Hey! Chris here, I'm the interviewer in this audio.
Josh Doody teamed up with me to lay out a sensible plan for making good use of your day job to become well-prepared for the transition. We cover things like:
* how much money you need to save
* how to save it while controlling expenses
* how to start marketing before you ever quit your job
* how long before you can quit your job (the most popular question)
I don't usually address "how to get started" questions on my podcast, but so many people were asking how to make the transition from day job to freelancing that I felt like I should.
If anyone has questions about the episode or about the topic in general, feel free to post 'em up and I'll answer as best I can. :)
I agree with all of this, those 3 elements are critical. However, the issue I keep coming back to is "how do I figure these 3 things out before I launch a product?"
Nathan at ConvertKit has built an incredible business, and he's earned every bit of it the hard way. However, not everyone is going to have the financial or emotional stamina required to launch a product first, watch it struggle, and figure out the positioning later. For a lot of us, if we don't get the target market at least ballpark-right the first time, we aren't going to be able to see a product through the process of trying this positioning and that positioning until we find something that works.
So, how can we improve our chances of getting "purchasing power", "purchasing desire", and "market mass" right up-front, before we invest time and energy in creating a product? Are there any particular exercises or processes you recommend that will help us find and/or evaluate different markets?
There's a few strategies I recommend in the book (Marketing for Developers) for this:
1. Start with people like you – Mike from Freshbooks was a designer. So when he started his company, he focused on designers.
2. Choose a market that is easy to reach – you can test this out by writing blog posts for different markets, and see how easy it is to get traction. Another tactic: try buying Facebook ads for different segments. Which segments do you get the most engagement for? How cheap were those clicks?
3. Start small – starting with a tiny product allows you test our a market, before you invest too much time in it.
Hey! Interviewer here. This is my recent talk with Connie Holen, who is kind of a badass - how many web designers do you know who are former fighter pilots? O_O
Anyway. Connie is pretty cool and she figured out some useful things about running a freelancing/consulting biz. If you want to chat about the episode or have any questions, I'll be around.
I really wanted to subscribe to this podcast in my RSS reader, it was a nice episode! Unfortunately, I could find no way to download the audio and my usual use of podcasts is to listen during a commute when I have unreliable internet. Without the ability to download it is unlikely I will continue to listen. There's even a link on the 100kfreelancing site that says "download mp3" but it doesn't work and just links again to the streaming web player.
Looks like it isn't online for this episode yet, but usually Chris has full transcripts on the 100kfreelancing.com website. It'll probably appear here when it's ready:
Sometimes it takes me a day or two to get the transcripts up. I don't have them for every episode yet, as I just introduced the feature 3 or 4 episodes ago, but I'll have one up for this episode soon.
I'm not a deaf programmer, but I know a surprising number of them! It's a pretty solid career choice for deaf people, considering 98% of the job is doable without being able to hear anything. Thanks for doing transcripts :)
Where do you see these?