How many of you are self employed?

Currently self-employed as a.....rare coin dealer! Odd path for a tech nerd hacker like me, but certainly the most fun thing I've ever done with no plans to change this gig ever.

My backstory: Collected coins as a kiddo, took a 35-year detour into startup land: Started a VC-backed Web 1.0 company from 1999-2002, ran a non-tech company for ~10 years, then 2014-2022 did very traditional early stage tech product management / utility infielder roles. All fun times with at least one legit acquisition/IPO so far, but it turns out I don't love long zoom meetings and politics and formal process all that much.

In 2021 I started getting back into my old coin-collecting hobby and dabbled in buying and selling at a local coin show, and boy oh boy did that escalate quickly (it was one of the most fun and dopamine-filled weekends I can remember in a long time).

Cut to 2023 and I'm running my own rare coin business full-time -- buying, selling, and trading. It's such a fascinating business and very quiet multi-billion dollar industry with enormous opportunity. You need to have a passion for coin collecting and have a knack and aesthetic eye for quality (it's not all spreadsheet Moneyball), but man is it fun.

Feel free to AMA about being a tech nerd full-time coin dealer :)

I've been self-employed for the last ~18 months. In the past I started two VC-backed startups, then was a PM at some later-stage companies before returning to entrepreneurship.

This time around, I'm building a solo "digital product studio" [1] instead of a startup. So, I'm staying one person, haven't raised money, and have multiple revenue-generating products. Product revenue doesn't cover my costs yet, so I do occasional consulting to bridge the gap.

I like the flexibility of this lifestyle. I'm based in NYC, but writing this from Tokyo where I've been doing a creative residence for the past two weeks.

And, a fun technicality - I truly self-employed in the sense that I have a salary and a payroll system. This is because my company is registered as an S-Corp in the USA, which requires the owner to be on a salary.

[1] https://www.contraption.co/essays/digital-product-studios/

Self-employed on and off as a graphic and web design consultant since 2005 or so, with some time in offices, making websites with static generators, PHP/WordPress, and Python/Django, and print work with pencil, ink, paper, and graphics apps.

Tips:

1. Live simply and reduce expenses. Avoid debt if you can. Rice and beans recipe: https://hypertexthero.com/eat-play-read/

2. Try to be nice to other nice people and stay in touch with past co-workers, especially the nicest ones. They make the best bosses or clients later. Don’t burn bridges unless there is no other option.

3. Always be working on a project for yourself that you enjoy and can learn new skills from. If the project could be useful for others, clean it up a bit and share it.

4. Use a paper weekly planner and write down things to do and cross them out when they’re done. Write ideas and things to look up here. Have a drawer or cardboard box in which you throw pieces of paper with ideas written on them. Open the drawer and pick a random piece of paper when feeling stuck.

5. Look in the mirror now and again and ask yourself if you are happy with the upcoming day. If there are too many days in a row when you’re not, time to change, move, etc.

More: https://hypertexthero.com/reignite-passion/

I am a self-employed furniture maker. I'm that guy who somewhat infamously no longer builds software[0]. About a year ago I moved my operations from a makerspace to my own shop. That's come with its ups and downs.

On the one hand, I know which idiot last used a tool: me.

On the other, I would no longer see other humans besides my wife most weeks. To keep sane I also work one day a week at a bike shop fixing bikes. It's something I'd done on a volunteer basis many years back.

The unexpected nice thing about this is that it gives me projects that are an hour or two in size in addition to the many-week sized projects that I do as part of my business. It's sort of like getting to fix a small bug in the midst of adding a big feature; it lets me pop out of the big project for a bit and see something else through from start to finish and see some tangible progress before diving back into a long-running project that moves forward in fits and starts.

Beyond getting to tackle some bite-sized projects, I'd say the thing that sustains me is getting to work with clients. It's tons of fun when people come to me with a vision that we can iterate on and bring into reality. And then the flip side is also rewarding: getting to scratch an itch and turn a design I've been turning over in my mind into reality.

Edited to add: If you've got an idea for a furniture or woodworking project, my contact info and website are in my profile.

https://github.com/docker/cli/issues/267#issuecomment-695149...

I've been working on https://webhook.site since 2016 when I posted it here on HN. In fall 2023, I quit my job to work on it full time, and it's one of the best decisions I've ever made. I have around 1400 subscribers, which is enough to pay myself a good salary. I've not done any funding or marketing so far.

I'm self employed for around 10 years now. Before that I was employed as frontend developer for around 7 years.

I started self employment as software consultant, which worked pretty well despite not having any connections from my previous employment. I only needed one or two projects a year to sustain my lifestyle. Getting two companies a year to accept your application isn't hard. If you write at least 5 applications a month, you need a success rate of less than 5%.

I changed to technical writing later, because text is less of a struggle than code, and educational articles that explain how to use software (e.g., services, tools, SDKs, frameworks, etc.) are paid pretty well, especially compared to the non-technical writing tasks. Regular software consulting projects take months and can haunt you for years. An article takes a few days and after that you can do other things you find interesting.

Via technical writing, I got into other kinds of text related jobs the software industry offers, like social media management (e.g., Twitter/X, newsletters, blogs) for companies with developer audiences.

Usually I work less than 20h a week and I can do it from everywhere, which allows me to travel often and having enough time off to enjoy it.

I am working on https://audiodiary.ai as a solo founder, I recently have been getting enough income to just about cover my living expenses and haven’t received any funding and didn’t do any marketing, with 9k users so far since launch last May. It’s fulfilling and great to see people use and love a product I’ve built. I’m obviously highly motivated to grow so it keeps me busy.

Self-employed, running https://buttondown.email as a solo founder. (My day generally looks like — 30% engineering, 40% onboarding + support, 10% marketing, 20% operations.) It was a profitable nights-and-weekends project from 2017—2022; took it full-time in 2022.

I think the thing that I would say about self-employment is that people understate the day-to-day flexibility and overstate the month-to-month flexibility. It is _addicting_ to be able to structure a given day exactly how you want it, and to take days off without having to worry about PTO; conversely, I've done a hither-to poor job of increasing my bus factor and it's tough to e.g. plan entire week-long vacations without knowing I'll need to carve out extra time afterwards to catch up on inbound issues.

