Foreword
I am not very good at writing but I am trying to change that. This is just another step I am taking in this journey.
I am a 35 year old male originally from Europe. For privacy reasons I'll keep some details vague but I'll try to answer as many questions as possible if there are any.
I first came across this forum a long time ago. I signed up and promptly forgot about it.
I am currently a senior software developer at a medium size tech company in Stockholm. I love my job but I am not free. The golden handcuffs are real.
How did I get here?
This is quite a long story but I'll try to stick to the essential points.
I am a college dropout. I was never really good at studying in a classroom with other people. I prefer to learn things by myself, experiment and fail in order to eventually succeed.
From 18 -22
Lived in Japan, studied the Japanese language and did odd jobs such as bar-tending and serving people food.
From 23-25
Lived in the US worked at my parents restaurant as a server.
From 25-26
Moved back to my home country. Through connections, I managed to land a job as a real estate agent. The money was sh$t, the workplace was sh$t but I learned to sell and started seeing some success although I was not happy. I was partying all the time, not making any real progress in my life overall. Not much money to my name, no real home, no girlfriend.
The low point came one day when I woke up on my parent's couch as I had just lost my apartment. With $100 to my name, I realized that the path I was on was going to lead me to a very dark place if nothing changed.
With nothing to lose I reached out to my best friend and asked him for advice. He recommended a change of scenery.
I quit my real estate job which was making miserable and got hired as a construction worker under the table by a friend of a friend.
I saved every cent and bought a one way ticket for Australia.
From 26-34
Landing in Australia with no network, no contacts and $2000 in my pocket, this was the make or break moment.
I quickly landed a job as a landscaper. I worked my a$$ off for the owner of the company and eventually 3 months after starting the job, he put me charge of my own crew of guys to manage.
Things were starting to go well but I had a fallout with the owner and had to leave the job. I found another job as a construction laborer for a home owner who was doing extensive renovations at his house. I worked there for the better part of a year doing all kinds of jobs, learning as I went.
I liked it but construction work was starting to take a toll on my health so I decided I should try to find a white collar job. Not sure about what to do, I started exploring tech and borrowed my girlfriend's(now wife) laptop to work on small baby projects on the weekends or in the evenings after my day job.
I pitched an idea for a business on a classified ads website in order to find co-founders since my coding skills were utter crap and managed to get 1 other developer on board to help me get the website up and running.
I guess, now looking back, I became the product manager and I prioritized the tasks for the other developer. But the other developer had a full time job and could not commit to working on the project full time(which was completely normal).
Progress was too slow, so I decided that the only way to make this work was that I learned to code properly and do it myself. I started learning more and more and making more changes to the website by myself.
However due to poor market research and having no idea about marketing, SEO and everything else needed to make this work I decided to shut down the project.
But I still wanted out of construction, so I hatched a plan. I convinced my wife(girlfriend a the time) to let me study full time on my own for 3 months in order to transition to a tech career. I saved and scraped every cent for 3 months before quitting the construction job and moved in with her to save my rent money.
For 3 months, I studied and created projects for 12-14 hours a day, 7 days a week. Once I had a few decent projects I thought that it was time to get a job but getting a foot in the door with just a few basic projects and no diploma nor experience was tough. I needed a way to get in.
Desperate to prove myself, I reached out to startup incubators in the city where I lived and asked the owners/managers to spread the word on my behalf that I was looking to join a startup, any startup as an unpaid intern. I pitched myself as a hard working person , a fast learner who only ask to be given a shot.
Within two days, I started talking to 3 startups and landed a junior developer position(unpaid) with one startup. I worked with them for 2 months shadowing those guys and learning as much as i could. I was coding while having lunch, breakfast and dinner. I gave it all. But the startup wasn't going anywhere. No product market fit unfortunately. I had a good relationship with the founder so I approached him and asked him to be a reference for me for my next job. He agreed and understood that I needed to move on.
I started applying to many jobs and eventually somebody was interested(most likely due to the glowing reference given by the founder of the startup). But I wasn't hired yet. I needed to prove myself. I failed the code challenge but sent an email to the recruiter and asked him to pass it along to whoever was in charge of reviewing the coding challenge. In this email, I thanked the company for giving me shot, that I knew the coding challenge was not working as required but that I was glad I got to try to solve it and that I learned a ton from this experience.
Then I started sending out more resumes as I thought that this would be the end of it. Two hours later, I got a call from the recruiter telling me that I had utterly failed the coding challenge but that the email I wrote to the hiring manager of the company showed that I had passion and the will to learn and get better. Because of that, the hiring manager asked the recruiter to invite me to an onsite interview.
I nearly screamed of joy when I heard the news but I tried to keep it together on the phone. Two days later I am at the onsite interview and it's not going well. But I give it my all. before leaving the hiring manager who was also a senior developer at the company tells me that I wont get the job. I am too inexperienced. I thank him for his time, apologize for this sh$t show and tell him that I respect his decision and learned a lot during the process.
