Post: #1

Do we have any members who have made this switch?

A little background: I'm a generalist software engineer who is able to program in pretty much anything and solve a wide range of problems. I have a decade of solid experience with all kinds of platforms and tools and a have worked in a few different domain fields. Currently I work remotely and charge per hour.

I can still grow my hourly rate a fair amount. Haven't reached my plateau there. However, I'm getting tired of building other people's dreams. Additionally, it's clear I'll never make as much money writing software as I'd owning software.

I'm thinking of building a SaaS product. I have no idea which market to focus on, though. The only field I'm truly knowledgeable about is software. I know the survival rate for SaaS products is low so to be successful I'd probably need to launch a few different ones.

I'm curious if we have any members who were ever in similar shoes. Would love get advice about this kind of switch.

Post: #2

No one is going to give you an actionable business idea. Getting advice about "making the switch" isn't going to help you produce an idea worth acting on.

There are two types of people in this world. Those who can imagine uncreated solutions to problems they see in the world every day and those who can't.

Here's the big problem with the "live your dreams" crowd at places like The Fastlane Forum. It's one thing to acknowledge that it's hard to create wealth quickly without creating scalable businesses. It's another thing entirely to come up with a good enough idea to act on.

Here's the other problem. To notice most existing problems (and propose a solution), you generally have to be knowledgeable about a specific industry. For example, my business efforts are towards solving problems in the education industry. I knew about these problems from being a teacher and personally facing these problems. I've been able to work towards solving those problems because of my industry experience.

Another forum member who I spoke to recently is involved in a creating fitness equipment. He innovated improvements on existing fitness equipment because of his person experience using such products which acquainted him with several design flaws that he felt could be improved on.

Many people who have dreams of striking it rich pursue creating a consumer product in a category that is already full of products because they can't think of any better ideas. Most of the best ideas are B2B and only visible to people with industry specific knowledge.

If you want to create software that you can sell instead of trading your time by the hour for money, the best advice is to become intimately familiar with one specific industry so that you can become aware of the needs there and learn to use software to solve those problems.

Contemplating "making the switch" is going to do you little good. Rather, you should be identifying a specific industry that interests you and looking for people who are knowledge about that industry. Get them talking and sooner or later, they'll complain about a problem they have that deserves a solution.

Post: #3

(12-03-2017 09:34 PM)Suits Wrote:  Contemplating "making the switch" is going to do you little good. Rather, you should be identifying a specific industry that interests you and looking for people who are knowledge about that industry. Get them talking and sooner or later, they'll complain about a problem they have that deserves a solution.

To clarify, I wasn't expecting anyone to give me business ideas. Just fishing for general experience on this topic.

Thank you for the reply. This is actually excellent advice. Your thinking reminds me of Paul Graham's How to Get Startup Ideas essay. He mentions a startup founder who got a job at a restaurant just so he could get familiar with the field and potentially build a niche product. It worked.

Doing something that extreme would definitely require me to get out of my comfort zone. Talking to people in general and going to conferences, meet ups and such is more actionable, but probably not as rewarding. However, you're right: contemplating change won't do anything for me.

Post: #4

(12-03-2017 10:10 PM)lazy Wrote:  Doing something that extreme would definitely require me to get out of my comfort zone.

Yup.

And that's just the beginning. At least if you're (for example) working at a restaurant just to learn about the industry, you're getting paid.

Now just think about all the unpaid work you'll have to do based on nothing more than the belief that someone will be willing to pay money for the finish product.

Although coding might be within your comfort zone, going without income (or a full income) for an extended period of time is probably not.

Those of us who paid our own way through university have some experience with being outside of our comfort zone, often for a period of four years or more. But we did it because we believed that the value received at the end (a finished degree) was worth it. Whether the belief was justified or not, just about everyone in our life supported our belief in the belief, so we put up with living in a certain type of poverty for several years until our degree was completed.

