Have you considered starting a company?

I once started a company about 20 years ago, a startup together with a fellow developer who used to be a carpenter before. We used to focus on interactive web applications using Flash, before changing to e-commerce and search engine optimization. We had a lot of fun and learned a lot, but we could have done better economically. Lessons learned: if you want turn your hobby into a profession, don't forget about money! Team up with a salesperson or get professional economic advice. Also find out about your skills and what makes you happy at work!

After leaving my own company, I became an employee for about the next 10 years. First I was happy not to worry about money, paperwork, and difficult decisions anymore. Later, I started to miss my freedom, especially the freedom to say no, the freedom to chose my customers. Globalization, pandemic, and economic crisis brought a lot of change to our industry, and so did the imminent climate change - at least for me personally. I was one of several people who quit their job (others got laid off) to find alternative vocations offering more purpose and impact.

Currently I don't own a company, but as a freelancer, I grow my network to be able to offer customers full service without relying on conventional freelance project for traditional agencies.

I'm open minded about my professional future, so I might join a collective of other web developers and designers who share ecological and ethical values if they are also fun to work with and share a lot of my implicit values about design and technology.

Sometimes I do. But I'm aware it takes so much dedication (it's not as glamorous as social media makes it look). I think having a "one-person business" is more doable and sustainable.

I have seen many people fall for this and failing because of wrong approach. If you are good at coding the product, doesn't mean you can build a successful product. And, people tend to think that they will handle all other aspects from marketing and sales to support, etc. You can't!

So the right approach is to find a great co-founder who have completely different skillset than you, for example someone who is good at sales and marketing.

And then building a good team, for this you need a decent amount of money to at least start, then after successful MVP, you can go for funding or stay bootstraped.

But for this you need to be a different person than you currently are, you have to learn other skills to compliment your leadership and entrepreneur role.

I know, starting a company is the new trend, I have seen genius of coders building trashiest of product and wasting their time.

Technically speaking I have one, but freelance is a very broad category ^^. I've this project, but, signs of the times, I don't have something meaningful, for now.

I did, started developing an Application, dropped the idea as it was too complicated for me to build at that time.
The twist is that after 2 weeks, I saw a similar app being launched and gaining popularity😅

Well, yes. In fact, this company exists to date but I'm no longer putting any effort (beyond keeping registered in the local chamber of commerce).

It's a software company. I started it with some pals because we had a prospect that needed a registered company for a project but it never came to live.

I decided to keep and invest some time on it. In 2018, I was jobless and, thankfully, go to clients to work with. It was all freelance work but I took the chance to exercise working for the company. As organized and flexible as possible, being concise in communication, trying to do the best so the company would succeed.

In the end, local clients are very hard to work with because of expectations they have about software building and budget.

It was like an eight month effort. Tons of learning. I'll probably start looking for clients for the company but not soon. I first need to understand a bit more the business side of a company, analyze what went wrong, try to niche it down, and even create a product instead of making custom software (which is VERY complicated).

It's definitively worth it but needs a lot of commitment and sacrifice in the initial months.

Ben copying text from dev.to/devteam/what-developer-prod...

and pasting in
dev.to/devteam/have-you-considered...

3 times, Once in 2012, once in 2016, and one in 2020.

Out of three, the one I was trying in 2016 was a sass product which I thought would change digital marketing of small brands. It should have been successful, but I then realized that coding a software is much different than running a company. I had no people skills, I miscalculated my fund reserves, I was too focused on making a technically beautiful code, not the features that my end clients needed. A year after I turned off the servers, A friend of mine in digital marketing background pointed it to me that the end clients I assumed would use it, would actually prefers to pay marketing companies to do it for them, I would have been successful If I had targeted marketing companies first instead of focusing on small shopkeepers.

Yep. And so I did! theclutch.dev

A JAMstack agency leveraging Nuxt and Storyblok CMS focusing on small/local businesses.

They need affordable custom options too. Not everyone wants a wordpress or wix price, nor can afford a full-house design & development agency.

Literally filed the forms to be a legal entity this morning!

Exciting times ahead

I did that.
And it's a really fun experience to see what's going on beyond your IDE, to learn a bit about Sales, Marketing, Legal, Accounting, etc.

I even wrote an article about it a few months ago:
12 Extremely Useful Tips for Building a Startup

As developers, I think we're sometimes a bit too self-centered, thinking that we provide the most value for our employer and all the other departments are just one step away from being automated.