Being self-employed is hard work for sure. I also _totally_ understand the cliche of "becoming a founder makes you un-hireable"; it's really hard to imagine going back to a traditional job after this, and I find it more fulfilling than anything else I've done in my career.

In Poland, where I'm from, it's pretty much the norm to be self-employed in Poland in the IT sector.

I believe that around 50% of workers are technically contracted one-man companies, and this percentage is inversely correlated with the seniority level - the greater the earnings (and the sense of job security that goes along with expertise and experience), the greater the incentive.

Going B2B makes a substantial difference in terms of fiscal burdens. Other than that, your day-to-day work looks pretty much the same though. You're just sending monthly invoices to the same employer, typically a single one, sometimes for years on end.

Me! I started my solo, startup law practice almost by accident via a Hacker News comment years ago. It's now my primary source of income.

It's hard, but less hard than what startup founders do. It's nice having control of my schedule, but the flip side is that there's never a day off. Personally, I think being self-employed is great for people who naturally work really hard and want to capture the full output of their labor.

I don't think I could ever go back to full time employment for someone else. It's addicting having your own business that actually cash flows!

I'm self-unemployed :D Helped a startup to exit a couple of years ago and had a small amount of equity. Been working on building a game since then. I don't think I'm going to make it to the finish line before I need to get another job, but maybe after that job I'll have the game finished and can build a more sustainable path from there.

Definitely envious of those with actually sustainable business models, though, heh.

(p.s. https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants, come say hi in the Discord if you want to talk shop about Rust/Bevy/WASM/gamification of mental health)

I just build projects that interest me (websites, apps, games). So far released 62 things, of which 10 made >$10k. It's interesting because you get to do a variety of things, and I don't really mind the unpredictability. Might even like it in a slot machine variable reward sort of way.

Just now I spent 3 months making a game that turned out to be worth $0, but that's part of the process. As long as the project itself is interesting and you learn something from it, it doesn't feel like totally wasted time.

Self-employed. Project started in 2000. Income fully funded by revenue since 2009. Product is a cross-platform native digital audio workstation (ardour.org). Revenue also funds a significant part of the income of a second developer (total of $220-240k/year in recent years).

Was self employed and worked as contractor programmer for the longest time until a couple of years ago. Thought I would work less. Boy was I wrong. Chasing clients, doing taxes, invoicing people and praying they'll pay on time. Got sick of the not very dependable cash flow which was feast and famine cycles. Went to get a corporate job and even though the work is not as exciting and the codebase is legacy, at least I don't sweat the next paycheck.

Would living on investment income be considered as self employed. I quit my management job of Tech department of my company.

Saved enough money to generate 80 percent of my last drawn salary from my investments.

Now focusing on creating my own fintech web app, with generative ai integration.

I like the feeling of working independently and years of corporate job had taken taken toll on mental health.

Currently building skills in fullstack web development and generative ai. Would take freelance job for some extra cash

I have been self-employed since 2008, when I quit my job in software engineering to go all-in on my software business (that dated from 2003). That failed spectacularly, because I only focused on technology and not on the value I was creating, and with few customers, I had to do on-site contracting for more than a year before going on full-time parental leave.

I then rebooted my software project, launched a landing site and started talking to prospects (hundreds of them), before I set out to pivot my existing product to something that might gain traction. (I wound up throwing away 95 percent of the code.) I spent 2014 through 2019 with the product in beta, barely making a living off of a few enterprise support contracts and doing freelance photography (and depleting my savings), but spending at least 80 percent of my time on building the product and getting it to a finished state.

(Some people seem to be able to build a product in a weekend that gets eager customers. I'm not one of those people, choosing to build something that was, in retrospect, much too big of a project for one person. I probably also spent too much time polishing the product before commercializing it, likely due to a fear of failure.)

In 2019, the product was finally commercialized as a SaaS service. I remember thinking that I either wanted it to be a spectacular success, or a spectacular failure (so that I could focus on other things, after close to 20 years).

It was neither, but has been growing steadily ever since. I would have made much more money working for someone else, but the freedom is unparalleled. I get to set my own hours and focus on things I consider important. I enjoy doing everything from support calls and UX work to building a compiler and a type system (that I have mentioned before on HN).

I also have no one I need to answer to, other than our customers. That has been important over the past couple of years, when a series of health emergencies in my family has diverted my attention elsewhere. I have been very fortunate to be able to do so, focusing on what's important, without having to ask permission to cut down on work temporarily.

Overall, I wouldn't trade this for anything. This year, my product will gain a sister product in a more lucrative field (I'm hoping), and I have plans to commercialize my compiler, both as a service and as a traditionally-licensed library. So I'm excited to stay solo and keep working on building the business.

I am. I founded PG Support (https://pgsupport.dk). We are a small team of experienced PostgreSQL consultants.

I really like having close contact to customers as well having a very high variance in the type of work that I do.

I also run DebianSupport (https://debiansupport.com) from which we provide professional services for Linux. Mostly Debian and Ubuntu but not exclusively so.

Having used Linux extensively since 1997 and PostgreSQL since 2000, I really like working with both pieces of technology. And I love being able to provide value from my skills and experience.

I am for a couple years now. I do consulting work [1] around Rust/Embedded Systems/Systems Engineering, usually helping teams that are either kicking off a project (so helping with planning, scoping, and backfilling knowledge gaps), or people who want help building a proof of concept (so: just build it for me asap) for existing companies exploring new ideas or for startups that are working on demos for investors, etc.

I've been active on both the open source and commercial side of embedded Rust since the beginning, so it's been fun to watch it grow both as an ecosystem as well as from a commercial adoption perspective. Doing consulting makes it easier to help do more open source docs + support in the open, and seems to be one of more sustainable ways to do OSS in my opinion, if you can swing it.

[1]: https://onevariable.com/

I’ve been self employed full time for almost 20 years, with one to two employees during that time. It’s a product company which I won’t link to because customers think we’re a big organization.

I worked nights and weekends for about 10 years on the products before they were good enough and selling enough that I could go full time. I’ve focused heavily on not having technical debt, and making the app as user friendly as possible to cut down on customer support burden.

Customer support work on holidays and vacations is required, but only for an hour or two. It’s been a pretty good gig.

