About two years ago, I founded a web dev shop that has since grown into a 10+ employee company and earns me six figures annualized. Starting out, I didn’t know more than a few HTML tags and I didn’t know anybody in the industry.
Luck had a lot to do with my business’s success. If I started over today, even knowing everyone/everything I do now, I still doubt I would come this far, this fast.
But it wasn’t all luck, and even if I only did 20% as well—I’d still be doing alright.
My plan for this thread is to explain everything I did. I think I'll post 4–5 times a week till I run out of worthwhile stuff to add. There’s a lot to say and, unlike 99% of how-to guides, I actually want to give actionable detail, so it will take me a couple weeks to write all the posts. Feel free to add questions about stuff I overlook.
Anyone who reads this shit will know 10x more than I did when I began, and should have no trouble succeeding in this industry—provided he’s got the smarts and the balls to hustle a bit.
Part 1
1.1 Thread Theme Song
1.2 Do Not Learn to Code
First, a little sermonizing.
The recent proliferation of programming threads (here & elsewhere), coding ecourses & bootcamps, and the “GET A STEM / PIPEFITTING DEGREE OR PERISH” hysteria in the wider world piss me off.
It gives guys a very narrow idea of how to make a living and become successful, and it’s what inspired me to share this stuff. So, indulge me a minute...
Seems you can’t turn around these days without someone telling you, You gotta learn to program. A smart boy like you would be a fool to do anything else!
$300 a day if you can spell SAP!
$100k annually if you’ve registered at Codecademy!
Learn to write Python or learn to suck cock under an overpass! And et cetera.
As someone who works in the industry, I support this.
Most of my employees are programmers, so I’ll stand behind anything that encourages a glut of programmers and diminishes the cost of an hour of decent development.
Same time, I find it kinda perplexing. Programming is honest work, but it’s no more stimulating than the mid-level white collar jobs that got pilloried on The Office and Office Space.
Starting salaries can be good, but they top out quickly.
The availability of part-time / flexible positions is way overstated, esp. at junior levels.
And what about personal development? Variety? Adventure? Fulfillment? Good joke—programmers spend 8–12 hours a day staring at computer screens.
If I knew a smart, ambitious 18-year-old with zero tech experience who was looking for a career, no way would I tell him to be a programmer.
Hell, if I knew a smart, ambitious 18-year-old with advanced mastery of the ten most marketable programming languages, I still wouldn’t tell him to be a programmer.
Programming is a fine job, and somebody has to do it. But it’s insane to tell talented young men that they should aspire to be cogs coding away in the bowels of some corporation, or dev shop, or grungy co-working space. Which is where most programmers end up.
If you have the smarts to code, you also have access to far better choices than coding—choices that offer more money, more freedom, more interesting challenges, and more room to grow.
And—this is big—choices that don’t require you to spend months/years learning programming languages while not getting paid.
So, my first piece of unsolicited advice to anyone considering a career in tech is: Do not learn to code. Look for a better way to spend your working life.
Unless you are convinced you were born to program, try something else before you invest the time required to learn a language. Programming jobs aren’t going to disappear. You’ll always have that route as a fallback.
My second piece of advice to anyone interested in tech is…
1.3 Become a digital project manager (PM)
Below, I’ll give more detail about what exactly digital project managers do. For now, it’s enough to know that PMs oversee the work that produces a digital product: an app, a website, a graphic design, a piece of code… the list goes on.
There are PMs who work for themselves, and PMs that work in-house.
The greatest benefits of being a PM, money-wise and lifestyle-wise, accrue to those who run their own businesses. A year or two as an in-house PM provides excellent (tho non-essential) training to become an independent PM.
(Side note for the uninitiated: 'project manager' is a job title that’s used across many industries. There are PMs in power plants, hospitals, universities… and there are probably commonalities, but I can’t speak to being a PM outside the tech industry.)
As the owner of a small web dev shop, I’m basically a PM. I oversee the development and sometimes design of websites.
