I spent years working my way up the ranks of agencies in the UK. For the last 4 years I've been working remotely and landed my dream role of Technical Director of an agency working with huge brands such as Glenfiddich Whisky and Bundesliga.
I recently left that role and I'm living off savings whilst I go back to my development roots and my real passion of building custom products and services in the hope of building passive (ish) revenue streams.
My first marginally successful product is a WooCommerce payment gateway plugin for a Hungarian bank. I am now working on my first major SaaS product which will be ready for launch in ~3 weeks.
Never done an AMA before and thought it could be interesting and self-reflective. Ask me anything!
Top comments (5)
I would love to do something like this eventually!
If you don't mind me asking, how long do you think you're savings will last before you get in hot water, if you don't haven't been able to generate revenue yet?
Any sneak peeks at what the SasS project might be? 😉
Life will be tight until some other products start to return some revenue but I'm hoping I can maintain this indefinitely as the payment gateway almost covers my rent and I just need to find a way to cover my other expenses. Worst case scenario I'll need to find some contracts in around 3 months from now.
Of course, the first SaaS project is an A/B testing tool for Metadata. It is pretty much built, just going through the UX and making sure there are no bugs over the next couple of weeks. There is a (very basic) landing page at polkadottiger.com if you wish to sign up to the mailing list.
That's awesome that the payment gateway covers your rent!
Good luck on the product launch! I hope it goes great, that landing page looks really nice! Hopefully it takes off when you launch!
That's an inspiring story! I'd love to know how you made the transition to remote work? Do you think there is a threshold of experience below which securing remote work is just not feasible?
Thanks, i'm glad you found it interesting.
I really lucked into my situation. It wasn't originally part of my plan to work remotely but I got recommended for a role with a team who all worked remotely. At the time I wasn't looking for work but the salary was the same and the chance to work remotely and travel while working was too great to pass up.
The team and role ended up to be fantastic and it really helped my transition as they all had experience working remotely so they could share tips for when I lost productivity.
I do think that working in a team for at least a year or two before switching to working remotely would be very beneficial as I think you can learn so much quicker from those around you. Remote teams can be great but for that 2 seconds of help from a more experienced team member, nothing can compete with being in the same room.