Skip to content
7 Year Discounts on CueCam, Video Pencil, Shoot and More...
Lots of discounts for June 3026, here’s why.
7 years ago I stopped selling my time
This was a huge step for me. Why?
This is my last contracting invoice:
Remote work, 4 days a week, with very nice people.
And if I’m honest, my workload was pretty light.
But I was depressed.
Here’s the kind of thing I was building:
You click the deal, it does a fancy CSS masking animation. Two weeks of back and forth with designers, like it was the most important thing in the world. It makes me tired just thinking about it.
When I was a child, I wanted to be a rockstar millionaire and then parlay that into solving world poverty and death with nanotechnology.
But it’s not all about failed ambitions.
It’s also about the difference between earning a salary and building wealth.
I got paid handsomely but I didn’t own the products of my labour.
If the company made 2% more on special deals, that wouldn’t affect my income.
When you’re selling your time, the most you can hope for is an occasional incremental pay rise, no matter how much you work.
I work hard.
I’d throw myself into every contract, making seismic changes to development practices and business goals along the way. Founders are happy to see you become a ‘believer’, but that’s the only way I could bring myself to work for anybody, by believing in what they were trying to create, or that I could steer them towards creating something I considered worthwhile.
When you’re a contractor, nobody’s protecting you from anything, least of all yourself. So I would routinely burn out. Severely.
I’d be charging a lot of money, but then not being able to work while I recovered. Which pretty much balances back out to a normal salary. And meanwhile, I’m barely paying off my debts, and I’m certainly not building any wealth.
If my time was worth this much to so many companies, surely it should be worth MORE to myself?
The downside of building your own business is you might fail and have to go back to selling your time.
The upside is unlimited.
If you can build something that people want, especially in software, the line could just keep going up.
So instead of selling my time so I could sometimes make some music, and do some app projects on the side, I thought I could just have the apps be my income and have time for music after that.
This embedded link can't be shown.
This embedded link can't be shown.
This embedded link can't be shown.
Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.
This is not the way.
Try clicking the ··· in the right corner or using a keyboard shortcut (
CtrlP
) instead.