Best day job for an indie hacker?
Is it software engineering, designing, marketing, or something else?
Does the answer change if you know how to code?
Is it software engineering, designing, marketing, or something else?
Does the answer change if you know how to code?
Ideally, something that allows you to…
• Work or start a business on the side without your employer owning that business or firing you if you get caught. This is crucial. Don't guess — find out for sure.
• Have flexible work hours. Most remote jobs give you this freedom. That way instead of being forced to spend nights and weekends on your own business, you can sometimes do it in the middle of the day.
• Allow you to reduce your work hours. This is related to the above, but instead of merely shifting your hours around, it's best if you can reduce them. For example, if your side business begins to take off but can't fully support you, perhaps you'd like to reduce your normal to 20 or 30 hours a week? This is easiest of you're a consultant or contractor or something like that, but I've interviewed others who've worked full-time jobs where their bosses allowed them to move to 3- or 4-day weeks.
• Work with lots of people starting companies, so you can learn on the job and also generate ideas. For example, I interviewed Nat Eliason and Julian Shapiro on the podcast, both of whom run agencies that help other businesses grow. They've come up with lots of ideas for businesses of their own after seeing what works and doesn't work for so many others. I'm in the same position — interviewing so many founders for my job improves my own skills as a founder.
• Make purchase decisions for your company. I interviewed Mike Perham who was in charge of engineering at his company. He was therefore able to make his company the first paying customer for his side project, Sidekiq. And then since Sidekiq was an open-source project that his company was paying for, he was even justified in making code contributions to it while on the job.
• Work alongside talented people. They could very well become your cofounders. The "Paypal mafia" is probably the most famous example.
I'm liking this answer, especially since it seems omni-profession.
I've found freelancing to be a good gig, it requires you to run a business of one (yourself) – giving you lots of practical business experience, and it allows you all the flexibility that you would want or need to work on side projects.
Want to stop working for a couple hours to try something new on your side project? Go ahead!
In addition, in working with my clients I'm writing software or building products that solve their problems – problems that many other organizations probably have. You can easily package up your solution and begin selling it on the side as it's own service.
How do you find your first customer(s), without having much of a public portfolio (mainly company projects)?
TLDR; brand yourself, put yourself out there in your local community, try to network and reach out (even in person) to companies or organizations that you are interested in.
It's hard at first, but do your best to find quality clients who understand the value you bring in your local area, I recommend (Calling the Shots)[https://smackbangdesigns.com/product/calling-shots-ebook-workbook/] for creating a brand for yourself and finding your ideal clients. Finding and satisfying great clients breeds more great clients.
Charge flat-rates, not per-hour. This way, you can charge based on the value you bring to the table – instead of selling hours. I highly recommend reading (Breaking the Time Barrier)[https://www.freshbooks.com/assets/other/Breaking-the-Time-Barrier.pdf] to further understand how important this is.
Build up as much of a portfolio website as you can with any of your existing work, highlighting the success that your work created. Did you build a thing at your company where you increased sales by 20%? Put that on there!
If you have any open-source projects or contributions, it doesn't hurt to highlight that as well.
Hope that helps!
Didn't expect such a thorough answer. Thank you very much.
What kind of work would i want to offer? I did some basic web design - static pages for small businesses - but there's not a lot of money in that.
Ideally I would like offer my skills in full-stack development of small to medium web apps. I'm wondering, who commissions external developers to develop apps? Startups without tech people?
And what would such a job look like?
There's some money in building websites for local businesses, but more often than not I just tell small companies to do their own Squarespace site. Unless you can offer something that they cannot do themselves (marketing, SEO, integrations with their existing infrastructure, get creative), then it is quite a bit of work for little return. Although, it can still be decent work to get started with.
I've been transitioning from building sites to web apps, and I've gotten most of my web app work from clients I've built sites for in the past. Even if you're just building a simple site, try to dig into what their true business goals are and really get to know the internals of their company, and you'll often find that you can build a custom web app / software for them that will streamline something and ultimately make them more money or whatever.
