If you have the entrepreneurial itch and don't have the financial security to back it up, becoming a bootstrapped micropreneur is a great first choice.
Start your business on the side, when it revenue is high enough to live on, make the jump. It's slower than a funded startup, but a lot less risky. Does come with a high social opportunity cost due to lack of time, however. But so does starting a startup.
If your sidehustle does well, you can even leverage it later to fund your big startup idea. Or, hell, live a good life on a lifestyle business making a few hundred thousand per year.
$150k/year revenue won't get you any headlines, but it's plenty to live on and run a solo business.
Get to $500k/year and you prob have a higher expected ROI over N years than any startup founder.
Disclaimer: my sidehustle is at the $50k/year level, but that's on 60 hours per month. If I didn't insist on living in SF, I could have a very cushy life back in Europe.
Thanks for sharing. I find stories like yours more inspiring and motivating than the "ramen to unicorn" ones. I have little interest in scaling a business to IPO, but I'm very interested in building something that holds my interest and lets me support my family and an enjoyable lifestyle.
A combination of books and teaching. I'm experimenting with coaching and a company is sponsoring my React Native writing on a cobranded blog/yt channel.
I publish monthly breakdowns on swizec.com and that lists all revenue streams.
I never had an official mentor, but plenty of people helped and nudged me in the right direction and answered questions. You can find most of them on the internets.
It all boils down to this: Make things. Add "Pay For Thing" button. Tell people.
I started with following Ramit Sethi's emails for a few years (he's great to drive home the point that yes you do deserve to get paid), then Brennan Dunn's emails and content (he's great for "you totes can make shitloads"), then Nathan Barry's book Authority which is great for "Here are concrete steps to start making bank", and I went to Dunn's DYFConf which is like a baby MicroConf (to which I want to, but haven't, go), oh and of course I listened to all mp3s of all past talks from MicroConf. Patio11's writings helped a lot as well. I used Bryan Harris stuff for ideas on growing an audience, and Kai Davis is great for being a cheerleader and giving good ideas on positioning and writing.
Somehow I got invited to the Slack group where many of these micropreneur/microconf celebrities hang out and that's been superb as well. A lot of inspiration and great ideas.
Oh and I used Ken Wallace's MastermindJam to join a mastermind of likeminded peers. That helps with keeping you accountable and actually shipping stuff.
I also used Amy Hoy's 30x500, but I bought that too late (or too early, hard to say) and it didn't help super much. I should revisit.
Oh and levelsio's twitter stream is just a huge bundle of inspiration.
Thanks for taking the time to write this up. Plenty to look into.
I get the sinking feeling that achieving many of these things requires being charismatic and/or attractive and/or extroverted, of which I am none. Of course my marketable skill is not in communication but rather in engineering, so hopefully that won't matter.
I get the sinking feeling that achieving many of these things requires being charismatic and/or attractive and/or extroverted, of which I am none.
This has not been my experience of running a software company and, while speaking for others is always risky, most of the people mentioned in that list are personal friends of mine and I think would react to "good thing you are attractive and extroverted" with gales of laughter.
Start your business on the side, when it revenue is high enough to live on, make the jump. It's slower than a funded startup, but a lot less risky. Does come with a high social opportunity cost due to lack of time, however. But so does starting a startup.
If your sidehustle does well, you can even leverage it later to fund your big startup idea. Or, hell, live a good life on a lifestyle business making a few hundred thousand per year.
$150k/year revenue won't get you any headlines, but it's plenty to live on and run a solo business.
Get to $500k/year and you prob have a higher expected ROI over N years than any startup founder.
Disclaimer: my sidehustle is at the $50k/year level, but that's on 60 hours per month. If I didn't insist on living in SF, I could have a very cushy life back in Europe.