Only around 5% of the products from IndieHackers generate a monthly revenue exceeding ~$8,333 (around ~$100k/year).

Source: https://scrapingfish.com/blog/indie-hackers-revenue

I was self employed for about 10 years until one of the startups I did along the way turned into something and now I have to work there.

I'm doing full time freelancing in the UK and loving it tbh, but sometimes it can get a bit difficult to handle.

I was doing typical employment until October 2023 while doing some part time freelancing. The company had layoffs and I decided to do more freelancing while I look for the next job. Then the freelancing pay became double or more what I'd make from normal employment, so I am unlikely to get back to "being an employee" unless the situation changes significantly.

Initially I was worried about being able to find enough gigs to be able to make enough income to survive, but now my main struggle is to not take on too many responsibilities at once to be able to keep the clients happy, and even had to turn a few people down because I'm getting too busy...

I do get some spare time for myself to work on my own things, a few of those projects do bring income, but my main income source and the thing that takes most of my day is the freelancing.

I hired an accounting company to take care of taxes and stuff.

Most of my clients are in the UK.

I work partially through Toptal and some through my network.

I can't complain too much about it!

Self employed since 2005.

I run 2 long-term consulting gigs (one of them is an Elixir project for the French government at https://transport.data.gouv.fr?locale=en, the other is in the healthcare sector).

I have also bootstrapped various products (and plan to do more in the future).

Me as well! I've started working at startups as an employee about ~6 years ago.

And did my first freelance project about 3 years ago. Mostly doing FullStack with a FE focus. From then I've been working on and off due to studies.

It certainly has its upsides and downsides. Here in Germany, freelancing allows one to somewhat escape generally low salary for employed software developers (as compared to the US). But what I don't enjoy is the distance to the actual issue/customer at hand. It's on average a much more corporate form of work. And the last couple months have been very slow in terms of demand.

Long-time lurker, first time poster. Here goes… Founder CEO of a bootstrapped compliance engineering startup. Ex-FAANG who got really frustrated by the engineering toil caused by audit and compliance management. Most compliance tasks are manual, repetitive, tactical, and lack enduring value. As an engineer who spent 20 years dealing with auditors and regulators globally and who understands compliance really really well, I knew I had to change things or I would never forgive myself. If you’re an engineer who’s had to face auditors you know what I am talking about :-)

Anyways, building out an automated cloud compliance platform. MVP is coming out in the next few months. B2B subscription based SaaS platform for automated SOC 2 compliance in AWS. Post MVP looking at PCI and then some of the data privacy regulations. Also reviewing upcoming compliance requirements for AI and Electric Vehicle Charging Management Systems (EVCMS).

PS: Happy to answer any engineering questions or share tips on how to become compliant with least toil. Regulators aren’t engineers and engineers don’t understand what needs to be minimally done to get the auditors off their back, so this is my way of giving back to the community. Traveling internationally and will respond here on a best effort basis, or my LinkedIn (listed in my HN profile) is the best way to reach me.

Cheers! Vic

I've been independently employed the for 13 years as a software consultant. Most of my work has been building web-based business software for small/medium sized businesses. This involves both designing and implementing solutions for non-technical clients. It's a lot of greenfield design and development, which feels a lot like working in an early stage startup.

I have at times taken 6mo - 24mo contracts as just a software engineer when the pay and environment were good enough. This work is far less interesting, because someone else is typically designing what is to be built.

I was self employed from 2009 to 2018. I was an embedded programmer / debugger and I had two major sources of income debugging engineering development boards for two boutique companies. I got the first gig from a friend who worked at one, the second by spamming the embedded world conference, and a handful more through linkedin. I couldn’t really travel because I needed a lab with test equipment. But I did double my previous salary north of 200k and I worked as much or as little as needed. It ended up being an average 40hr work week overall. The one thing I missed out on was equity. A decade without bonuses, RSUs, or options really set me back compared to my peers. Plus I hated having to stress about finding new contracts or if I was going to get cut loose. Finally I quit and went back to a big employer and I’m much happier to not have that financial stress and to have equity again.

I’be been self employed for ~1.5yrs after quitting my job to build a GUI for Kubernetes [1]

It’s not easy to get started, but im very happy with this change after being a FTE for 15yrs. It’s a refreshing experience having to talk to customers to understand their pain points and then build something for it

I’m also doing some part time freelancing, so with my products + freelancing I’m earning way more than as a FTE

[1] https://aptakube.com

Self-employed for 10 years now as the co-runner of Apsis Labs (https://apsis.io); we're a software development agency with a focus on healthcare technology and HIPAA compliance.

After a decade of building products for clients, we've recently launched our own bootstrapped SaaS offering: https://reamdocs.com --- the contract management platform we've built in-house to manage our services business for the last 5 years.

That all pays the bills, but what sustains me is my time outside of work: my family, my hobbies, my cat. Joys which I have time for because self-employment has allowed me to set my own hours, walk away from toxic clients, and freedom to do what is interesting on any given day.

Does selling programming ebooks count?

I left my job in 2014 (worked for a semiconductor company), muddled around for 4+ years with not much to show before writing programming ebooks allowed me to earn a living. Fast forward to 2024 and I'm still only earning about 1/3 of what I used to earn (without even considering inflation, what my salary could've been now, etc), but it works for me.

I've been self-employed for nearly two years. I work on a Chrome extension [1] that is used by a significant fraction of the US legal cannabis industry for compliance.

2/3 of my time is spent on consulting projects, which pay better, and the rest is spent maintaining the platform. At the moment, the platform is self-sustaining and the revenue from it is growing fast. I work some of the largest companies in the industry, which is great for network building. The flexibility in schedule it offers is terrific, and I have no need to fundraise or hire.

[1] https://www.trackandtrace.tools/

Currently self-employed with a web hosting company started with some former colleagues when the company we used to work for was bought out and shut down. We were fortunate to be included in a list of alternate providers that the old company gave to their customers and had an early influx of a couple thousand customers. As a result we've got a ton of customers who we've been working with for 16+ years.

I handle the customer-facing stuff, ie service and support. That sort of work has the downside of dealing with occasional negativity, but for the most part our customers are happy and capable of producing complex problems that are fun to solve :)

I've been self-employed for the past 5 years, coincidentally because job recruitment processes were so ridiculous and time sinks at the time (spent ~6 months getting bounced around and ghosted), can't even imagine how things are nowadays.

