Hello! Road to full independence! :)

[BlahBlahBlah]

Hi everybody!

I just joined this forum and I look forward to get ideas and knowledge I need to kick off my own business and find full independence!
My situation: I am 37 y.o. currently on a 9-5 job as project manager that quite honestly I like and pays just over 50k €/year. I am home based, so despite not working for myself I have quite a bit of freedom and do not spend time commuting in and out of an office (which I hate). I also have an extra income from a hobby of mine (poker), which brought me around 250k in the past 5 years and make some extra money by coaching players and making videos for a poker school. I dedicate about 15/week to poker on average and despite of liking it I wouldn't like to play full time. Said this my realistic yearly expectation from poker is more like 30k €/year now as the game it is getting tougher with time.
I am married and my wife also works (in an office). I spend an average of around 2.5k/3k per/month everything included to live.

The reason I am here is that although I am overall happy with my life, I still don't feel 100% independent. I don't want to work for someone else for the next 30 years and want to be able to work when and where I decide to. I love travelling and being able to work from wherever I am around. I always had a lot of ideas, but I never make the real change and put them in action as I should have.
In the last couple of months I started studying programming on my own free time, I would like to be able to design/develop my own website with more than basic functionality when I finally figured out what business to kick off. I don't even know is this makes sense, or should I just outsource, but I like to have control and the more skills I have the more I feel like I can progress without depending on externals. I am not yet sure though whether website advertising (once I generate enough traffic) is a worthy business or should I focus on selling something. Or what other potential internet business are out there. I have many unanswered question I hope to find clarification to in the next days/weeks via this forum.
I don't care about becoming millionaire to be honest, but want to make good money and be able to work at my own pace without reporting to anyone except me!

Any help/suggestion is very much appreciated.

 

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[DeletedUser43x]

Hey, welcome. I am new here as well. I am making the jump into self employment with web design, software and product design to find the same independence you are searching for as well. If you have any questions about improving your site or learning more about web softwares, let me know! I'm happy to offer advice from what I have learned in the last few years of developing.

 

[BlahBlahBlah]

Thank you!
I actually started building on my own site in the past week, doing pretty well even though sometimes I get stuck here and there and spend quite a bit of time going through the HTML/CSS guides, but I guess it will get easier as I learn!

 

[People>Cash]

Coding is important but I would suggest learning learning one of the major cms out there: wordpress, joomla, Drupal.

It's quicker to build websites and more efficient. Of course basic knowledge of coding is always helpful.

Also I would look into app development. Apps and mobile is the future. Best to leverage high.

 

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[BlahBlahBlah]

Yes I am actually building the website using wordpress at the moment, but I am really happy that the time I put in getting up to speed in HTML/CSS in the past couple of months has not been wasted and although I am far from efficient I can find my way around pretty well, and found a lot of info over the internet whenever I encountered and issue so far. I struggle a bit when I have to change both HTML and CSS code though, as the file have so much info and sometime I am not really fast. Technically considering the time spent it would have worked out much cheaper to me to pay someone else to do it, but I believe long term the knowledge I am acquiring will make me save time/money, especially because I would like to scale it across different sectors if it works out. Also I like to be able to play around with the site myself and make changes if I can. In future I would like to learn PHP also (at least the basic) - I won't spend a huge amount of time on it though, if I require some more complicated piece of code to be written I will definetely outsource it.

I ran some further research on flippa and on the short term paying 50$-100$ for a made site would save me a lot of time/money (even if it is just a clone), but I read that some of those sites attract traffic in illegal way and I would risk for my Adsense account to be banned also for other sites I may have, so I will just leave it.

I bought a domain for 1 year on GoDaddy for 0.99€ and the first month on Hostgator I paid only 5.58$ for hosting so far.

My goal in the month is to have the site/social media side completed and ready to go and start getting traffic on the site (I have a plan, no need of good SEO for now, even though it would be a great plus in future) and in the next couple of months make my first 1$ via Adsense, also start getting familiar with the different opportunities out there, etc. etc. Big money can wait for now