DEV Community: AdemHodzic

I Made $8280 in March 2021

AdemHodzic — Thu, 15 Apr 2021 13:43:46 +0000

As always, I'm a tad bit late with this month's update.

As predicted in the previous income report, March was a record-breaking month.

I've earned $8280 working for two clients six-ish days a week. I've got a couple of people reaching out to me if I'm available for work but I had to decline them because I'm busy as it is.

I'll change up the format a little bit.

In previous updates, I'd try to break down everything I did for my clients but I've noticed that those sections are pretty thin so I'll replace them with tables that look like this.

Clients	Invoiced	Hours Worked (approx.)
Client #1	$4800	112
Client #2	$3480	58
Total	$8280	170

What Happened to Get Django Saas?

If you've followed my income reports so far, you'd know I work on my product that is a Django/Vue Saas Boilerplate since I've built a few Saas products in this stack.

Well, I've put it on a pause right now.

The combination of always working for clients and COVID restrictions is not playing nice with my motivation. Most days last month I'd wake up at 12, work till 9 and then go to sleep while watching One Piece (I'm on Wano arc so I'm almost done yay).

Luckily I didn't presell the product so there isn't any damage if I don't work on it again except for hours I've already sunk into it.

If nothing I've got a semi-functional codebase starter for my next project

Expenses

These are difficult to track so I'll approximate it and try to keep it tighter the next month.

Expense	Amount
Taxes	$1000
Investments	$1200
Software	$50
New mic	$50
Total	$2300

Conclusion

For April, I predict lower gross income at around $7k probably due to Ramadan and me not being able to put in as much energy as in other months.

In total, I've made $8280 in gross revenue. If we take out $2300 of expenses, I'm left out with $5980 of profit.

I'm really rushing to put this thing out there so I apologize if it's not as detailed as previous updates.

I'd love it if you could give some feedback on this series. I'm always available on Twitter (@triforceOP) so you're more than welcome to send me a DM.

Until next month.

Adem Hodzic

I Made $6725 in February 2021

AdemHodzic — Tue, 09 Mar 2021 20:13:46 +0000

(article version on Kodeblok)

As always, I'm late with this month's income report.

February was another record-breaking month.

I've managed to land another client and start taking my side project, Get Django Saas, more seriously on the marketing side.

TL;DR I made $6725 for 128 hours of work on two projects. I have no other projects in the pipeline.

Projects

Client #1 ($4800 for 96 hours of work)

Except for hiring more engineers, there isn't anything new with Client #1.

I'm still working with them three days a week for a weekly retainer of $1200.

Client #2 ($1925 for 32 hours of work)

As you might have guessed so far, I've landed another client this month.

I wasn't looking for another client but @sahil shared this Hacker News thread and this one person caught my attention so I decided to reach out.

This client is working in niche and tech stack I'm very familiar with so it wasn't a tough sell.

To make an already short story shorter, I've signed a three-months contract at a $60 hourly rate.

Woo hoo!

Get Django Saas ($0 for ? hours of work)

As I've mentioned in January report, I've started building a Django/Vue Saas boilerplate.

I didn't track time on this project but I've got a couple of major things done:

Switched up colors on the landing page not to look like every other template
Started implementing a blog by watching this Gatsby from Scratch YouTube playlist
Wired up authentication (which I'll probably need to rewrite at some point)
Integrated Sendgrid for sending confirmation emails. Originally wanted to do this either via MailChimp or EmailOctopus but these products are used more for email marketing rather than transactional emails
Created the most of common components

Some things I want to do before launching are:

Finish up common components library
Authorization
Teams
Payment provider integration. Stripe is not supported in my country so I have no idea how I'll pull that off
Documentation

I plan to launch on Gumroad and then start building out sample micro-saas products to demo the boilerplate.

Here's how my Trello is looking like right now.

Red tags are critical.

Blue ones are 0.1 release which is when I'll try to get some beta users and do a soft launch.

Indigo ones are either nice-to-haves or something I'll implement after I get a sale or two to validate that this is a product worth working on.

Leads

I've currently got no leads in the pipeline.

I don't know if you'd consider Client#2 a lead since it took us a week from the initial meeting to start working together.

Expenses

Expenses	Amount
Transaction Fees	$480
Taxes	$798
Retirement Fund	$154.5
Ethereum	$320
HelloBonsai	$19
Google Workspace	$12
Namecheap	$8
Github Sponsorship	$5
Patreon	$13
Total	$1810

Of course, with more revenues comes more expenses.

Currently, the biggest expense after taxes is transaction fees. I've had better rates when I used PayPal instead of wiring money directly into my bank account but PayPal would often refuse to transfer money.

Taxes are a bit higher than the amount I made since I've received around $1600 that was locked out in my PayPal account since November.

International transfer fees are bullshit.

Last month I forgot to include a $10 monthly subscription to Google Workspace. I use it just to have a custom email address. I know you can set up custom email via a domain provider like Namecheap but with those emails I can't send or receive any files which is a problem.

