I'm writing my year in review post for 2017 and the thought of maintaining this trajectory in 2018 is making me shit my pants.
β Swizec Teller (@Swizec) January 2, 2018
2017 was bonkers. It started with an almost finished rewrite of React+D3v4 and a realization that I had 6x'd my income in 4 years.
π₯ Start with a bang πͺ
Then I got busy with the sponsored Shoutem React Native school project and everything else slowed down. Creating a new React Native app every other week is hard.
So it took me 7 months of tweaking and updating React+D3v4 before it was ready. During this time, I also experimented with 1-on-1 coaching, tried selling React & D3 workshops to consumers, and started vlogging.
Vlogging is fun, great for brand building. People comment about it a lot in real life, but they don't press the magic Like button as much. Β―_(γ)_/Β―
Overall, the business was on life support. I flirted with the idea of giving up and living a normie life almost daily. It just seems so much easier.
You go to work, you build what you're told, you offload your stress, do overtime when the boss likes it, and collect your fat paycheck. Being a Silicon Valley startup employee is easy.
But it's not as fun.
It's like my friend said, "If you quit your sidehustle, you're just gonna start a new one. Do you really think you can sit still and focus on One Thing?"
No.
Business picked up again in September. React+D3v4 launched to little excitement and tiny fanfare. Preorders were great, but there's only so long you can keep people excited. When your product is 7 months late or moreβ¦ heh π
React+D3v4 did make $6.5k during launch, so yay. Best sidehustle month in history. πͺ
Best sidehustle month ever! $9013 :partyparrot:
β Swizec Teller (@Swizec) October 5, 2017
Here's how π https://t.co/lWVpZ5EpOI
Also explains why it wasn't $90,013 π pic.twitter.com/kd3OOH160K
Until October. October made me crap my pants.
A workshop deal from Real World React fell in my lap and I taught the StubHub SF team about React and Redux. I also turned 30 and ran a birthday promotion that made almost $6k in 1 day.
Life was good. I was flying high. Then November was bad, then December was good again. Another StubHub workshop. This time in Boston.
Breakdown
For the curious, here's how the year breaks down.
Total revenue: $72,167
Product sales: $37,240
Packt royalties: $2,188
Workshops: $19,684
React Native School: $10,793
Time investment: 864 hours
An average of 16 hours per week, making a respectable but not great $83/h.
Total cost/investment: ~$43,000
Creating a measly post-cost pre-tax income of $33/hour.
Better than minimum wage ($13/h) but talk to any engineer in Silicon Valley and they will tell you that number is just sad. I might as well give up now.
But where's the fun in that?
What I wanna do and build in 2018
Ultimately the goal for 2018 is to maintain this trajectory π
That means I gotta 2x my revenue. A cool $144,000. Preferably without 3x-ing the cost or worse.
Why?
Because freedom, that's why. Money is freedom.
The more π° you have, the more you can do whatever you want. Something cool tickle your intellect? Wanna lock yourself in your room for 2 weeks and hack on something cool?
Can't do that if you got bills to pay and nothing to pay them with.
And I really want to do that.
So how am I going to get there? I don't know yet to be honest. It's daunting.
Hitting $70k was largely a matter of luck. There was no systematic process. No step-by-step plan I followed to get there. I just did things and hoped for the best.
What I wanna build
My strategic plan is a lot like that. I'm going to Do Things and then Stuff Will Happen. I need to work on that plan, but here's a list of some things plan to create π
- I wanna start a daily video series. Learn X while you poop. 2-min videos teaching React and Redux based on my StubHub workshop. Expand if that goes well.
Iβve been thinking of a project for 2018. Something like βLearn X on your morning poopβ where X is javascript or CS or code or somesuch.
β Swizec Teller (@Swizec) December 29, 2017
It would be a daily series of 2 or 3 min videos.
Should I do it? π€
Not sure yet if this will be a paid product, a membership product, or a purely brand building marketing product. Perhaps all 3.
- Iβm going to update es2017.io for 2018 and add any new stuff that's coming to JavaScript. Keep that cheatsheet current.
