Ask HN: How did you escape your safe 9-5 job?
I escaped the 9-to-5 with freelance web development.  I never actually had a full time job because I decided I never wanted one when I was doing a summer job in college that required me to sit in one place programming for 6-8 hours a day.  I discovered Hacker News around that time and the idea that I could make money on my own and was hooked.<p>I started out doing what basically amounts to working in an agency.  A business guy I graduated with wanted to start a marketing company and he got the jobs and I built the websites.  It was still a contract setup and I made $50 an hour because Hacker News told me that $50 was a good starting rate so I asked for it and he gave it to me.<p>Then I got into doing Django web development and charged around $90&#x2F;hr because I got a lead and I didn&#x27;t really want the work so I said, &quot;My rate is $90&#x2F;hr&quot; and he said &quot;okay&quot; and from then on my rate was $90&#x2F;hr. (Ha!)  I just recently got $125&#x2F;hr in a recent project.<p>Starting when I was still sort of in college helped a lot.  Living in small town Indiana where the college was and this company started out helped a lot lot.  Rent at the time was $150&#x2F;month with a roommate.  Having very low expenses meant I could experiment more and not have to worry as much about paying rent.  Not having any dependents helped too.<p>The biggest advice I have to anyone who wants to go out on their own: learn business skills.  If you already know how to develop, you may think that&#x27;s all you need.  It&#x27;s a meme at this point that &quot;If you build (a SaaS) they will come.&quot;  No, they really wont.  You need marketing, marketing, marketing, and coding to build a webapp.<p>This is why I recommend people start out freelancing first.  Then go into building consulting services.  And _then_ build products.  Freelancing is so much easier to make money with.  Any competent developer can get $100&#x2F;hr+ with some networking.  That will teach you how to talk to clients and how to sell yourself.  All things you need if you are going to sell products, but it&#x27;s way easier and you don&#x27;t also have the burden of designing a good product.<p>Consulting services are very lucrative, but require even more business sense.  If you can business and code at the same time, you are in a verrrrry small percentage of people, and have superpowers.<p>Build your audience somehow.  You&#x27;ll need one if you are going to sell a product.  Make the product first as a service that &quot;doesn&#x27;t scale&quot;.  That is, manually implement the business outcome your software would give your customer manually yourself.<p>Then if you feel the need build a product based on your consulting business.  Create rungs on a &quot;product ladder&quot; - free content you put out, paid info products, higher price consulting services, and then at the very top automate all of it in software.  It&#x27;s a model I&#x27;ve seen a number of people do that will be a lot &quot;less risky&quot; than quitting your job and building a webapp blind without anyone watching.<p>I tried this once.  I quit all my freelance work for a year and lived off of savings.  I then proceeded to not make anything anyone wanted and just ended up spending all of my money.  Then I got back into freelancing and have money again.<p>In general, this strategy is: &quot;Have safe money and risky money&quot;.  Your employment is safe money.  It&#x27;s boring, but safe.  If you want to get out on your own with less risk, figure out a way to get more time but keep that safe money (maybe try to reduce hours, maybe try to reduce your commute, maybe try to work 4 days a week), then pick up freelancing part part time.  Then once freelancing becomes &quot;safe money&quot;, quit your job.  Work on freelancing part time and build a business that is &quot;risky money&quot;.<p>This is what I&#x27;m now doing and I have managed to make a reasonable living while having a lot more time to pursue ventures I&#x27;m passionate about.  I still spend about 20 hours of my day doing &quot;boring&quot; web development work, but it pays for the rest of my life.  I&#x27;ll probably always keep at least a little of that work because it pays so well for the time put in.<p>Happy to talk about this more, this subject is of great interest to me and is something I&#x27;ve thought about a lot.  My email&#x27;s in my profile if you want.  I think your mindset is more reasonable than many people seem to think, and I wish you the best in your quest to find work you love.  It&#x27;s a long term process but in 10 years of doing this I wouldn&#x27;t have it any other way.