Hi,

I’m a programmer with a bunch of years in IT and currently I’m trying to build my own project that can bring me enough revenue so I can leave my full-time job and focus on my projects only and eventually start my own business.

The main struggle right now is that I have too little time to work on my projects (around 3 hours per week) and I estimate it will take me at least 2 more years to start earning anything (not talking about real money so I can leave my full time job). I don’t want to create any sort of scam just to grab some cash, but building a real complex software is a time consuming process, not speaking about that I must handle other stuff than programming (which I enjoy but this means I have even more work to do).

I’m wondering if anybody can give me any advice how to speed up that process or where I can get money to be able to focus on my ideas full time? Or maybe somebody tried to do the same and failed and can share what lessons they learned from their mistakes?

I’m looking for a real solutions, so please cut out generic advices like “just keep working” or “just find an angel investor”. I understand that starting your own business is hard and requires to take a risk, but I’m looking for practical advices and not advices based on luck or having a huge start capital.

Thanks

  • ugo@feddit.it
    3·
    14 hours ago

    To expand on this: the better the collaboration between sales and programming, the better for everyone involved. I have no experience on starting businesses, but it feels to me that when starting or expanding a business, one often needs to sell products that don’t exist yet. Because building something in the hopes of selling it is very risky, as the product you develop might risk not being able to properly satisfy the needs of anyone and therefore could end up not selling.

    Selling something that doesn’t exist yet instead guarantees a sale and therefore funding, but sales and programming need to be aligned on the difficulty of creating said product (or adapting an existing one) and the timeline to do so.

    Few things cause a bigger sense of loss in programmers than being told “we sold this thing that needs to be ready in 2 months” when the programmer knows it needs 6 months to be built correctly. It’s a fantastic recipe to make programmers miserable, product managers miserable, clients miserable, and likely sales miserable too.

    • freagle@lemmy.ml
      2·
      10 hours ago

      Selling something that doesn’t exist yet is the key. A programmer is asking us how to start a business and talking about building something. The answer is not to build right now and instead do the sales work. The programmer and the salesperson are the same in this post, and alignment is guaranteed. The most important thing is sales and the programmer needs to focus entirely on the sales discipline.

      And even more important, everyone’s experience with sales people is missing the most critical part of entrepreneurship - selling before a product is even defined! It’s not even about selling something that doesn’t exist. It’s about discovering the pain the customer is before deciding on what to build

      • YUART@feddit.orgOP
        1·
        3 hours ago

        Hi. While I can agree that sales thinking is important for a business, I don’t want to be a con artist.

        I already had experience to working with people as that, who sells things that don’t exist yet. Everything was fine till people understand that super cool product they were promised is unreal to implement (so eventually it is a scam).

        • freagle@lemmy.ml
          3·
          3 hours ago

          The alternative is wasting your time building something no one wants. If you’re going to fail, fail to implement. It’s easier, faster, and costs less. If you fail to sell, you can spend literally years building something that will never make money. The reason the developer wants to start a business is to make money, not build something that works without money

          • YUART@feddit.orgOP
            1·
            2 hours ago

            I agree with this and I plan to involve potential customers as early as possible so they can realistically say if this is something they are willing to pay for. I spend a year of building my current stuff and soon I plan to release an alpha version to validate my implementation. Even if it’s shit - at least I earned a lot of experience from that implementation.

    • realitista@lemmus.orgEnglish
      2·
      13 hours ago

      Yes there’s nothing more important in the early years than sales and dev being aligned. These are the greatest and most exciting times you can have in either role if you are able to understand the other side. You need to be careful to hire salespeople with technical backgrounds who really care about their clients in those early years to avoid the “throw it over the fence” mentality.