Like most PMs, my involvement in a project is limited only by the project’s scope. I handle anything from sales to contracts to requirements analysis to business strategy to quality assurance.
Essentially, I employ programmers to write code for clients. As with any entrepreneur, once my employees go home, everything they leave behind falls to me: all the other work, all the other responsibilities, and—most importantly—all of the profits.
1.4 Do the math
What I find funniest about this wave of programming boosterism, is that I never hear anybody asking why companies are paying 24-year-olds $150k to code.
People go gaga over these salaries, like it’s unfathomable how companies can pony up so much.
But, of course, it’s really easy to explain how they do it—
Goldman Sachs can pay its analysts $100k because the bank (and its management) earn far, far more.
An NYC law firm can pay its starting associates $160k because the firm (and its management) earn far, far more.
Random web companies that you and I have never heard of can pay junior developers $100k+ because… you guessed it, they and their managers earn far, far more.
Knowing that, why the hell would you aspire to be a programmer instead of a manager?
Why work for somebody else, when the tech industry makes it incredibly easy to work for yourself, and keep all the profit for yourself?
Why be a serf, when you can choose to be king? Not to put too fine a point on it...
Here are some typical numbers from my business to drive home this point. I share these partly because I’m an arrogant prick, but mostly to drive home the point that it’s way better to employ and manage programmers, than to become one yourself.
1) At any given time, I have the equivalent of 8–10 full time developers on contract.
2) Most make $30 to $40 per hour (equivalent to $60–80k annually, assuming 40 billable hours per week; web developers generally make less than other programmers)
3) When pricing projects, I shoot for a blended rate of $90 to $120 / hour
Now, take the most conservative ends of those ranges, and figure how much the business nets in a single day:
1) 8 developers * 7 hours per developer = 56 billable hours / day. Shave that to 50 so I don’t have to take out a calculator.
2) 50 hours * $90 / hour from clients = $4,500 gross
3) 50 hours * $40 / hour developer wage = $2,000 payroll
4) $4,500 gross – $2,000 payroll = $2,500 net / day
5) $2,500 / day * 250 business days / year =
But anyway.
Some caveats— of course we don’t get paid daily by clients. We get paid in large chunks for hitting project milestones. Income ebbs and flows.
The business has some other expenses: a lawyer on retainer, a couple accountants, a development server, some subscription-based team management softwares.
Still, overhead and expenses are extremely low. I work from home or the library. Developers provide their own machines. Client meetings are mostly over a free conference line.
Point being, this is a very lucrative business.
Companies that pay their programmers exorbitant salaries do so because the programmers earn them racks on racks on racks (or might eventually earn them those racks, in the case of startups).
However valuable coding skills are to programmers, they are vastly more valuable to the people that employ programmers.
So, my suggestion is that you become one of those people.
Setting up shop as an independent PM seems—from my perhaps limited vantage point—the easiest and most accessible way to do that.
Upcoming
That’s all I got time for tonight. Assuming this is interesting / valuable to others, I plan to keep going.
Here’s my preliminary outline of additional topics to cover...
—What is a digital PM / wtf does a PM do
—Requirements (knowledge / skills, personality)
—Perks of PM work (money, lifestyle, career)
—Day in the life
—Project lifecycle (Sales, Contract, Discovery, Design, Development, Ongoing Maintenance)
—Basic Principles: Macro
—Basic Principles: Micro
—Breaking In: Your first job
—Breaking In: Selling yourself as a newbie
—Breaking In: Finding developers
—Breaking In: Newbie mistakes to avoid
—Tools of the trade: task tracking, time tracking, bug tracking, sales tracking, client communication
—Staffing up, staffing down
—What to do in lean times
—Necessary expenses: Support staff, technology
—Other services: design, copy, strategy, content insertion
—Digital specialties: Web dev, software, systems work
—10 point plan to starting your biz
—Why good PMs always have work
…but I wanna keep this flexible. Let me know if there’s something else worth covering.
