Zero to Consulting to Indie Hacking - A 2020 Quarter 3 Progress Report

Early this year I was in my last semester of college. The longest stretch of employment I had at that point was 8 months for a paid co-op. I like working, I think it's important to have a routine where you get up each day and solve problems, but as we got it to March it became clear that it's not safe to have only one stream of income.

I was laid off from my job as a developer on my schools campus, luckily I had planned for this and was able to finish my Computer Science degree, but being without work left me feeling panicked. So I started looking for a full time job and a freelance gig.

I took a temporary position made possible by a PPP loan and quickly found a local business looking for someone to do freelance IT and consult on their search for an application development firm to build out a multi-vendor marketplace.

I was fortunate enough to land a permanent job at a company that is thriving during the pandemic and it's programming based, which is the direction that I want my career to be headed in.

In Quarter 3 I made about $4,500 of 1099 income. which is about 30% of what I want to be making through that channel.

Neither of the jobs that I'm currently working would strictly be considered indie hacking, but they are revealing things about businesses of various sizes - a lot of work is being handled in Excel or Google Sheets. Sometimes that works great, other times it's confusing and people become caught trying to optimize a system that they don't thoroughly understand. That's not their fault by the way, it's unreasonable to expect people to become experts in something that isn't their core job.

It's been great for inspiring possible products to bolster my 1099 income. In the coming quarter it's my goal to expand my 1099 income by creating a product, not increasing my hours.

That enough from my end, how did your Quarter 3 go? What steps did you take to advance your indie hacking income? What are you going to pivot to in Quarter 4?