This is great advice. Turn whatever you know right now into a learning opportunity for others. This is what we do at http://teacherr.com, we help others build an audience around their experience and monetize their following by selling information.
Same here. Here's what I did. Long story short: I've been a developer at smaller companies, bigger companies, a team lead, and none of these made me happy. With some money saved, i quit for working on a personal project.
8 Months later, I now run 2 online projects: www.rechargeit.com and www.DNhub.com
As you can see, one is publishing, one is domain investing. I love what I do, there are so many to learn and do, I burn money every day with a team of part-time freelancers, and I am trying to find my business way before money gets burned.
Lessons learned? A lot :)
Easy path? Not at all
Deserve trying? Yes, no doubts
Thank you for your thoughts. In fact, I am more interested into the how can i make this process efficient in the real world, as a scallable service, without competing with the other freelancing sites that offers full projects development. I am more connected to a programmer to programmer service perspective (getCode.org)
You have right. From what you are saying, i understand that in some ideal conditions, meeting THAT coder might help you a lot. Otherwise, it will just be a loss of time and money. Thank you for your thoughts!
I understand. So based on your experience, don't you think that writing down the specs and the expected return, combined with finding a smart programmer available to write code, could be a winning decision? I mean, there is nothing in this process that can be done to improve your efficiency and still be a win-win deal?
You have right, but this triggers me to the other side of a programmer perspective. Thinking from a test driven development, and creating parts that are easy to mock and test, couldn't be the outsource-process mindset be a one more reason to better write code handling the dependency of the other parts of the system? This way, i think that some critical parts can be easily mocked up in the outsourced code, so the complexity gets easier to manage. What do you think?
Aren't oDesk and Elance more as a general complete project requests? I mean, you really find them perfect fit for outsourcing parts of your code? Is there any aspect of the process that you might want it different? Personally, I find them a bit to crowd for an immediate need of some coding parts for my project
Good to see that i'm not the single one that struggles with such existence thoughts. Yes, i am a software engineer as well. I love challenges, and really love to read a lot (marketing, entrepreneurship, things that helps create a business). As a introduction about me, I wanted to earn a living from my projects since 17 (there are more than 10 years since then). I started working on personal projects, and unfortunately, i got the virus. The little successes has got an amazing satisfaction to me, that couldn't be replicated in any job i worked. And no antidote found by now :)
For the last 2 years, it got worse and worse. I quit once my job, got a new one into a bigger company, stayed 3 months, offered the chance to work into a startup(moderate engineering, moderate decisions), and after 7 months, i am struggling again with giving up. What still keeps me in here are my personal projects. I invest some money in few of my projects, because i somehow try to buy my ticket to quit the full time job and go into the entrepreneurship world by myself. Or at least, i want to buy a year of my work life, working for me, as a try-learn-experience.
All successful entrepreneurs teach us not to give up the full time job until we have a plan, savings, and our business already make some money working part time. I hardly follow this advice, but this is the way i'm trying to follow with my projects. Thanks to them, i didn't quit. The last 2 weeks were so unproductive for me at job, my mind is only at my projects, investments, and planning my escape to work for myself. My projects, my business...
So far by now, i can only advice you in what works for me: part time work on your business, consolidate your escape plan. To me, DNhub.com, GetCode.org and easyCustomMaps.com are my source of motivation to continuing what am i doing now..
I do not know what are you writing about, but in the first place, you need challenging subjects that worth to be debated. Then, check the profile of your user that's coming in. Is the user only look for information, and than leave? Is he landing there but the content he is looking for is not what he needs? Checked the analytics? Installed a heat map - recording user interaction script to see how they behave on the page?
And since you already have some early adopters, have you also asked them why they do not interact with what you write? :)