Or if you’d rather pay me than compete with me, and you got $30k sitting around for a flashy new website, drop me a PM.![[Image: wink.gif]](https://rooshvforum.network/images/smilies/wink.gif)
More tomorrow.
Luck had a lot to do with my business’s success. If I started over today, even knowing everyone/everything I do now, I still doubt I would come this far, this fast.
But it wasn’t all luck, and even if I only did 20% as well—I’d still be doing alright.
My plan for this thread is to explain everything I did. I think I'll post 4–5 times a week till I run out of worthwhile stuff to add. There’s a lot to say and, unlike 99% of how-to guides, I actually want to give actionable detail, so it will take me a couple weeks to write all the posts. Feel free to add questions about stuff I overlook.
Anyone who reads this shit will know 10x more than I did when I began, and should have no trouble succeeding in this industry—provided he’s got the smarts and the balls to hustle a bit.
Part 1
1.1 Thread Theme Song
1.2 Do Not Learn to Code
First, a little sermonizing.
The recent proliferation of programming threads (here & elsewhere), coding ecourses & bootcamps, and the “GET A STEM / PIPEFITTING DEGREE OR PERISH” hysteria in the wider world piss me off.
It gives guys a very narrow idea of how to make a living and become successful, and it’s what inspired me to share this stuff. So, indulge me a minute...
Seems you can’t turn around these days without someone telling you, You gotta learn to program. A smart boy like you would be a fool to do anything else!
$300 a day if you can spell SAP!
$100k annually if you’ve registered at Codecademy!
Learn to write Python or learn to suck cock under an overpass! And et cetera.
As someone who works in the industry, I support this.
Most of my employees are programmers, so I’ll stand behind anything that encourages a glut of programmers and diminishes the cost of an hour of decent development.
Same time, I find it kinda perplexing. Programming is honest work, but it’s no more stimulating than the mid-level white collar jobs that got pilloried on The Office and Office Space.
Starting salaries can be good, but they top out quickly.
The availability of part-time / flexible positions is way overstated, esp. at junior levels.
And what about personal development? Variety? Adventure? Fulfillment? Good joke—programmers spend 8–12 hours a day staring at computer screens.
If I knew a smart, ambitious 18-year-old with zero tech experience who was looking for a career, no way would I tell him to be a programmer.
Hell, if I knew a smart, ambitious 18-year-old with advanced mastery of the ten most marketable programming languages, I still wouldn’t tell him to be a programmer.
Programming is a fine job, and somebody has to do it. But it’s insane to tell talented young men that they should aspire to be cogs coding away in the bowels of some corporation, or dev shop, or grungy co-working space. Which is where most programmers end up.
If you have the smarts to code, you also have access to far better choices than coding—choices that offer more money, more freedom, more interesting challenges, and more room to grow.
And—this is big—choices that don’t require you to spend months/years learning programming languages while not getting paid.
So, my first piece of unsolicited advice to anyone considering a career in tech is: Do not learn to code. Look for a better way to spend your working life.
Unless you are convinced you were born to program, try something else before you invest the time required to learn a language. Programming jobs aren’t going to disappear. You’ll always have that route as a fallback.
My second piece of advice to anyone interested in tech is…
1.3 Become a digital project manager (PM)
Below, I’ll give more detail about what exactly digital project managers do. For now, it’s enough to know that PMs oversee the work that produces a digital product: an app, a website, a graphic design, a piece of code… the list goes on.
There are PMs who work for themselves, and PMs that work in-house.
The greatest benefits of being a PM, money-wise and lifestyle-wise, accrue to those who run their own businesses. A year or two as an in-house PM provides excellent (tho non-essential) training to become an independent PM.
(Side note for the uninitiated: 'project manager' is a job title that’s used across many industries. There are PMs in power plants, hospitals, universities… and there are probably commonalities, but I can’t speak to being a PM outside the tech industry.)
As the owner of a small web dev shop, I’m basically a PM. I oversee the development and sometimes design of websites.
Like most PMs, my involvement in a project is limited only by the project’s scope. I handle anything from sales to contracts to requirements analysis to business strategy to quality assurance.
