I quit my job. Today is Day 16

http://www.nevertryneverfail.com/i-quit-my-job-today-is-day-16/

by keslert • 12 years ago

88 35 12 years ago

keslert4• 12 years ago

I added caching to my blog, but in case there are issues, I posted to Medium again as well. https://medium.com/@keslertanner/e6eeeb60360c

jctanner• 12 years ago

Great followup to the last post. Interested to read the three month post!

mathattack• 12 years ago

I like the intellectual honesty and perspective that comes with time. And I hope this post generates interest in the business for the OP.

ibrad• 12 years ago

I wish you good luck. I will be in the same boat in 2 days. Quitting your job is very hard especially when you are not going for another one. Working on your own project is exciting but the toll comes when you don't see progress for a while and these times will come believe me.

I too will be working on my own ideas but I know after the honey moon is over I will have to face the fact that I have no paychecks coming every two weeks. It will be hard, but if success was easy, everyone will be doing just that.

Again good luck, and I do think freelanceinbox is a neat project.

arethuza• 12 years ago

Good luck - and if it helps here is a quote that I find rather motivating (and yes, I do know what it is like to leave a steady job for your own project):

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

[It's an awesome quote made even better by the role it had in a fantastic sporting/political event - involving rugby so therefore doubly awesome]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizenship_in_a_Republic

keslert4• 12 years ago

That is epic. Needs to belong to the wall behind my monitors.

elwell2• 12 years ago

Freelance Inbox piques my interest, but have you considered a commission fee business model as opposed to monthly payments? I'd like to try it out your service without putting any money up, and if it works well I wouldn't mind paying a certain percentage (or flat rate) to you if the lead turned out to be profitable.

xhrpost• 12 years ago

Looks like they're offering a full money back guarantee after a month. Though I suppose it's entirely possible that you haven't been paid by a client in that time frame.

kp25• 12 years ago

This is interesting. Paying certain percentage depending on the job you have accomplished would be better than paying monthly. Why risking money if you are busy in some other projects during a month?

lucaspiller• 12 years ago

I was thinking the same. Anyone know anything like that in the UK / EU? In my experience "remote" in the US means "remote anywhere in the US".

seanschade• 12 years ago

It is only $69. If you don't find something within a month then cancel and ask for a refund. Heck, if you used it for an entire year and only got one good job the cost is only $828. Do you think a flat rate or percentage of your billable rate would be cheaper?

jarrett• 12 years ago

I suspect that collecting on such commissions would be a real challenge. I'm not saying the service's customers are dishonest, but...it's easy to "forget" to pay your commission when it's on the honor system. Other bills come in, other responsibilities push it out of one's mind. Human psychology may thus work against an honor-based commission system.

As a customer who's rooting for the success of Freelance Inbox, I want the subscription fee to stick around. Not to be an elitist, but by its nature, this type of service can only work if it's exclusive. (Too many freelancers, and the fierce competition makes the leads worthless.) Which is why I'm also pleased to see that Freelance Inbox will/does have a membership cap.

elwell2• 12 years ago

Good point about it being exclusive

kull• 12 years ago

For commission based model you should check matchist.com. Also give a try www.area301.com - it is free leads aggregator which is not blidnly scarping job posts but it does some magic behind the scene to remove low quality leads.

timjahn• 12 years ago

Thanks for the matchist shoutout Dan!

beat• 12 years ago

Oh man, the feels, they burn!

Tomorrow is my last day of dayjobbing. I'm committing full time to my startup. On saturday, I plan to sit down with my lawyer for re-incorporating and re-branding. I've had an LLC and an initial name I used for expenses and stuff, but I have a better name now and I want to start with a completely clean slate.

I have no idea where my mind is going to be in a month, or in six months (I'm giving myself six months of runway to have revenue at least trickling in). Euphoria and terror, all at once.

keslert4• 12 years ago

That's awesome and I completely understand :) Best of luck and feel free to reach out anytime.

gedrap3• 12 years ago

>> I’ve felt the pull. However, personal motivation to succeed keeps the wheels churning.

I really like your point about motivation.

I'm a freelancer and working from home, and I used to think that nutrition, physical activity etc has a lot to do with it. Yeah sure it does but recently I think at the end of the day, it's just about will power and deep, personal motivation. If you are not enjoying it, no diet will make you more motivated or energetic. It's about an ability to say firm 'no' to distractions. Especially the 'short' ones, because they never tend to be short [0].

Sometimes there is just shit that needs to be done. I mean ugly stuff, like code written by someone else and you have no idea how does it even work in first place or think that the the other programmer was drunk when coding it. Something that your mind says 'I didn't signed up for this shit!'. You just have to focus on it, and get it done. No 'just going to starbucks downstairs', or 'just a cigarette' will help.

