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How I built a 6 figure annual development agency on accident and just hired my first employee!

Hello! I like to share my experiences and my last post seemed to get a lot of interest so I thought I would share this story as well.

My development agency story starts during my undergrad. As a desperate college student who was mainly a R/Python data engineer with a sprinkle of statistics (I wouldn't even say I was resemblance of a data scientist) I was desperate to jump into the business world and get direct experience in the professional world. After I took up a M&A Analyst gig during the school year, I ultimately decided that I did not want to do that and wanted more out of what I did. I became obsessed with statistics and the underlying power of numbers on the financial markets. This would ultimately end up in a position as a Junior Investment Analyst at an investment fund that morphed into a data science position. This game me the rare experience of building data pipelines and data models from scratch at a firm that barely knew what data science was (old school Buffett value firm).

It was during this position I began taking on larger data science projects and, UI/UX projects that surrounded data science/ML as a freelancer. Many of my clients to come would be funds, finance firms, and even accounting software companies that utilize numerical data on a large scale. What just became a way to learn and grow professionally soon became a very lucrative business where I was learning pretty much everything under the sun while being paid to do so. This included Draftbit (my favorite), Webflow, Bubble.io, React/React Native, Svelte, Vue, Streamlit, many ML libraries, CausalImpact, Dash by Plotly and many other tools/libraries. I was eventually making much more than my investment job paid and upon graduation went full time and took my freelance business and made it official as Pital & Co.

It is coming up on a year since then and I just hired my first employee. We have multiple internal tools we use that we can at any time turn into SaaS businesses. We have a couple already released SaaS products I have used internally/personally for the past few years. We are in the unique position where we can build software at rapid speed compared to traditional devs without the tradeoffs due to the vast tools we/I know and have developed.

After this year, it seems the focus has shifted from just financial software to no/low-code tools as well which is awesome to see and even better to see people use. I am excited for the future. It goes to show, you never really know what something you do turns into. Me stumbling upon Upwork 4 years ago has turned into a full-time business for me.

Whats your business story?

Thanks!
Joe

  1. 2

    Hi Joe! Thanks for sharing this - to me, def seems like no-code is a good direction to be heading! (we're about to launch Ditto and have been working on it for 2 years... sometimes I look back and wonder if we could have/should have figured out how to do it with no-code first. We didn't think we could pull it off, but I think maybe platforms have improved since then... or maybe we just didn't know enough.) Unrelated question: are you still working on Autolance? I'd be interested in chatting, if you're willing... it looks like Autolance + Ditto = potentially a better, cheaper version of Upwork. Could be an interesting partnership?

    1. 1

      Hey! Sure book a call with my personal Calendly here https://calendly.com/schnetzlerjoe. I saw your post the other day for the need of a Webflow developer/designer. We can definitely help you either find one at Autolance or do it for you at Pital depending on your specs.

      Best,
      Joe

      1. 1

        Hi again, Joe! I know it's been a while... you may recall that we chatted, and you invited me to reach back out to you once Ditto was ready to take on users, the thinking being that there might be a promotional or partnership opportunity for Ditto and Autolance. (As a reminder, Ditto is a payment platform purpose-built for project-based work - see more at workwithditto.com.)
        Ok if I schedule a little more time with you using your calendly link above?
        Best,
        Liz

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