Essentially, I employ programmers to write code for clients. As with any entrepreneur, once my employees go home, everything they leave behind falls to me: all the other work, all the other responsibilities, and—most importantly—all of the profits.
1.4 Do the math
What I find funniest about this wave of programming boosterism, is that I never hear anybody asking why companies are paying 24-year-olds $150k to code.
People go gaga over these salaries, like it’s unfathomable how companies can pony up so much.
But, of course, it’s really easy to explain how they do it—
Goldman Sachs can pay its analysts $100k because the bank (and its management) earn far, far more.
An NYC law firm can pay its starting associates $160k because the firm (and its management) earn far, far more.
Random web companies that you and I have never heard of can pay junior developers $100k+ because… you guessed it, they and their managers earn far, far more.
Knowing that, why the hell would you aspire to be a programmer instead of a manager?
Why work for somebody else, when the tech industry makes it incredibly easy to work for yourself, and keep all the profit for yourself?
Why be a serf, when you can choose to be king? Not to put too fine a point on it...
Here are some typical numbers from my business to drive home this point. I share these partly because I’m an arrogant prick, but mostly to drive home the point that it’s way better to employ and manage programmers, than to become one yourself.
1) At any given time, I have the equivalent of 8–10 full time developers on contract.
2) Most make $30 to $40 per hour (equivalent to $60–80k annually, assuming 40 billable hours per week; web developers generally make less than other programmers)
3) When pricing projects, I shoot for a blended rate of $90 to $120 / hour
Now, take the most conservative ends of those ranges, and figure how much the business nets in a single day:
1) 8 developers * 7 hours per developer = 56 billable hours / day. Shave that to 50 so I don’t have to take out a calculator.
2) 50 hours * $90 / hour from clients = $4,500 gross
3) 50 hours * $40 / hour developer wage = $2,000 payroll
4) $4,500 gross – $2,000 payroll = $2,500 net / day
5) $2,500 / day * 250 business days / year =
But anyway.
Some caveats— of course we don’t get paid daily by clients. We get paid in large chunks for hitting project milestones. Income ebbs and flows.
The business has some other expenses: a lawyer on retainer, a couple accountants, a development server, some subscription-based team management softwares.
Still, overhead and expenses are extremely low. I work from home or the library. Developers provide their own machines. Client meetings are mostly over a free conference line.
Point being, this is a very lucrative business.
Companies that pay their programmers exorbitant salaries do so because the programmers earn them racks on racks on racks (or might eventually earn them those racks, in the case of startups).
However valuable coding skills are to programmers, they are vastly more valuable to the people that employ programmers.
So, my suggestion is that you become one of those people.
Setting up shop as an independent PM seems—from my perhaps limited vantage point—the easiest and most accessible way to do that.
Upcoming
That’s all I got time for tonight. Assuming this is interesting / valuable to others, I plan to keep going.
Here’s my preliminary outline of additional topics to cover...
—What is a digital PM / wtf does a PM do
—Requirements (knowledge / skills, personality)
—Perks of PM work (money, lifestyle, career)
—Day in the life
—Project lifecycle (Sales, Contract, Discovery, Design, Development, Ongoing Maintenance)
—Basic Principles: Macro
—Basic Principles: Micro
—Breaking In: Your first job
—Breaking In: Selling yourself as a newbie
—Breaking In: Finding developers
—Breaking In: Newbie mistakes to avoid
—Tools of the trade: task tracking, time tracking, bug tracking, sales tracking, client communication
—Staffing up, staffing down
—What to do in lean times
—Necessary expenses: Support staff, technology
—Other services: design, copy, strategy, content insertion
—Digital specialties: Web dev, software, systems work
—10 point plan to starting your biz
—Why good PMs always have work
…but I wanna keep this flexible. Let me know if there’s something else worth covering.
Or if you’d rather pay me than compete with me, and you got $30k sitting around for a flashy new website, drop me a PM.
More tomorrow.