Not sure if I count but I could definitely uniquely live off my SaaS profits.
The tips I would give to myself:
1. Don't ever stop trying: sure, getting a job instead will give you a few hundreds k per year - but it won't help you getting any closer to your freedom dream. No more worthless standups or stupid retros.
2. Don't kill your social network: I know the temptation to get rid of social media is strong, but you need to cultivate your network and turn it into an audience of potential customers
3. Keep writing: building a trace of reliable writing and showing skills is an invaluable marketing tool
My view may be biased by having invested most of my life in up-skilling my skills (just because I enjoy it) and I find myself technically super strong but lacking in marketing.
The tips I would give to the general population are:
1. Be balanced in how much time you spend learning tech / doing marketing / managing staff
2. Do what's best for the product and for getting to the customer. CREATE VALUE FOR SOCIETY
Politics aside, X/Twitter just isn’t what it was. Less people, less quality, and I’m reticent to trust a platform that changes on a whim. Which is a tragic shame because Twitter was it.
Mastodon’s … fine. Nowhere near the reach and never will be.
X is nearly identical now to what it was before, except more people complaining that it's different. If the landscape of your social network there has changed, seriously question what type of community you're building / a part of, because it doesn't reflect reality (most don't).
But, my community is almost entirely general business, SaaS, and developers - I've noticed no discernible drop in quality or quantity. If you follow a lot of journalists, politicians, etc. yeah your experience is going to be a lot worse.
My concern with LinkedIn is my day job. My company is pretty active there. I have a side project SaaS that might do well with some LinkedIn marketing, but how is my boss (or more worryingly, my boss's boss's boss's boss) going to feel seeing posts from me about some side hustle? Even if the publish time is in the evenings or weekends. The alternative is the company profile route, which is fine, but basically negates my existing platform there (such as it is).
It might be beneficial for you to officially disclose your side hustle to your employer. This way you can draw the line where your intellectual property and time separate from the company’s property and time.
Consider this. You don’t post on LI. Your side hustle ends up being a success. You leave your company. There is a non-zero chance that your company will notice then, and possibly have suspicions about whose time you used to develop this successful venture.
It’s one of those situations where it is a bit uncomfortable to disclose now, but could avert a much more uncomfortable situation in the future.
My boss knows about it, we've talked about it and I've shown him interesting technical things here or there. Like I said my concern isn't so much him but higher up.
You're right that it might be a good idea to get some sort of paper trail in place. I'm already very good about what machine I do work on, what time commits happen in git (always outside of business hours, no giant commits at 5:01 PM, etc.), that sort of thing.
Sucks, but you're probably right. And this is one of the biggest barriers to me working for myself - I have no network. Haven't had any social media in almost a decade, except linkedin which I avoid as much as humanly possible. Oh well.
People advertising their crap is one of the reasons I got rid of it in the first place, along with rampant celebration of total degeneracy, and it generally being a pointless timesink of short-term entertainment.
The tips I would give to myself:
1. Don't ever stop trying: sure, getting a job instead will give you a few hundreds k per year - but it won't help you getting any closer to your freedom dream. No more worthless standups or stupid retros.
2. Don't kill your social network: I know the temptation to get rid of social media is strong, but you need to cultivate your network and turn it into an audience of potential customers
3. Keep writing: building a trace of reliable writing and showing skills is an invaluable marketing tool
My view may be biased by having invested most of my life in up-skilling my skills (just because I enjoy it) and I find myself technically super strong but lacking in marketing.
The tips I would give to the general population are:
1. Be balanced in how much time you spend learning tech / doing marketing / managing staff
2. Do what's best for the product and for getting to the customer. CREATE VALUE FOR SOCIETY
3. Keep growing your network