Using time that could otherwise be put towards earning additional income is an entirely different type of sacrifice. A lot of people will not support your belief. There's often no way of knowing how long the project will take. There's often no way of knowing how much money the product will fetch once completed (although there are some options for determining demand in advance). All you'll have is self-belief and uncertainty.

That will most likely be well outside of your comfort zone.

Post: #5

It sounds like you are in a pretty good position. You have a couple options:

1. You can negotiate equity for one of the projects you work on.

2. You can come up with an idea and do it all on your own. I recommend reading a few business books and then reading a few SAAS case studies. A couple books I recommend are: Think and Grow Rich and The Lean Startup.

Post: #6

I sell enterprise SAAS.

It's true niche problems are the best. In fact we found our best markets by pitching everyone until something stuck. However if you try to make something general like a CRM someone else has done it better.

Its not all sunshine and rainbows, I would guess there are millions/billions/trillions of lines of code that were never published.

You're best goal might be to find someone at a very early stage and ask for a significant equity stake. Probably plenty pf guys out there with ideas and no money to pay you.

But the best ideas come from working and getting pissed off that something doesn't exist, and then make it.

Post: #7

You could take a look at these threads:

/thread-65952.html

/thread-65448.html

I am in the same area as these guys and think it's a better idea to work at selling other people's successful products rather than doing the 10% shot at any success and 1% at good success. Finance is the hardest game to crack. It's the only one where you put up resources and can end up with less after your efforts and hence the popular jealousy/hatred of rich people. Whereas if you're down the gym you are getting henched to some degree... Business is hard and I have huge respect for anyone who can make a brick and mortar company with staff, overheads and taxes work. Most fail or are unimpressive. But once you learn all you need to know to make money by selling other people's products you can roll out sites with high success rates.

It's not difficult to start earning enough income online from some form of advertising that would allow you to live somewhere like EE, i.e. $300-600 per month and then build on that. You also have the option of branching out into international markets, rather than being rooted to the US, UK etc.

A quick starting point would be to find a database and enrich it and give people easy access to it. Governments produce lots of such data that either isn't searchable or is searchable in a poor way.

As an example take a look at this site:

http://www.onlinenewspapers.com/panama.htm

It gets about 20K visits / day. It's just a list of newspapers by country/region. That's a very basic level of enrichment. That site has major inbound links from authority sites as it's the best there is. It would be easy to blow it out the water by pulling in lots of other data sources and allowing more searching. I'm pretty sure that site could make between $1-3K / month in ad revenue, for just sitting there with next to no work. It's an obscure-foggey niche (which I highly recommend due to lack of competition). Newspaper subs are actually one of the best affiliate programs. With proper development it could do $10K / month.

Other similar databases that lie about relate to place names (gazetteers), historic sites, census / statistics, post codes / zip codes, campaign contributions... Such databases are freely available but typically not even indexed in search engines. There are some sites monetising them, but they tend to be very poor.

There's many avenues you can find preexisting data, enrich it to provide people simple concise buying options (from which you get commissions), ad revenue or a mixture of both. For the former see: http://cpuboss.com/ or the latter https://coinmarketcap.com/ . The latter is probably pulling in over $1M from a bunch of fairly simple pulls from API and a few cron jobs. The extent to that the data could be enriched is lacking a lot. I am very tempted to get into that niche quickly as it's probably going to be one of the biggest sectors over the next 30 years.

Look at something where your site becomes the destination in the niche for either/or people making buying decisions; and general niche reference.

Going down this route, you can keep your 9-5 and then spend 20-30 hours a week more grinding out your own sites deep into the night. I went for the option of living with the parents and working sometimes more than 100 hours a week, no break, no weekends, no rest. I know a guy who did the former and hit $3-4K / month in about a year to add to his $4K monthly salary.

I find that a lot of the big companies that you can drive sales to and get commissions from tend to have hopeless tech teams. Their companies are full of people who have degrees in online ads, programming, design, marketing etc. and they don't mesh them together and are just self-inflated monkies following outdated formulas. I have the 9th most visited site in a $3B market with two part time employees on $5/hour. The tenth most visited site has a giant office in London with over 100 employees. My long game is to push up to #3-5 and wait for the inevitable bloated buyout offer that any other site has eventually got from one of the big boys up to their nuts in VC.