In the past 3 years through my company (https://webesque.agency) with the aim of expanding in digital product delivery, though I haven't invested enough time and marketing on that front yet. Thus I continue to contract and consult on DevOps automation and Cloud related projects for the time being.

I created a SaaS product (b2b) 7+ years ago. I work on it by myself with no team whatsoever. It generates around a million in profit in every year.

I'm a self-employed consultant, generally either CTO-style "make your company run better and build better software" stuff or, less often, specific robotics and automation stuff where I'm legitimately something of an expert. I have a PhD in decision theory / optimisation / meta-computing - and it was all applied to autonomous vehicles. A recent client I've picked up in the mining industry is paying me something like 300% of the highest salary I ever earned before setting out on my own.

In addition, I co-founded a company that makes Escape Rooms. We sold 13 turn-key rooms to other operators, then eventually invested in our own venue. We were the only company in the southern hemisphere to win a prestigious TERPECA award this year, so it's not a stretch to say our venue is probably the best in Australia. I've never earned a cent from this in eight years... But, this year is the one. Maybe. Probably. Hopefully?!?

I don't often use the term 'self-employed' because I don't directly receive 1099 income, and I receive a W2 paycheck and benefits, although my employer's headquarters happens to be in my office. But in practical terms, yep I'm self-employed.

We (my wife and I) do business-development for our crazy schemes, sometimes alone, sometimes with the help of up to six contract developers that we love to work with. I fund those crazy schemes by doing contract software development myself. Benefits include 100% paid health and dental insurance, as much 401(k) matching as we can possibly have, and afternoon siestas.

We have no plans to hire anyone else, simply because it would be very important to me to give them a square deal: Equal ownership in the company, equal benefits, nice equipment, and so forth. But I don't mind enlisting other contractors who are already comfortable, and if one of our schemes really takes off, we incorporate a Delaware C-corp around it and make sure everyone owns a piece. That's only happened once, but I managed to quickly step down from the C-suite and become a SW dev contractor at that company.

I've been juggling side projects while working full-time as an engineer for the last 15+ years. Most of these projects tanked, but a few have started to bring in some side income. About 6 months ago, I went fully self-employed. I'm not at a Silicon Valley salary range yet, but I should hopefully be there in a year or so.

Main income builders: - https://www.deepwander.com - https://www.readthistwice.com - https://www.iso100mm.com

I've got a background in B2B and product development, and I don't think it would be too hard for me to raise some capital, but I'm intentionally choosing the indie/bootstrapped route as I want to maintain my relaxed lifestyle and have complete ownership and freedom over what I work on and how I do it.

I also enjoy working on B2C way more than B2B because I like seeing my impact on an individual level. But I digress. :)

Oh hey that's me! I sell maps on the internet - https://pastmaps.com

After selling my last startup in 2022 and being very burned out I decided to lean deeper into my own hobby - metal detecting. This lead to me building out a lot of cool tooling around historical maps to help me find better areas to detect and I slowly began to realize that there were many other hobbyists and enthusiasts who also were interested in the maps and tools I was building. So Pastmaps was born

The traffic and server costs started snowballing in the past year so I added the ability to buy physical prints of any of the maps in the collection and this has also started to take off. It's only ramen-profitable for now so don't go thinking that this is hugely successful by any means but it's growing on its own so I'm excited to see how big it can get.

Next up is also adding some premium tooling and features that many of my members have been begging me for so fingers crossed!

Independently wealthy after working 10 years in the Bay Area. I live in Amsterdam now, but I still consult on for startups if the project seems fun, good to have some extra money for the nieces and nephews.

I’m self employed for nearly five years now. Based in France, working mostly with software companies scaling up. I have been learning as I go and have managed to find some good ‘cornerstone’ clients that I have been working with regularly since I started. These are supplemented with shorter contracts and freelance work, anything from a one-off gig to a couple of months.

I set myself the goal of earning the same or better (after taxes) as what I was as a full time worker in the same sorts of companies I am now working in, and I’ve always managed that - plus I get many more hours in the week to spend with the family, I don’t have to travel constantly, and I can run every day without thinking too hard about how I am going to fit it in around sleep, family, work, and the rest of life.

I sometimes miss a few things about working in a ‘normal’ job in France (job security, sick leave, paid vacations) but the freedom to create my own schedule and fit work around life a lot of the time more than makes up for that.

I teach whitewater kayaking and swiftwater rescue with my company https://whitewaterworkshop.com. I started doing it on nights and weekends around a full time tech job and then when COVID hit, demand for outdoor activities skyrocketed so I went full time with it.

I worked in tech for about 15 years where I paid off my student loans very aggressively, then once those were done I started pushing the same amount of money into retirement and savings accounts. My wife and I have no kids and were probably putting $50k+/year away. Turns out if you do that for 15 years, you end up with enough money to never need to worry about rent or health insurance again and you can choose what you want to do that is more fun. For me that was instructing and leading epic multi-week rafting trips like the Grand Canyon 3 times, the Maranon River in Peru, and the Alsek River in Alaska.

Solo founder at Emysound[1]. Started 10 years ago as an open-source project, building an algorithm for audio fingerprinting. Added a commercial offering, selling storage built specifically for audio fingerprints, targeting enterprise customers. Since the offering was too technical (it's hard to sell solutions to problems that are too narrow and domain-specific), pivoted to more "business-oriented problems". This last year's pivot is a chance to finally grow. Running a business in single-player mode is, at times, too stressful. Aside from the technical part, which I very much enjoy, I need to wear marketing, sales, and customer support hats.

[1] - https://emysound.com [2] - https://github.com/AddictedCS/soundfingerprinting

I run a fractional CTO business. I started it in 2013, went full time as CTO with my 4th client and stayed through exit a couple of years back, and then took on multiple clients again starting around 12 months ago.

The flexibility and being my own boss is great. I have enough bandwidth to work on long term bets, while keeping income flowing. The type of clients who hire fractional CTOs can be challenging - they're typically bootstrapping, and often have unrealistic expectations. Finding new clients hasn't been particularly hard, at least so far; word of mouth in my network has been about 70% of engagements, with online postings the remainder.