I got home and started applying to more jobs again. Later, on the same day in the afternoon, I get a phone call from the recruiter, he says the hiring manger/senior dev wants to talk to me and sends me his phone number.
I call the guy and he tells me that he wants to hire me not because of my skills but because of my drive and willingness to learn but I need to prove myself and that if I cant do that within 3 months, I'll be fired. I accept the job offer and started the next Monday.
I stayed with this company for almost 4 years, first as a junior then as a mid level developer. Eventually the company got acquired and it was time for a change. Changing jobs was so much easier. I aced multiple interviews and got a great salary boost.
But after almost a year and half at the new company I started getting jittery and after talking with my wife we decided it was time to leave Australia. By now we both had dual citizenship so we can come back to Australia anytime we want.
We are both European citizens so we decided to explore European countries. Having lived in a warm climate in Australia, we decided to move to Sweden to completely change scenery. I have now been working at a tech startup in Stockholm for about 12 months as a senior software developer. Life is good. Good money, great life balance but I yearn for something more: FREEDOM.
Since I started my career as a software developer, I haven't stopped working on personal projects.
Throughout the years I have created many of them. Most of the time without a plan to market then or sell them. Just aimless creation. But things are slowly changing.
In no particular order I created:
- a job website for English teachers
- a link aggregating service( think Linktree)
- a real estate saas
- multiple browser extensions
Now
Having learned a lot from my previous failures I decided this time to not try to reinvent the wheel. I created a browser extension that does one thing and one thing only. This idea is already validated and users are already paying for it but the competition is sh$t and I know I can do better. I am also investing heavily in marketing channels like Facebook groups where my users are hanging out and SEO.
I am getting new users everyday and talking to users via emails and phone calls every few days. Since the user base is growing I am just about to release a paid plan for the browser extension and charge a monthly fee to use it.
I am predicting a 5% conversion rate from free to paid users which should be enough to validate this idea further. If that works, I plan to grow the extension side by side while working at my day job and resign once the profits from the extension are between 25% to 50% of my monthly income.
I am a risk taker and I make my own luck, but now I have a wife to support(due to personal circumstances, she can only work for limited hours) so I can't just quit and work full time on this new project even though I truly believe it to be my golden ticket.
Such is life and I make the best of it everyday.
I plan to create a progress thread to keep myself accountable. I am motivated and nothing will stop me form succeding in exiting the rat race. One way or another.
Thanks for reading this introduction. I hope that someone somewhere can learn something from it.
I am not very good at writing but I am trying to change that. This is just another step I am taking in this journey.
I am a 35 year old male originally from Europe. For privacy reasons I'll keep some details vague but I'll try to answer as many questions as possible if there are any.
I first came across this forum a long time ago. I signed up and promptly forgot about it.
I am currently a senior software developer at a medium size tech company in Stockholm. I love my job but I am not free. The golden handcuffs are real.
How did I get here?
This is quite a long story but I'll try to stick to the essential points.
I am a college dropout. I was never really good at studying in a classroom with other people. I prefer to learn things by myself, experiment and fail in order to eventually succeed.
From 18 -22
Lived in Japan, studied the Japanese language and did odd jobs such as bar-tending and serving people food.
From 23-25
Lived in the US worked at my parents restaurant as a server.
From 25-26
Moved back to my home country. Through connections, I managed to land a job as a real estate agent. The money was sh$t, the workplace was sh$t but I learned to sell and started seeing some success although I was not happy. I was partying all the time, not making any real progress in my life overall. Not much money to my name, no real home, no girlfriend.
The low point came one day when I woke up on my parent's couch as I had just lost my apartment. With $100 to my name, I realized that the path I was on was going to lead me to a very dark place if nothing changed.
With nothing to lose I reached out to my best friend and asked him for advice. He recommended a change of scenery.
I quit my real estate job which was making miserable and got hired as a construction worker under the table by a friend of a friend.
I saved every cent and bought a one way ticket for Australia.
From 26-34
Landing in Australia with no network, no contacts and $2000 in my pocket, this was the make or break moment.
I quickly landed a job as a landscaper. I worked my a$$ off for the owner of the company and eventually 3 months after starting the job, he put me charge of my own crew of guys to manage.
Things were starting to go well but I had a fallout with the owner and had to leave the job. I found another job as a construction laborer for a home owner who was doing extensive renovations at his house. I worked there for the better part of a year doing all kinds of jobs, learning as I went.
I liked it but construction work was starting to take a toll on my health so I decided I should try to find a white collar job. Not sure about what to do, I started exploring tech and borrowed my girlfriend's(now wife) laptop to work on small baby projects on the weekends or in the evenings after my day job.
I pitched an idea for a business on a classified ads website in order to find co-founders since my coding skills were utter crap and managed to get 1 other developer on board to help me get the website up and running.
I guess, now looking back, I became the product manager and I prioritized the tasks for the other developer. But the other developer had a full time job and could not commit to working on the project full time(which was completely normal).