Actually, I think one of the best indicator of maturity of software engineer is dealing with unpleasant tasks. Less mature developers try to delay it to the last minute (when bad comes to worse), or impulsively suggest re-writing everything from scratch, etc. Mature developers just get their shit together and get it done.

[0] Once I noticed that the biggest productivity killers are longer than 5min breaks because once you are away, it's so tempting to do one more thing, and then another. I blogged about it "It's all about the short breaks" http://blog.gedrap.me/blog/2014/02/09/its-all-about-the-shor...

Swizec2• 12 years ago

With the current market for engineers, if you aren't enjoying your work most of the time, you're doing something wrong and should probably find a more interesting project to work on. Fire yourself if you have to.

That said, good diet, healthy social life, and exercise are of paramount importance to will power. The better balanced your life, the more will power you're going to have.

But it's also important to manage will power. When you're tired, just stop, take a break. Even leave things for tomorrow. You are likely just fooling yourself that you can still get stuff done and wouldn't you rather just take a proper break than spend the next hour or two shuffling your feet and getting neither rested nor getting work done?

As for short breaks -> Timers. Use timers. Seriously, use a timer.

Shameless plug, I've been working on a book about this stuff: http://nightowlsbook.com

gedrap3• 12 years ago

Good points!

>> With the current market for engineers, if you aren't enjoying your work most of the time, you're doing something wrong and should probably find a more interesting project to work on. Fire yourself if you have to.

Yup, I'm starting a new job in 1.5 week, extremely excited :)

>> Even leave things for tomorrow.

That is also very true, blogged about it too a while ago as well [0]. Trying to get something done for 3hrs can be replaced by 1hr burst next day, as long as 'tomorrow' doesn't become a procrastination. What is important is to make sure that you are actually having a break, your mind is totally away from work.

And yeah, I agree about the timers. I sometimes use a pomodoro timer app and trying to make it a habit, planning to make a physical arduino one. Some day :)

[0] "3. Take a break and don’t feel guilty about it" http://blog.gedrap.me/blog/2014/05/19/4-things-i-learned-the...

vtbose• 12 years ago

Second the Timer comment. For me, something as simple as the Pomodoro http://tomato-timer.com/# is really helpful.

ehurrell• 12 years ago

Great post, good luck with the product! I recently did almost the exact opposite of this, quit work with a startup.

While I learned a lot of what you mention in your post (being a self-starter is a huge asset) at the time continuing work there seemed untenable. In retrospect, even though I was quitting into nothing and the next two months were some of the hardest times money-wise I've ever had to get through the decision was the best one I could have made.

I guess what I'm saying is congrats on taking control, which I think is more important then the vector of travel, I'm glad it's going well.

meritt• 12 years ago

Can you please please remove SumoMe? Or add a button which allows me to disable the stupid highlighting / clickjacking shit it does?

danielweber• 12 years ago

I wants me to do something but I can't tell what. Tweet things, maybe?

keslert4• 12 years ago

Thanks for the feedback guys. It is supposed to make tweeting easier, but apparently it's not doing a very good job (although it probably does make you want to tweet nasty things about me :)

I'll look into a better solution.

resu_nimda• 12 years ago

Yeah, and looking at the snippets that have supposedly been shared, they all appear to be accidental (unless someone actually wanted to tweet "ettling. The user wrote:"), leaving the rest of the readers with nonsensical highlighted sections and stars appearing in the middle of words.

Seems to be generating more annoyance than value.

zrail• 12 years ago

This is so inspiring. I'm looking forward to reading your continual followups, hopefully they'll help push me over the edge.

sologoub• 12 years ago

Has anyone used the Freelance Inbox?

Curious to know what the experience is/was like and if you actually closed any meaningful business.

ark15• 12 years ago

I don't have any words of wisdom since there are too many people here who are smarter than I am that you should be listening to.

But for whatever it is worth -

I signed up to freelanceinbox to show my support.

Not sure how useful it would be since my niche is enterprise web applications but I am going to keep my subscription alive for at least a few months to see if anything converts.

I also promise to sign up for your pro community when you launch that.

If there is at least one lead that converts into a decent client every month, I'd be happy to pay 2-3x of what you are charging right now.

Good luck!

clarky07• 12 years ago

I remember those days. Quitting was really exciting. I got more work done in the first few months after I quit than probably at any other time in my life. I'm on day 1100ish now and it doesn't come as easy, but it is still pretty awesome working for myself. It's still kinda scary, but I consider the experiment at least pretty successful considering I'm still at it 3+ years later. Good luck to you.

I quit my job. Today is Day 16

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