Not for everybody. I own my house and don't have kids, so I have a high risk tolerance. But, if you have a safety net and the confidence in your skills, it's a great lifestyle.

Self employed on Maths education. Doing a variety of part time job, mainly tutoring. Salary is not great but somehow I'm on my 12th year of being self employed

Founded sapien.ai in 2016 - evolved from web chatbots and voice search SDKs, to custom LLMs and generative ai search, etc. Brought in a co-founder and did the Sand Hill Road Shuffle, met with A16z, Benchmark, Sequoia, Accel, (and a whole bunch of smaller ones), plus made it to the final interview at YC. But then A16Z passed, and so everyone else did too, and then my co-founder quit because of the stress of raising capital - and also because crypto was going through a hype cycle (ICOs). So I went back to bootstrapping and have been profitable ever since. I have been fortunate to work with global brands such as the Olympics, NBA, NFL, Home Depot, Virgin Atlantic, and more.

Interesting thread. Anyone here in the U.S. and supporting a family? The main hurdle for me starting my own business is cost of healthcare. I haven't looked too deeply into options, but I assume I'd be taking on a huge cost to support a spouse and children.

I make video games [1] and TikToks [2] about them. I’m a solo game dev doing the coding, design and business/marketing stuff. I’ve worked in mainstream games and as a CTO at a few companies but my passion is making small games I can prototype in a few days and release within a week or so. After trying a lot of different roles the satisfaction of building something hundreds of thousands of people play that I have total control over is deeply fulfilling.

[1] https://attackmove.io/playit

[2] https://tiktok.com/@attackmove

I'm currently self employed, but I just accepted a role in big tech. After 4 years I was able to set up my recruiting company to run without me, so I can earn about $300K-$500K per year from that, plus my full-time salary.

I'm also working on a new SaaS product (co-pilot + CRM for small recruiting agencies). I'm looking for someone to work on it with me. Tech stack is svelte kit + node + python for custom models. I have an audience of 160K followers on LinkedIn, mostly recruiters, that I can reach when the product is launched.

If you are looking for an interesting side project that will generate revenue, email robert at getditto dot com.

I'm virtually self employed, started about one year ago. Taxes are HIGH where I live, it's a little cheaper for employer to subcontract, so he pays the same overall, I got a raise. I currently have probably one of highest pays for my region, so would have to move to other city to earn more. Plus I do some freelancing in free hours, to bring some more money. Bought a little too big home for my means (it was just before everything suddenly went 2x, "finished" it just before pandemic), so I'm spending everything I get. I earn twice what some of my friends get, but they have more for "life".

Self employed since 2006. Currently working for a couple of customers. Three of them would be too much, no meaningful weekly deliveries for at least one of them. Current stacks: Django with server side rendering and Rails with a Vue.js frontend. Side projects on my home servers in whatever fits short time slots and small footprints: Lua with OpenResty, Python with customized http.server POST and GET methods, Ruby and bash scripts. Possibly other things that don't come to my mind now.

The greatest thing it to be able to adjust the daily and weekly schedule around what I want or have to do and when, and no commuting.

I quit my job and became self-employed ~6 months ago. I work as a freelance developer and I focus on 3D graphics and computer-vision, but I occasionally take on other projects if they are interesting.

I find jobs on Upwork and I do cold reach out on LinkedIn and via email. So far, I managed to keep myself pretty busy and I landed a few pretty good projects. I consider that a success since I went into the freelancing world not knowing much about it.

It's hard, especially with the uncertainty of where the next project/money is coming from, but I can't imagine going back to a full-time employment anytime soon.

I'm bootstrapping https://www.crone.ai and making a small amount of money.

I've bootstrapped a few companies. B2B apps are easier since you can do custom work for business clients while you perfect your software.

Crone AI is much harder. It's my first edtech consumer app. It's been live for 3 months and we've made $1,500 so far (lol).

My previous business startups made $200k ARR and $1M ARR. Iterating on consumer apps is more fun and you can still extrapolate growth from small numbers.

I've been a self-employed Ops-Engineer/Sysadmin for hire/Sysadmin-as-a-service for 14 years now, after doing the same as an employee for a consulting company for the 10 years before that.

I'm ~10 years in as a full stack product dev on brown and green projects for ~100 big and small clients across a range of sectors.

Previously, I worked as a back-end dev in NYC in the media sector - initially at half a real salary because my employer decided to take a gamble on a n00b dev with a degree in writing - and then as a suit wearing front-end dev consultant in the finance sector for 2 years altogether.

I love the flexibility and the range of work. I have had partners and employees but am solo again and enjoying it. My spouse has good health insurance and a more traditional career, albeit one that has required a move every 2-3 years, and that helps quite a bit.

You will save yourself a lot of grief if you can build up your credibility and a good stack of relevant and wide-ranging contacts before you start. Bad clients can cost you more than money.

If you are considering it, be honest with yourself. Many, many folks are better suited to a more structured work life. Advocating for yourself AND your client's best interest is no small challenge when you are solo. Finding a niche, whether in technical expertise or industry focus, will help significantly.

Also – I highly recommend adjusting not just your rates but your billing structure to create more value for clients and better work. E.g. I now have tiered support plans – and tbh if I were based in SV and 10 years younger, I would probably build a SaaS to make it easier for more folks to do that.

I am at the moment due to being in a bit of an odd situation.

I've been hit by layoffs in tech twice in the past 2 years. Once due to the consultancy I was working in selling, and all non-billable roles being terminated as a part of the sale. Then I joined a mid-sized startup as a head of engineering, and it turned out their remote work policies were bogus and they wanted me in the office all the time, and so they ended my probation.

So I'm a bit disillusioned with the hiring process in tech right now, so I'm working on two things:

1. Building market pricing intelligence software (basically manual scraping and data engineering, but I have plans to make it more sophisticated) to track prices of products in the market. I've got a couple of profitable no-risk ways to use this data, and it's started off nicely. And I think one day the tool will be worth a lot.

2. Working in my wife's gourmet packaged food business. It makes good money, and a large part of the business is waiting around for dehydrators or ovens to do their thing... so it means I have time to work on code while bringing in steady money.

I'm going to check out the fractional work/moonlighting job sites someone else posted as it might be a better way to more effectively make money to support my family while I build, but then again it's pretty satisfying working with my hands making food.