As far as commissioning goes, like I said, previous website clients are huge. However, if you're in a big enough city, there's a good chance you'll find a few companies who contract out developers to do work on their behalf. Even in my city (<200k people) there's at least 2 or 3 companies that do this. They don't always advertise this on their website, so you'll need to do a little networking (I hate that word) at events, or in the local slack communities.
Thanks a lot!
Anything that has clear objectives, flexibility of time, and great autonomy.
That's hard to find, but it gives you the flexibility needed to ship fast, fix deployment issues fast, and respond to customers fast.
I've heard it both ways. If your goal is to 'learn marketing', then take a marketing job.
But, if you already are seasoned and want to flex your skills, you might want to take a job that is unrelated to your side-hustle so you don't burn out.
Freelancing gives you the ability to work when you need to, and hack when you want to. Working a job for an employer typically isn't nearly as flexible, and I'd have ethical concerns working on my side project at any point during the day, leaving me my tired after-hours to do side work.
There's tons of freelance work if you know how to code. Heck, there's tons if you know how to set up a basic website!
I am a product manager - which is great experience to go into a startup / side-hustle as the business / non-technical co-owner. My current day job also gives me 20% time to learn new things that improve my skills and can be used for the company. Which is pretty awesome because that has allowed me to improve my HTML/CSS and SQL competencies as well as learn new things like js, swift, java, python.
Honestly, I think my day job is the best job to have as an Indie Hacker. I'm a rails dev for a remote company, going on 5 years now. I manage two large rails apps. I'm building a startup on the side, and my employer is 100% in support of me doing it.
Our company culture is laid back and results oriented. It doesn't matter when you work, as long as there are results. We have 32 hour work weeks, with every Friday off. The CTO and CEO, understand the entrepreneurial drive in some employees, and they foster that.
If only all companies embraced this culture. It's truly a special thing.
BTW, we're hiring for one of the apps I manage:
https://weworkremotely.com/remote-jobs/blender-market-ruby-on-rails-developer
More info here too:
https://blendermarket.com/posts/2018-blender-market-review
Wow, You are living my dream life. :)
I am software developer, but I have no experience on Ruby and Rails.
I am having experience on React, Angular and other backend API stuff. Right now I am working in Taiwan full time, but I want to go back to my home country India.
Thanks for sharing.
This motivates me more to find out such job. Thanks again.
I always wanted to do PhD:
I work in a startup that is company backed. I learn a sh*tload on defining, marketing, networking for a new company.
None of these things really involve coding but they help me to figure out how to get a presence online. The coding on custom products is also awesome and the limited time really turned my "code, but with the goal to create viable products" notch up a few clicks.
I'd say that role is less important than the company, for one key reason: many companies will not allow you to have a side project or outside employment (large companies, government, and so forth). You should ALWAYS have your employer approve any side work. Second order after that would be enough work/life balance that you can have time to have a side project and not be working 12 hours a day at your day job. Then, role. The more you hate it, the more motivated you'll be :)
Thanks to this thread. I just learnt that my side project was a breach of contract (luckily before launch). Thanks @mjwhansen for this thoughtful comment. You just saved me a whole lot of troubles.
Yikes! Glad to have helped, but I'm sorry to hear that.
I was gonna say (as you mentioned) that this probably only applies to large co's and gov. I have worked for tech "startups" and this is never mentioned in any employer agreement. The only agreement is that you cannot engage in any work that is in the same industry or that is a competitor. And of course it doesn't hurt to double check with your manager if you're worried about it. I honestly believe that as long as you don't work on your project during work hours you are fine. Unless you signed something saying so they cannot tell you how you spend your free time.
Yeah, most small companies won't care, but it's always good to be upfront! Over-communicate and make it clear to them that your work isn't competitive and that you won't do it during work hours.
This comment was deleted 8 years ago