Info products are a very good line as they can often offer commissions in the region of 50%, rather than the 4-8% on physical items. This is a big one at the moment: https://mobe.com/become-an-affiliate-3/

One sale of their top tier product would be a nice year's income in EE.

You can have a look at what niches are available by seearching affiliate middle men: CJ.com, AWin and affiliate directories. Or look around reference sites in a niche and see what they are doing to make money.

Will be writing a datasheet on this some time next year...

Post: #8

Why not start delegating the EXACT programming you're doing -- "but I'm so good, how can I do this?" -- just do it.

Find devs that are as good or better than you, but have no business acumen.

SaaS is the holy grail, but before you get there, build some experience running an easier business:

From now on, all new clients, you pitch as Business owner / solutioneer / "have my crack team of devs that I lead"...

Still a service business, but you spend time understanding clients' underlying businesses, and translating requirements so some 3-6 month project maybe only takes 100 hours of your devs' carefully managed time.

So you stay remote, you can bill hourly/daily/monthly/weekly or per-project (building in margins of safety) -- BUT you are now operating a shop and not simply being a coder for hire.

Benefits:

- learn how to run a business while stepping OUT of the trenches -- like many of your clients probably run but don't "do" all the nitty-gritty of their businesses

- more time spent talking with business owners, less time in code, therefore you learn about all other kinds of businesses

- scale up your profits

- gain ideas, PLUS a staff, potential customers, for your eventual SaaS holy grail business


This takes some changes in thought:

- no more talking Tech jargon or language / platform names with clients: ONLY focus on business results (they assume you know the details)

- delegation and trusting and setting up your devs for success (find people you've worked with before, offer them chance to moonlight at night for decent hourly while you set up requirements and talk to clients during the daytime)

- seeing your offering as Consulting (to figure out what needs to be done), and managing the service of getting it done via your EE's

- no longer seeing yourself as a programmer, though programming got you here


Obviously you can't "flip the script" on existing clients... but for new clients, remember "We will get this working for you", not "I will program this for you".

Almost feels "guilty" at first in a Dunning-Kruger-esque way because you're "just" managing and not coding anymore -- but that's NORMAL for most business.

Post: #9

I honestly have a SaaS product innovation I intended to pursue within three years. I wouldn't work with anyone that didn't have enough ideas of their own that I'd have to put extensive effort into convincing them to work with me.

Post: #10

Thank you all for the input. Lots of great information here. I'll keep coming back to this thread to read these posts over.

(12-04-2017 01:28 PM)gework Wrote:  A quick starting point would be to find a database and enrich it and give people easy access to it. Governments produce lots of such data that either isn't searchable or is searchable in a poor way.

The idea of making money off a visualization of a data set is interesting because it's basically passive income. Do you know how people typically monetize these? Ads? How does Coinmarketcap pull in $1M?

(12-05-2017 11:46 AM)456 Wrote:  Why not start delegating the EXACT programming you're doing -- "but I'm so good, how can I do this?" -- just do it.

I had never even considered this. Actually, your post gave me an idea. Every year, the top universities in Brazil spit out a few hundred CS undergrads who will probably end up working for pennies in the Brazilian market (comparatively to what they would make in the US). These are all smart middle/upper class kids from competitive universities that rank in international lists. Usually they have great English skills, math skills, etc. I bet I could pay them above market rate for someone with their experience, sell their services to foreign companies, and still make a profit. They would be inexperienced, but I'm not, and I would mentor them. It'd be kind of like a high quality outsourced IT shop.

(12-04-2017 11:51 AM)qwertyuiop Wrote:  You're best goal might be to find someone at a very early stage and ask for a significant equity stake. Probably plenty pf guys out there with ideas and no money to pay you.