Self-employed running https://bankstatement2csv.com Like the url implies, it's a pdf bank statement to csv converter. What Rob Walling from microconf would call a 'step 1 business'.

I quit my job in December to work on it full time. It doesn't pay the bills yet (current MRR $590/month), but it is slowly growing! Little bit of a race to see if I can pay my bills with it before I run out of runway.

Me! Since about 2019 I started designing and selling circuit boards among other things. I came from nothing,no funding support, just investing a few hundred dollars here and there and applying my own beliefs. I am forever grateful and won't take it for granted. I get to work from home, be my own boss, oversse everything, turn a good profit, build my savings, have my food delivered to my door, and workout using peloton. Everything is beautiful and I don't complain. I am able to offer support and advice to others in a much more positive manner and inspire people who want to give it a shot.Things which have changed perspective to me include reading job postings and realising how different i was towards them to how i am now, how upset people become when i discuss with them that i am successfully working for myself at home, how i feel knowing i can buy expensive things if i want to but i dont wish to - the feeling alone is often enough, i don't travel as much both in daily life or holidays because i am low stress and comfortable - my life is a holiday everyday. I have to remind myself recently to look ahead to new ideas and not to rest on what i do forever but maybe if im lucky i could.

I'm about to wrap up my 3rd year as a one-person company (https://www.exaresearch.com) specializing in spacecraft flight dynamics and space situtational awareness (SSA). I basically do custom orbit determination things. Super fun. I spent 30+ years in the business before going out on my own. It's going great, primarily because I have a large network in a niche field.

I've been self-employed for nearly three years as a freelancer / consultant.

Though, I have a course I've pre-sold during the recent work drought. These pre-sales have been paying the bills. So there's lots of pressure to deliver on them while still trying to line up freelance/consulting work.

I started doing this because I had big indie hacker dreams. Now I just think that I'm partially unemployable. What matters most to me is controlling my own destiny and Intellectual Property rights. Writing code is what fills me up, and It needs to be protected. Otherwise, I feel trapped, growing bitter and angry over time. So I'll keep doing this until I have more products.

My ultimate goal is to create a portfolio of products to pay the bills. I have no particular biased towards what. They could be courses, ebooks, or even games. 2023 was a special case in terms of cash flow (business cycle goes down), but I'm hopeful for the future, and my course sold decently well, so I think I'm getting the hang of this entrepreneurship thing.

Self-employed since December 2019. Back then I wasn't sure how long it would last, but I'm still doing it! I've juggled several consulting clients needed web/mobile app development, sometimes simultaneously, and sometimes with extra developers on the project. A business partner and I also started a B2B SaaS that we're bootstrapping.

Founded, bootstrapped and still completely own CoalitionTechnologies.com. Started it 15 years ago and we do website development, programming, and online marketing. 270+ full time employees and another hundred or so contractors. World class management team has allowed me to step back and buy a cattle and hay farm two weeks ago...

I am working on my second startup. The first startup was bootstrapped hardware company. We released a few electronic devices. I worked on the first product part-time. Just before it was released, I decided to leave my job and work on the company full time.

I worked on the second product full time for about a year. It was profitable, but I never scaled the business up enough to make a living from it. I went back to work full time.

By this point, my appetite for hustling on the weekend to build a business in a market with limited growth potential had diminished. I focused on paying off my mortgage and saving money. After a few years, I had saved enough money to be able to cut back my hours and focus more on my hobbies and passion projects.

I've been working on my current startup Emurse full time since the end of 2020. I am covering costs with the revenue from my first startup and living off savings. We're getting ready to launch the first paid product soon.

I never understood what self employed means vs a startup. If I start a Delaware C and raise 20M am I self employed?

Consulting. I've worked deeply on startups for the past 20 years. Now I'm on my own working with founders who need some help getting through a stuck patch/thinking through problems. It's a great way to stay around startups without doing one yourself.

Not currently self-employed, but I've been a "self-employed" contractor in the past.

In case it was because the "client" wanted a temp, but the contract lasted longer than what, IMO, was appropriate. I was early-career, and the "client" really wanted to treat me as an employee.

In the second case the employer had a limited budget and we agreed on contract-to-hire. 18 months went by and I eventually had to really twist their arm to bring me on full-time. (They were treating me like an employee.)

Anyway, contracting (as a self-employed consultant)'s great if you like that kind of thing and are prepared to incorporate to take advantage of tax laws; but if you want to be an employee, it's annoying.

I am self employed for the last 12+ months. I am doing Microsoft Dynamics ERP software development and consulting.

First when I started I was doing subcontracting for larger companies but now I have few customers of my own and it works out fine. I can provide them better and quicker service then larger companies can and for some customers the man and a dog company suites very well and for some companies it doesn't.

I handle everything myself when it comes to business - creating content, being active on Linkedin for inbound leads, doing the bookkeeping, doing the monthly tax reports etc.

I've been self employed at Hog Bay Software [1] since 2004. I mostly build Mac apps. A few years I did some consulting. A few other years I worked with some other people, but generally it's been just me the whole time.

> Curious to know what sustains people.

It allows me to work on what I am interested in, for me that's the key. For whatever reason I've decided that text productivity apps are really interesting, and worth my time to build. So that's what I do. It hasn't lead to great riches, but I wake up pretty much every day excited to work on what's next. Pretty fun!

[1] https://www.hogbaysoftware.com

I've been self-employed since 2006. Started my last company in 2008. Bootstrapped and grew that over 12 years and sold it to private equity. Private equity mismanaged the rollup they assembled and lost 95% of the value in the companies.

Now I find myself middling between looking for steady/normal work and trying to stand up my new project, https://getspence.ai (landing page gets a revamp this week). I never expected trying to find steady/normal work as an exited entrepreneur to be so difficult. There are so many square holes and I often feel like a round peg.

Not anymore but I was for around 2 and a half years up until this time last year... Well kind of - I worked as a consultant and registered an ltd. Mostly for tax reasons - the corporate tax where I live is very low and I kind of enjoyed sending out an invoice at the end of each month and move on. The company is still legally active since it costs ~10 bucks a month so if I decide to pick up something on the side or get some of my personal projects to an actual product, I can get them out in no time. Or if I decide to go back into the consulting side of things, which has certain pros(but also cons).