If you want details about any other expense on the list you can reference the January report.

Conclusion

February of 2021 was a record-breaking month.

I forecast that March will be too since I started working for Client #2 in the middle of the month.

And I charged him for only 24 out of 32 logged hours because I was looking at the timesheet for the past two weeks instead of the whole month. Oops.

In total, I've made $6725 in gross revenue. If we take out $1810 of expenses, I'm left out with $4915 of profit.

If you like these updates and don't want to miss them out, you can subscribe to my newsletter.

If you want to read previous updates, visit the Archive.

See you again in a month,

Adem Hodzic

I Made $4800 in January 2021

AdemHodzic — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 13:39:40 +0000

It's time for the first update in 2021.

If you're not familiar with these posts, I'm documenting m journey from $5/hour Fiverr code monkey to $100/hour consultant.

You can check out my previous updates on my profile or visit the archive on my blog.

Although January was a wild month in the world, I had quite a chill one.

I've restructured the deal with Client #1.

Some pretty interesting projects came my way.

And I started making my own product.

Let's get started with the update.

TL;DR I made $4800 for 12 days of work on one project. I have two other projects in the pipeline.

Projects

Client #1

I've already mentioned that Client #1 got funding. Now that they have money, we decided to restructure our deal a bit.

The First thing is that we switched from charging by the hour to charging by the day. Client #1 currently occupies three days in the week.

Next up we switched from $35/hour to $400/day.

Leads

Two people reached out this month.

Coincidentally, they both work in finance and want to create their own SaaS product to escape the grind.

I've had a total of three meetings, two of which were introductions, and one deep-dive.

Lead #1

Lead #1 wants to make a sales team performance tracker that integrates seamlessly with Stripe. The budget is around $5-$10k.

I had an introduction meeting with him where I asked if we can get in touch in a week after he creates some mockups so I get a better picture of his vision.

I've sent one follow-up email to which I haven't got a reply. I'll send another one in the following days.

Lead #2

Lead #2 wants to make a platform for discovering new food products. The budget is up to $5k.

I had two meetings with him.

It's the same situation as with Lead #1 where I asked for a mockup before I give out a quote.

I received a mockup this week, had a deep-dive conversation to find more about the project, and I've written him a proposal in Bonsai.

Bonsai notifies me when someone sees proposals and I got an email that he saw it. I'll follow up with him in a couple of days.

I have no preference on which project I'd rather work on.

My Product

After talking with these two leads, I've realized that I can win the project even if they don't accept the first proposal.

If they reject the first one, I'll propose another one which will be 10-15 hours shorter but I'll ask them to buy a license for a SaaS starter.

But there's a problem with that plan. There is no a good SaaS starter kit for Django and Vue.

My current favorite stack for bootstrapped products like these is Django + Vue.

I've tried to find a SaaS starter kit for this stack but couldn't find a good one so I've started writing my own.

I introduce you to Get Django SaaS. An opinionated SaaS Starter kit for Django and Vue.

So far I've:

Put up an email capture website
Ran ads for the product
Setup backend and frontend base projects
Bootstrapped base layout for frontend
Written email/password authentication system on the backend
Created login and register page

Some things I still need to do before I can call this an MVP:

Wire frontend auth with backend
Write a system for CRUD scaffolding
Add email integration with MailChimp and EmailOctopus
Integrate billing with Stripe and Paddle
Design and code common components a customer can choose from to customize the base look
Add teams and email invite system
Documentation, documentation, and more documentation

After I implement all this I'll see whether it will fly and if there are freelancers that are struggling with the same problem.

You must be asking yourself: "Hey Adem, it's awesome that you're building your own product but how did you validate this idea?".

There's a ton of SaaS starter kits out there so there's a market for it.
I'm scratching my own niche. One famous SaaS starter kit is Laravel Spark and its creator, Taylor Otwell, said that he'd be fine if no one was buying it since it's helpful for him. I'm going with the same approach. Even if I don't get any customers, I'll still have an awesome starter kit for future projects.

Expenses

Moving on I'll include my expenses for the month.

Expenses	Amount
Transaction Fees	$259.50
Taxes	$495
Retirement Fund	$154.5
Ethereum	$320
HelloBonsai	$19
Namecheap	$8
Github Sponsorship	$5
Patreon	$13
Total	$1274

Detailed breakdown

Client #1 uses Deel to process payroll. I get paid via SWIFT so the transaction fees are SWIFT fees + my local bank fees.

Lucky for me, in Bosnia taxes are pretty low and they come at a bit over 10%.

Each month I have to contribute to the retirement fund a small amount of $154 to be eligible for a pension when I get old.

I buy ETH each month to get the advantage of dollar-cost averaging and compounding effect. This is not an opinion on what should you invest in. I'm breaking down my business expenses because my crypto investments my other pension.

Hello Bonsai (affiliate link) subscription costs $19. Worth every penny.

I bought getdjangosaas.com from Namecheap for $8.

I spend $18 supporting some creators and open-source contributors for the hard work they're doing.

Conclusion

January 2021 was one of the better months I had.