(12-05-2017 11:49 AM)Suits Wrote:  I honestly have a SaaS product innovation I intended to pursue within three years. I wouldn't work with anyone that didn't have enough ideas of their own that I'd have to put extensive effort into convincing them to work with me.

It seems to me that the hard thing is having ideas that are actually profitable. I have a list of ideas for websites, apps and open source projects that I've been updating since 2010. If I scan through the list, I can only find 1 or 2 that would realistically make me money. Being creative doesn't cut it... that's the problem with "idea guys". The most actionable ideas are born out of experience in a particular field.

Post: #11

(12-05-2017 01:12 PM)lazy Wrote:  

(12-05-2017 11:49 AM)Suits Wrote:  I honestly have a SaaS product innovation I intended to pursue within three years. I wouldn't work with anyone that didn't have enough ideas of their own that I'd have to put extensive effort into convincing them to work with me.

It seems to me that the hard thing is having ideas that are actually profitable. I have a list of ideas for websites, apps and open source projects that I've been updating since 2010. If I scan through the list, I can only find 1 or 2 that would realistically make me money. Being creative doesn't cut it... that's the problem with "idea guys". The most actionable ideas are born out of experience in a particular field.

You're doing yourself a huge service by recognizing this fact.

Now that you've accepted this important fact, how can you act on this information that will allow you to get what you want in life?

Post: #12

(12-05-2017 01:12 PM)lazy Wrote:  Thank you all for the input. Lots of great information here. I'll keep coming back to this thread to read these posts over.

(12-04-2017 01:28 PM)gework Wrote:  A quick starting point would be to find a database and enrich it and give people easy access to it. Governments produce lots of such data that either isn't searchable or is searchable in a poor way.

The idea of making money off a visualization of a data set is interesting because it's basically passive income. Do you know how people typically monetize these? Ads? How does Coinmarketcap pull in $1M?

(12-05-2017 11:46 AM)456 Wrote:  Why not start delegating the EXACT programming you're doing -- "but I'm so good, how can I do this?" -- just do it.

I had never even considered this. Actually, your post gave me an idea. Every year, the top universities in Brazil spit out a few hundred CS undergrads who will probably end up working for pennies in the Brazilian market (comparatively to what they would make in the US). These are all smart middle/upper class kids from competitive universities that rank in international lists. Usually they have great English skills, math skills, etc. I bet I could pay them above market rate for someone with their experience, sell their services to foreign companies, and still make a profit. They would be inexperienced, but I'm not, and I would mentor them. It'd be kind of like a high quality outsourced IT shop.

(12-04-2017 11:51 AM)qwertyuiop Wrote:  You're best goal might be to find someone at a very early stage and ask for a significant equity stake. Probably plenty pf guys out there with ideas and no money to pay you.

(12-05-2017 11:49 AM)Suits Wrote:  I honestly have a SaaS product innovation I intended to pursue within three years. I wouldn't work with anyone that didn't have enough ideas of their own that I'd have to put extensive effort into convincing them to work with me.

It seems to me that the hard thing is having ideas that are actually profitable. I have a list of ideas for websites, apps and open source projects that I've been updating since 2010. If I scan through the list, I can only find 1 or 2 that would realistically make me money. Being creative doesn't cut it... that's the problem with "idea guys". The most actionable ideas are born out of experience in a particular field.

You don't need some crazy software to do it. Even if you had specialized software and have a few business clients that pay you 4-5 figures a month. This sounds like a lot at a personal level but at an enterprise level its not much.

From a sales perspective, make an MVP, pitch a few of your current clients and see if it sticks -- or if you have an idea. Call a few hundred companies with your product and see if anyone is interested.

Feel me if you have any specific q's on how to sell whatever you create.

Post: #13

Also don’t think leading a dev solutions team must be “outsourcing bodies”.

You are the architect that “designs” and your guys execute, clients are buying solutions not devs.

Brazil is close enough to USA timezones so get American clients.

Subtle distinctions in language, don’t volunteer you are all remote but don’t deny; emphasize how you are a team that works together successfully and no office costs allow you to stay nimble and grow with clients.