

Bitboard looks like a fun project - I hope it'll bring you success. Do you have any revenue from it yet?

No, but I'll implement paid plans soon. I don't expect much from it in the beginning. Feedback from pre-release users has been positive, but they do ask for some critical features before wanting to pay for it.

Out of curiosity, how many months could you go without pay at this point? Could be a good measurement for other people looking to do the same.

I've saved enough money in the company to have a sallary without any income for about 18 months. So the plan is to keep making income by doing freelance work so that the buffer keeps being about a year at a minimum. So basically I intend to treat any products I work on as a client. And at some point it might become a client that gets most of my attention (when it can pay me enough) :)

The one thing that I quickly found out is that "steady" paycheck is only as good for as long as it comes. But when you've mastered working for yourself and keeping a runway? Nothing feels better.

I can image :) I'm looking forward to that point.

The modify permission is because I originally intended to be able to manage most of the things in Bitboard. I ended up removing this from the scope of the initial release. I will go through the permissions and test out what I can leave out. I agree that some of the modify permissions should be able to be removed for now.

I'll look into it.

Looks good mate, well done.

Thanks

One thing, why does it need all these permissions to modify?

Let me explain

Read your account information

When you login I store your avatar, email and unique bitbucket id. Avatar to present in the UI. Email to create an account and butbucket id because it is necessary when figuring out which repositories, issues, pull requests etc. you have created, updated etc.

Read and modify your repositories' issues

Bitboard syncs issues. So when you create a card in Bitboard it creates an issue in the Bitbucket repository the board is connected to

Read and modify your team's project settings, and read and transfer repositories within your team's projects

Necessary to figure out which repositories you administrate/own

Read and modify your repositories and their pull requests

Bitboard links pull requests to a card. So if you mention an issue id in a pull request description (like write "closes #id") the pull request will appear beneath the card on the board.

Administer your repositories

This is because at some point Bitboard will allow you to create repositories when creating a board. This might not be necessary now and I will look into this. Thanks for pointing that out

Read and modify your team membership information

Again necessary to know about which repositories you are connected to. Will see if I can remove the "modify" part

Read and modify your repositories' webhooks

When creating a board Bitboard creates a webhook in the repository connected to the board. This is necessary so it can be notified about changes in issues, pull requests and code pushed to the repository. When you create a branch prefixes with an issue id (like "issue_id-some-random-branch-name") and push it Bitboard moves the card for that issue to the "In Progress" column and it sets you as being assigned to the issue.

I'm not happy about that and its preventing me from using it.

I can understand that. I would probably react the same and I will make sure to explain it in the application.

BTW the link in your profile to payitoff doesn't seem to work. It links to https://payitoff.io - https://www.payitoff.io works fine

Congrats and welcome to the other side!

Thank you sir :)

I left my gig in September to work on my own venture - 5 months later, still loving every second of it.

Payitoff looks interesting. Great niche to work on IMO. Do you have any paying customers?

Some ideas that would have helped me:

1: Yeah I'm having coffee meetings with a friend every other week to stay accountable

2: I have an office at home I use for now. Our house is fairly large so it is fine for now. Once I start earning money through Bitboard I'll consider finding an office space

3: Very good point. This is definitely something I have to work on.

Have some way to stay above your financial watermark so you don't have to fight for the next gig and be distracted from your important full time work (Bitboard). I've solved this (mostly) by doing part time teaching (js, Ruby)

Yeah I'll be do freelancing. Teaching would be awesome. I loved being teaching assistant at university :)

Anywho, congrats again to you and your family! Having a full time job is way riskier than what you're doing, if you factor in opportunity cost :)

I couldn't agree more :)

Sidenote, Bitboard looks cool!

:-D Thanks

Thanks :)

With three kids it's not really realistic to jump into something like this without a plan and savings. :)

Thanks. I'll definitely start blogging about it in the near future. I've got one month left at my job. So when March hits I'll start a blog.

Thanks :) We'll see if I look back on it as a stupid move in a couple of years :)

Those a great points. Exercise is one thing I plan to do every other day. That is one of the things I've been looking forward to be able to do while the kids are in school/daycare

Must have explored possibility of wife going to work?

She is already working. I don't think I would dare to do this if she wasn't :)

Thanks :)

Good luck to you to my friend. What are you working on?

Thanks. That is great. Would love your feedback at some point :) Again it's still very rough with some important features missing.

Thanks.

That I don't know. I might look it up at some point :)

Thanks Yass. Whare are you situated in Denmark?

I've been working on my company nights and weekends for a couple of years now. I need to try to pursue it full time now. Might be a good solution for me in the future though.

its pretty tough that you have 3 kids, feels like "hard mode", anyway, good luck

It's not that bad as long as nobody is sick :) Thanks :)

Thanks - much appreciated.

Thanks. Now the hard work begins :)

Thanks :)

Thanks - I'll do my best :)

Thanks. Feels great even though (or maybe because) the road ahead will be tough and filled with uncertainty :)

Thanks. I really appreciate that.

I hope I can make something that will interest you then :)

Thanks :)

Hey Jakob, I hope you are already aware of Trello boards in Bitbucket.

Yeah but they target two different audiences. Trello is positioned as something to use in the marketing department. Bitboard does a lot of automatic updates to the board based on activity in the git repository.

But it is a valid concern and one of the reasons why Bitboard in the near future will support other services as well.

Anyway, good luck with everything!

Thanks

Best of luck Jakob!

Thanks

Make sure that you have some plan or enough money in the bank.

Yeah I think I do :)

Bitboard looks great!

Thanks. There's still a long way to go :)

Thanks. It really wasn't but it's going to be fun for the whole family.

Thanks :)