I've made $4800 gross. If we factor in $1274 of expenses, my profit is $3526.

If you want to read these updates as soon as I write them, you can sign up for my newsletter.

Want to read previous updates? Visit Archive.

Thanks for reading,
Adem Hodzic

I Made $2695 in November 2020

AdemHodzic — Thu, 17 Dec 2020 09:56:53 +0000

Welcome to the second issue of Adem's Freelance Journey.

I know it's the middle of the month and most of you expected a new issue on the first of December.

There's a very simple explanation for this.

I'm lazy and got hooked on PUBG.

Now that my poor excuses are out of the way, here's the November breakdown of my freelance business.

TL;DR made $2695 for ~ 74 hours of work on three different projects. Have two other projects in the pipeline.

Projects

Client #1 ($1575 for 45 hours of work)

Very busy month for Client #1.

We landed a very big customer couple of months ago and needed to finish up some custom work by the end of November.

If you've spent more than a day in the software development you'll know this means we were at least a month short of time.

We're currently rolling it out to their test group and it's going very smoothly if I may say so.

In other news, Client #1 raised money from VCs.

So starting January or February I'll start charging them my regular rate of $50 an hour.

Client #2 ($420 for 12 hours of work)

Not a lot of work from Client #2.

To be fair, he's developing all the critical pieces of the product.

I'm hired just to help him out on some less sexy tasks.

Client #3 ($700 for ~16 hours of work)

I've wrapped up a project that I've been working on with Client #3.

He's delighted with my work and wants to keep working with me, so he re-hired me to keep maintaining his app for $50 an hour.

Future leads

With Client #3 rehiring me and Client #1 raising funds, I don't think I need to look for more clients.

I'll be taking some client calls just in case something cool pops up.

I've already talked with a couple of IndieHackers and I think there's a high possibility I'll end up working with some on their projects.

Conclusion

All in all, November was a pretty good month. Not my best but not terrible either.

The only thing that was bad is dealing with PayPal. I do 100% of my invoicing through PayPal.

It refused to send funds to my bank quoting that there's an issue with my bank. I called up my bank and they said it was an issue on the PayPal side.

Luckily, after two weeks, I've managed to get the money into my bank account.

It turns out I can only withdraw $1200 at a time (which is annoying because I need to pay $5 every time).

But the important thing is that it works I guess.

Support

If you like what you're reading and would like to help me out, sharing this post with your friends on Twitter would help me out so much : - )

Check out previous months updates

If you want to read these updates as soon as I write them, you can sign up for my newsletter.

I've Made $1844 in October of 2020

AdemHodzic — Fri, 06 Nov 2020 20:10:52 +0000

Welcome to the first issue of Adem's Freelance Journey.

When I first started freelancing I didn't have anyone to turn in for advice. I've had to learn everything myself.

And no one shared the "dirty" parts of running a freelance business.

So I want to change this.

I'll try to be as open as possible in these posts and share the struggles of everyday life as a freelancer.

I'll try to write these posts every month.

I'll NOT share any sensitive information about my clients.

With this said let's get started.

TL;DR made $1844 for ~ 70 hours of work on three different projects. Have two other projects in the pipeline.

Income

I've made $1844 this month.

This seems pretty low for a freelance software developer and honestly, it is.

September was a super-busy month so I burnt down a bit this month and didn't feel like working a lot.

Projects

Client #1 ($1739 for ~49 hours of work)

I've been working on this client's project every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday as a part-time developer.

I charge him $35 an hour which is lower than my usual rate of $50 an hour. The reason I'm charging so low is the founders of this company are ex FAANG employees, they have a super cool and useful product and they're gaining a lot of traction in their niche.

The problem is they're 100% bootstrapped so they can't pay me my usual rate but it's fine for now.

Client #2 ($105 for 3 hours of work)

Client #2 is also a bootstrapped SaaS company.

It's run by one person with half a dozen freelancers.

I'm charging this client $35 an hour because we've been working for quite a while and the work I do is pretty chill so there's no real reason to increase my rate.

We've done a lot of work during September and I didn't hear back from him until a couple of days ago so that's why I've worked with him for only 3 hours.

Client #3 ($0 for ~18 hours of work)

Client #3 doesn't like paying freelancers hourly so we agreed on $1000 for about 20 hours of work.

I've already charged him $300 dollars and I expect to invoice him the rest sometime next week.

It's a classic board game made in React and WordPress.

Future leads

Work was slow the first three weeks of October.

I was about to start scouring IndieHackers, Reddit, and HackerNews for new opportunities.

Fortunately, Client #2 reached out if I'm available to do some work on his side project which I've accepted.

Also, Client #3 is pretty satisfied with the current state of the project and he's planning to hire me for another project once we're finished with the current one which is pretty cool.

Conclusion

I hope this post was fun to read as much it was fun for me to write it.

I'm looking forward to reading your feedback so please don't be shy in the comments.

If you want to read these updates as soon as I write them, you can sign up for my newsletter.

Thanks for reading,
Adem