Progress was too slow, so I decided that the only way to make this work was that I learned to code properly and do it myself. I started learning more and more and making more changes to the website by myself.
However due to poor market research and having no idea about marketing, SEO and everything else needed to make this work I decided to shut down the project.
But I still wanted out of construction, so I hatched a plan. I convinced my wife(girlfriend a the time) to let me study full time on my own for 3 months in order to transition to a tech career. I saved and scraped every cent for 3 months before quitting the construction job and moved in with her to save my rent money.
For 3 months, I studied and created projects for 12-14 hours a day, 7 days a week. Once I had a few decent projects I thought that it was time to get a job but getting a foot in the door with just a few basic projects and no diploma nor experience was tough. I needed a way to get in.
Desperate to prove myself, I reached out to startup incubators in the city where I lived and asked the owners/managers to spread the word on my behalf that I was looking to join a startup, any startup as an unpaid intern. I pitched myself as a hard working person , a fast learner who only ask to be given a shot.
Within two days, I started talking to 3 startups and landed a junior developer position(unpaid) with one startup. I worked with them for 2 months shadowing those guys and learning as much as i could. I was coding while having lunch, breakfast and dinner. I gave it all. But the startup wasn't going anywhere. No product market fit unfortunately. I had a good relationship with the founder so I approached him and asked him to be a reference for me for my next job. He agreed and understood that I needed to move on.
I started applying to many jobs and eventually somebody was interested(most likely due to the glowing reference given by the founder of the startup). But I wasn't hired yet. I needed to prove myself. I failed the code challenge but sent an email to the recruiter and asked him to pass it along to whoever was in charge of reviewing the coding challenge. In this email, I thanked the company for giving me shot, that I knew the coding challenge was not working as required but that I was glad I got to try to solve it and that I learned a ton from this experience.
Then I started sending out more resumes as I thought that this would be the end of it. Two hours later, I got a call from the recruiter telling me that I had utterly failed the coding challenge but that the email I wrote to the hiring manager of the company showed that I had passion and the will to learn and get better. Because of that, the hiring manager asked the recruiter to invite me to an onsite interview.
I nearly screamed of joy when I heard the news but I tried to keep it together on the phone. Two days later I am at the onsite interview and it's not going well. But I give it my all. before leaving the hiring manager who was also a senior developer at the company tells me that I wont get the job. I am too inexperienced. I thank him for his time, apologize for this sh$t show and tell him that I respect his decision and learned a lot during the process.
I got home and started applying to more jobs again. Later, on the same day in the afternoon, I get a phone call from the recruiter, he says the hiring manger/senior dev wants to talk to me and sends me his phone number.
I call the guy and he tells me that he wants to hire me not because of my skills but because of my drive and willingness to learn but I need to prove myself and that if I cant do that within 3 months, I'll be fired. I accept the job offer and started the next Monday.
I stayed with this company for almost 4 years, first as a junior then as a mid level developer. Eventually the company got acquired and it was time for a change. Changing jobs was so much easier. I aced multiple interviews and got a great salary boost.
But after almost a year and half at the new company I started getting jittery and after talking with my wife we decided it was time to leave Australia. By now we both had dual citizenship so we can come back to Australia anytime we want.
We are both European citizens so we decided to explore European countries. Having lived in a warm climate in Australia, we decided to move to Sweden to completely change scenery. I have now been working at a tech startup in Stockholm for about 12 months as a senior software developer. Life is good. Good money, great life balance but I yearn for something more: FREEDOM.
Since I started my career as a software developer, I haven't stopped working on personal projects.
Throughout the years I have created many of them. Most of the time without a plan to market then or sell them. Just aimless creation. But things are slowly changing.
In no particular order I created:
- a job website for English teachers
- a link aggregating service( think Linktree)
- a real estate saas
- multiple browser extensions
Now
Having learned a lot from my previous failures I decided this time to not try to reinvent the wheel. I created a browser extension that does one thing and one thing only. This idea is already validated and users are already paying for it but the competition is sh$t and I know I can do better. I am also investing heavily in marketing channels like Facebook groups where my users are hanging out and SEO.
I am getting new users everyday and talking to users via emails and phone calls every few days. Since the user base is growing I am just about to release a paid plan for the browser extension and charge a monthly fee to use it.
I am predicting a 5% conversion rate from free to paid users which should be enough to validate this idea further. If that works, I plan to grow the extension side by side while working at my day job and resign once the profits from the extension are between 25% to 50% of my monthly income.
I am a risk taker and I make my own luck, but now I have a wife to support(due to personal circumstances, she can only work for limited hours) so I can't just quit and work full time on this new project even though I truly believe it to be my golden ticket.
Such is life and I make the best of it everyday.
I plan to create a progress thread to keep myself accountable. I am motivated and nothing will stop me form succeding in exiting the rat race. One way or another.
Thanks for reading this introduction. I hope that someone somewhere can learn something from it.
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