Most of my 30+yrs in on-site biz support are SE. I do most everything that small-med biz need done. Mostly Microsoft but some *nix/BSD.

I build firewalls, deploy workstations, troubleshoot crapware like Quickbooks, setup/maintain domains, admin MS exchange/azure, build/run mail servers, virtualize things, fix hardware inc med & pharma equip (with son #3).

Lots of other things except web - which is done by my long-time friend/biz partner.

I've been employed on and off (mostly by clients) and prefer that but circumstances always intervened.

Pros: Flexible sched is plus to deal with family demands and endless crisis. Cons: Uninsured.

I built https://team-today.com with a friend about 4 years ago and have been working on it full-time for the past 6 months.

I tried to get funding but never really got there and we've just managed to grind it out to a point where we have enough revenue to pay ourselves.

The flexible lifestyle is great, I play golf on Wednesdays and help out with childcare much more than I would have been able to with my previous jobs.

There is the looming threat that all our customers will leave us one day and I'll have to go back to a regular 9-5 job, but hey ho.

I am unemployed; I'll teach undergrad and grad math for change (っ˘̩╭╮˘̩)っ

I’m an independent space exploration writer, and I love my job: https://blog.jatan.space/about

Happy to answer any related questions.

Yup, self-employed embedded firmware and hardware engineer. I mostly consult on things like wearable sensors (especially class 2 and class 3 medical devices) and industrial control systems. I also have a bit of an odd niche in phosphorescence-measurement instruments for research and practical applications. The closer to the metal, the better! The tighter the power requirements, the better! The more connected, the better!

Been doing it independently for almost 14 years now. Was based in Minnesota, but now I'm in Colorado. Wouldn't have it any other way.

I left Google about 8 months ago to build a Shopify app. I was a sales engineer that kept selling a super complex product to large retailers, and I thought it would be cool to "productize a service" and democratize it for smaller retailers.

It's amazing taking a full product from 0 to 1 with a small team, we're bootstrapped but have some revenue coming in now from very satisfied customers. I don't know if we'll ever raise money or have an exit, but I wouldn't trade the experience for the world.

This question could work well as a poll, which is an infrequently used HN feature: https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll

Self employed here. Mostly React / React Native specialist. I've been working in React since it was relatively new but try to stay up on latest updates in the ecosystem.

Backstory: Not entirely planned, but I was talking with a company about potentially being a frontend architect or something along that line. As the conversations progressed, they said they couldn't hire me fulltime since I wasn't able to come in to the office daily but they could give me a long-term contract. I've been consulting ever since.

I've been "self-employed" for the around 3-4 years now, mostly building UXWizz[0]. It's not really sustainable at the moment, due to the lack of marketing. I still get sales somehow by focusing mostly on the product development, but this year I will try to market it more. I don't plan to grow it into a huge business, just enough to be comfortably sustainable ($10k/mo from the current ~$2k/mo).

[0]: https://www.uxwizz.com

I'm "half-half" so to speak.

I work as a CTO in my day job (as an employee).

Also I'm self-employed (via a company structure) to build https://persumi.com - a blogging platform, and https://rizz.farm - a lead gen platform, as well as to work on client work.

https://persumi.com/u/fredwu/hire-fred :)

Since 2005, with a brief interlude at a company between 2008-2012. Have been a solo freelancer, an employer, in both tech and now real estate. Thinking through some options for the future, but I foresee opening multiple businesses in the next few decades, ideally so there will be assets for my kids to manage someday.

What sustains me? I like to eat and have a roof over my head. Could I have made more money going a different route? Almost certainly. But, life is about tradeoffs.

Been a year and a half since I started https://snowpixel.app/

Pays the bills and gives me enough free time.

Self-employed since 2009 (can't believe it's been that long). Started out doing dev-for-hire work with a friend: web sites and mobile apps mostly. Along the way we built up a "war chest" to self-fund something of our own, then grew it up and sold it off. Rinse, repeat. Currently we have a small company (10 people) in the VR sector.

Self-employment is definitely not for everyone, but I love the freedom and flexibility. It'd kill me to go back.

S-Corp, W-2 for myself. I do pretty mundane programming related stuff for safety critical systems (med device and am always looking for interesting stuff). Been remote consulting averaging 1-2 clients since mid 2017. Here's my profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sriramsundar/. Worked full time for about 15 years prior.

About 6 months ago I left my job to start my own company and make a language learning tool I always wanted to build (https://www.langturbo.com), It's something I use myself and I see real value in it.

I'm fully bootstrapped and I have some months left of savings to try this out. If this doesn't get traction then I guess I'll have to get a "real" job again :).

I've been bootstrapping orbitalhq.com for a few years now.

Pretty standard bootstrap story - used consultancy to get us out the door. These days, we're (nearly) self sustained through license revenue, with a small amount of consulting (1-2 projects a year).

It's been a tough ride, and in hindsight, I wish I hadn't pivoted away from consulting quite as early as I had, however we've managed to stay alive, so - so far - independent, which has been nice.

For the last 4 years, I've been working on app that help solo founder like me to manage their project but intuitive to use on mobile. Finally get the app ready for private beta soon, so lately my time have been focused getting the word out about the app.

App Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSiHWdoekCE

I went from full time employment to freelancing in 2010 or so. I wouldn't do that again. Freelancing is the worst parts of a full time job and the worst parts of entrepreneurship combined in retrospect.

I then founded a software services company where I currently work and grew it. It's been a very rewarding journey so far.

I'm not sure if either of these qualifies as "self employed" but that's that. :)

After working at various start-ups and Fortune 200 companies as a Product Manager, I am now working at my families niche consulting company.

The twist is my wife is also helping run her family business and while the two companies bring in similar revenue every year, that's about all they have in common.

It's been pretty eye opening seeing how my father and my FIL operate their respective businesses.

I am currently working on helping small companies solve technical problems, build a strong technical culture, and scale their engineering orgs. Both hands on code and leadership, as needed.

For a summary, https://orib.dev/consulting.html

I'm just starting out with this, but it's looking promising.

I've been a freelance web dev/consultant for the past 10 years. Like some other people mentioned, been wanting to have my own product so I started developing a Azure B2C app to help organizations manage users. It's very very niche but solves a problem that I've run into multiple times.