- Create similar interactive cheatsheets for React, Redux, MobX, and D3. Separate cheatsheet for each. They're great lead magnets for email subscribers.
- I want to build an open source Make Your Own Blockchain library based on Redux, Firebase, and some WebRTC. This is already in progress. Not sure yet where I'm going with this, but it's scratching my intellectual curiosity real good.If the blockchain works, I want to use it for a project/product/startup I had in mind. Not ready yet to tell you what it is just yet. π
But that doesn't give me too many products I can sell, now does it? Guess I'm just gonna have to write books/guides/courses about the stuff I learn along the way.
It feels dangerous to set that as a sort of throwaway side goal, but I want to get better at iterating and launching products quickly. When I learn a cool new piece of tech, or figure something out, it shouldn't take me 9 months to write a guide about it.
What needs to improve
And that's what needs to improve. I have to get better at launching infoproducts quicker. I'm already good at writing every day. I can sit down and blurt out thousands of words on a topic.
Those Shoutem React Native articles, 4000+ words each? They took me 3 days to research and 2 days to write and video.
If you put that in a book, it makes about 30 pages. I should definitely be able to launch more books and courses. Just gotta find the fire under butt. π₯π
Another very important part of the sidehustle that I need to improve is https://swizec.com. The homepage hasn't been updated in 3 years and doesn't even mention my sidehustle, which is ridiculous.
My blog is also in dire need of an update. It doesn't work well on mobile, syntax highlighting is all messed up, and it feels crufty and weird looking.
So I'm gonna fix that. But I'm going to hire someone to help me.
Yes, I'm fundamentally a web developer. Yes, I can do it on my own. And yet I haven't found the time to do it in years. π
Oh, and I have to work on my quote unquote Growth Engine. That's the part of the business that brings in new people every day that you can talk to. I have some ideas π€
Fin
π€
Continue reading about How I sidehustled $72,167 last year, and what I wanna do next
Semantically similar articles hand-picked by GPT-4
- How I sidehustled $180k and why it almost killed my business
- How my bank account went from $909 to $50,000 in 2019
- $2890 May sidehustle report
- $9013 September sidehustle report βΒ or why the React + D3v4 launch was not 6 figures or even 5
- $5874 March sidehustle report
Learned something new?
Read more Software Engineering Lessons from Production
I write articles with real insight into the career and skills of a modern software engineer. "Raw and honest from the heart!" as one reader described them. Fueled by lessons learned over 20 years of building production code for side-projects, small businesses, and hyper growth startups. Both successful and not.
Subscribe below π
Software Engineering Lessons from Production
Join Swizec's Newsletter and get insightful emails π on mindsets, tactics, and technical skills for your career. Real lessons from building production software. No bullshit.
"Man, love your simple writing! Yours is the only newsletter I open and only blog that I give a fuck to read & scroll till the end. And wow always take away lessons with me. Inspiring! And very relatable. π"
Have a burning question that you think I can answer? Hit me up on twitter and I'll do my best.
Who am I and who do I help? I'm Swizec Teller and I turn coders into engineers with "Raw and honest from the heart!" writing. No bullshit. Real insights into the career and skills of a modern software engineer.
Want to become a true senior engineer? Take ownership, have autonomy, and be a force multiplier on your team. The Senior Engineer Mindset ebook can help π swizec.com/senior-mindset. These are the shifts in mindset that unlocked my career.
Curious about Serverless and the modern backend? Check out Serverless Handbook, for frontend engineers π ServerlessHandbook.dev
Want to Stop copy pasting D3 examples and create data visualizations of your own? Learn how to build scalable dataviz React components your whole team can understand with React for Data Visualization
Want to get my best emails on JavaScript, React, Serverless, Fullstack Web, or Indie Hacking? Check out swizec.com/collections
Did someone amazing share this letter with you? Wonderful! You can sign up for my weekly letters for software engineers on their path to greatness, here: swizec.com/blog
Want to brush up on your modern JavaScript syntax? Check out my interactive cheatsheet: es6cheatsheet.com
By the way, just in case no one has told you it yet today: I love and appreciate you for who you are β€οΈ