My Company Of One Story - Episode 1 Intro
#businessWelcome to this new blog-series of mine where I want to invite you to follow my path as one-man-company. I want to share with you how I survive working on my own, freelancing, building products, and how I try to follow my business dreams. This is episode number one, where I give you an overview of what I do and what to expect.
If you're interested in why I decided to leave my old job and create my own company, take a look at the article What It's Like Being Self-Employed - A Three Months Recap of mine. Today, I want to give a current overview of my business.
Type Of Business
My business is located in Austria. It is a special kind of business suited for just one person. So this means I'm the only employee. It also means I'm responsible for every aspect of a company like book-keeping, marketing, client-search and from time to time I do also programming :-)
This kind of business lets me also work from wherever I am without having a dedicated office. This saves you a lot of money at the beginning of your new journey. I was working the first 18 months from the living room of my last apartment due to a lack of space. I wouldn't recommend that, but it works. Luckily, we found a new place, and I have my own office room now. When this room is fully finished, I will write a post about it.
How Do I Make Money
At the beginning of my business, my country helped me out with a little bit of money and workshops. My business plan and strategy is pretty straightforward. I earn most of my money by freelancing. This means I work for clients, and I help them with different PHP web projects. Still, my projects have been quite versatile so far:
- Building a customer-service chatbot
- Creating a PHP SDK for an API
- Porting a sponsoring management tool to Laravel Nova
- Helping out to refactor parts of a Cake application to Laravel
The returns of these jobs made up 90% of my income in 2019. So this is how I pay my bills.
Besides freelancing, I do have my products I sell. My first product was an ebook called "Build Chatbots with PHP". Unfortunately, I had to take this product off this year. You can read this article if you are interested in more details about this first product. Additionally, I have my video course Laravel Core Adventures, where I teach about how Laravel works under the hood. This product is still out there, and I plan to release more videos.
Where Do I want to Go
There are two main reasons why I created my own company:
- To be more flexible about how and when I work
- To try to live from my products
The first one is something you get from day one when you work for your own, and I enjoy this flexibility every day. The second one is far more difficult to achieve, and I'm still far away from this point. To be honest, I'm still not sure if I will be able to achieve this goal. But I have to try to find out, and that's what I'm doing. I put one step in front of the other, and I just keep going. You will never know where your journey will take you, but that's ok as long as you are in motion.
Next Up
I just asked on Twitter what topics you are interested in regarding my business. Please add a reply if you want me to cover a topic or answer a specific question.
In the next episode, I want to talk about motivation, which can become quite tricky when you work on your own. Stay tuned!