Lessons Learned Launching a Side Project in 48 Hours
In this candid personal reflection (2016), @ingve steps back to assess the lifestyle, mental health, and career tradeoffs of independent software craftsmanship.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Leaving high-paying Big Tech roles offers complete creative sovereignty, but demands high psychological resilience against loneliness and uncertainty.
Setting strict boundary lines between personal life and asynchronous bug reports is crucial for sustaining solo developer momentum.
Treating side projects and indie businesses as an ongoing marathon rather than a sprint creates resilience through dry spells.
Community Debate Themes:
Community members debated work-life balance, health insurance and retirement planning for solopreneurs, and finding meaning outside of traditional corporate ladders.
CATEGORY Founder Lessons →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 117 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 22 comments
Some ideas (take it with a grain of salt)
1) You should have a rating system for experts and award different level of badges and users should write reviews also experts with high scores should have a higher pay rate
2) interviewing experts is not going to scale not only you will not have the time but you also need internal experts to interview the Become an expert" applicants (you need some fast vetting process or rely on the rating system)
3) You should collect data from StackOverFlow and other sites and see which questions novice folks are having a hard time getting answers to and try to get experts on those topics (this could become your competitive advantage)
4) You can scale this to businesses - they would certainly appreciate the on-demand help aspect of this thing. Businesses specially small ones may have support account subscriptions with vendors like Red Hat, IBM, etc...which can be costly for them. If your experts are reliable they would rather pay you only when they need help instead of paying the vendors monthly/yearly.
5) As your experts are working the problems you should keep a very organized knowledge base of the issue and resolution (maybe you can monetize this data later on or it maybe useful somehow)
I like this idea. I personally think you are charging too little though. I know you want to make it affordable even for students but I feel that may only open it up for lower level programmers who are okay with working for low rates.
There is already a ton of help available online for low prices or free. I would like to see a service that focuses on instant help like this but with very experienced developers. I would have no problem paying over $60/hr or even a $100+ per hour for a guarantee that my problem will be solved. I would even fork out that kind of money for my employees to use a service like that. Something that I can deposit a certain amount of money per month into my employees account wallet which they can use towards live support issues and it only gets deducted if the problem was solved.
I may not be the norm though so take what I say with a grain of salt ;)
I think you should simplify the service and make it strictly about fixing bugs in small programs. Why: because information is essentially perceived as worthless by the majority and almost any question a person could hope to ask is already one Google search or Stackoverflow question away from being answered. This pervasiveness of information contributes to the assumption that a person is entitled to it all for free (and that the person producing it ought to do it for free) - which is one of the main reasons businesses models built on content are so shitty.
"Please help me fix a very specific bug that's only in this one implementation in this current universe" is a lot easier to monetize than "please teach me how a for loop works." See what I mean?
Nice! I hope this project goes somewhere.
Me and a friend of mine built something similar a while back but never really got to push it more. (https://www.ladr.io)
We always thought there was a gap between Upwork and Stackoverflow.
Nice. So how do you handle scaling this up? Working a full-time job, how would you expect to give this the man hours it needs, in order to determine if this is a viable business model? This is the main issue facing my side projects.