My goal is to continue consulting while releasing my side project.

Self employed on and off for 20 years. I am an industry analyst, former Gartner. If you have questions about that I wrote a book about it. :-) https://www.amazon.com/Curmudgeon-How-Succeed-Industry-Analy...

I'm a full time Twitch streamer since 2020

Self-employed since 2020. I'm basically a software consultant doing hands on software development in the .Net world.

Yeah 10 years contracting now taking time off to build my own products. Currently focussing on developing my innovation pipeline to systematically evaluate products/opportunities to decide when to continue or abandon them.

Next job is idea generation, prioritisation and mockups of ones that pass the initial filter. Then the real work starts.

Self-employed since 2005. It's been a slow road and I haven't wanted to lead a big team so it's been a mix of consulting and small projects. One of them is gaining a tiny bit of traction so I'm hopeful I can scale it up. I'd much rather build a software business than lead a consulting business.

I'm technically self employed because I got into a toxic contractorship as my first gig, when I didn't have the knowledge to avoid getting taken advantage of. But it's really just a software shop refusing to hire employees and using "contractors" for everything (we're actually employees)

I'm freelancing two days a week, which generates most of my income.

For the rest of the week, I'm bootstrapping a language learning app.(https://vokabeln.io/)

I'm lucky enough not having to pay rent and also living expenses in Czechia are not that high.

I guess I'm partially self-employed, in that I'm reactivating an old/defunct business providing content management & consulting. Still very early on, as I'm figuring out good niches in our AI-enabled world.

I do love seeing threads like this though. All the fun tools & projects people build up.

Successfully self employed since 2018. Built my own product that I sell as B2B to large businesses in Kubernetes/OpenShift space. Making a good salary of principal software engineer.

As a hobby working on side projects (apps for apple ecosystem) and my main hobby - skydiving (it is expensive).

>How many of you are self employed?

+1. Self-employed since 2006. Previously at Sophos.

>What do you do?

I'm a technical generalist, and it's slowly killing me. I need to specialise in…something.

>Curious to know what sustains people.

Fear of eviction & a broken anhedonic treadmill. Coming up to 20 years of that, there's a lot of damage to fix, frankly.

Been self employed for over 20 years already. Have my own software and hardware products that generate revenue. Over a time revenue has declined and complement by designing and implementing custom software products for clients.

I am registered as corporation so I am my own employee and pay myself a salary

I’ve been self employed since 2004. Never really had a “real” job even before that. Started a web site in 1997 and sold it a year later for 7 figures, worked as a “cofounder” at the company that acquired, then started more sites on the side until revenue exceeded my salary and quit.

I'm formally self-employed but it's actually a means of keeping talent from emigrating by granting tax benefits to people like me.

I do side gigs when the opportunity arises, but more often than not I don't have the time for anything but my main thing.

I started working for myself in '86, have been at it ever since with temporary excursion whenever a project got larger and I ended up hiring people or having partners. Wouldn't have it any other way in spite of the obvious risks and drawbacks.

Two years running indie tech conferences [0]. I’m still a programmer: I wrote a replacement for Ticketmaster/Eventbrite and never looked back.

[0] https://handmadecities.com

I have been self employed for 10 years now. I manage Google Ads for small and medium businesses.

I still have the desire to create a great start up, but at least this way I can pay the bills and have more free time to work on start up ideas.

IT service, sales and support business, and private cash-flowing multi-family real estate business (we provide nice places for people to live without the headache of owning/maintaining/repairing your own home).

I was for 2 or 3 years over 10 years ago. I built apps (mostly web based) for smaller businesses and startups.

I'll likely be going back to it after being laid off last June and not being able to find the same level of pay.

I'm self employed with https://stockevents.app as well as employed as the Head of Product Management for a construction software company.

I'm working on my own projects. Right now, most of my effort goes to AI Construx (https://aiconstrux.com), build things with AI.

I technically am self employed as I have my own LLC, but I generally work as a full time engineer for companies. It just helps for tax reasons but also flexibility in my work, ie choose my own hours and pay rate.

I've been self employed for 3 years now. I help companies get started with machine learning. ChatGPT is the best marketing for me: everyone and their dog wants ML because of ChatGPT.

I do advisory work and development too.

I am part of Independent Data Lab [1], a collective of bioinformatics consultants based in Europe.

[1] https://www.independentdatalab.com

Me. CTO Coach. ~4years now.

I do.

I run a small hardware product design firm and injection molding supplier right here in San Francisco.

Www.iancollmceachern.com Www.goldengatemolders.com

Self-employed for 24 years now. Mostly doing test management and project management, but also some coding on and off.

I would like to be self employed. But I don't know how to find contracting gigs. Any advice?

If I could build things on my own I wouldn't be working for someone else.

Consulting (mostly DT/business process) since end of 2014.

I've been self employed (doing the "solopreneur" thing) for ~8 years now. I wrote a blog post about the early days[0]. TLDR I have been bouncing between eCommerce (Shopify Apps) and software in the music space. Both of those avenues have roadblocks and challenges when it comes to building a future proof solo career: Shopify is a narrow market and changes fast while the music industry is all over the place. So now I'm focused on Zigpoll[1] which will hopefully have some legs take me from solopreneurship to early retirement :)

[0]https://www.zigpoll.com/blog/being-a-solopreneur-part-one

[1]https://www.zigpoll.com

I'm self unemployed, lol.

I was self-employed from 2020-2022, mainly for tax reasons. There are lots of things 1099 employees can deduct from taxes (home office rent, lunches, any work-related electronics and furniture you buy that the company doesn't reimburse, etc.)

Just make sure that when you negotiate the rate you bump it up enough to account for self-employment tax, health insurance, and vacation time. The company would have to pay for these anyway for W-2s (self employment tax becomes payroll tax) so they shouldn't be opposed to the slightly higher rate to account for these things.

It's idiotic that W-2 cannot deduct these but it's reality.

As a bonus if you ever work overtime you actually get paid for your additional work. Another thing W-2s should get but don't.

Self-employed freelance developer since 2010.

this is the post I needed today. ty!

Not any more! Yippee!

self-employed here (company owner)

I mean, it depends on your definition of "employed". :) I am only getting a few hours per week right now, but I am an independent contractor.