lowtek
Legendary Contributor
FASTLANE INSIDER
EPIC CONTRIBUTOR
Read Fastlane!
Summit Attendee
Speedway Pass
Welcome aboard, Tim. Congrats on your success as a solo contractor. It's a rough life, and not easy to hit the 180k/year mark.
There was a post on Hacker news about this a while back. Basically, it boils down to this:
Start positioning yourself as a consultant instead of a developer. This requires two things:
1) You must actively work to understand what business problem you are tasked with solving, and take ownership of solving it for the customer. Go from churning specifications into a product to identifying and solving core business needs by pushing back on the customer and doing some intelligent inquiry.
2) Hire someone else to do at least a chunk of the labor. They should be a contractor, so that they get no equity upside and you can pay them a fixed hourly rate while you bill at whatever you can get away with.
Hope that helps.
There was a post on Hacker news about this a while back. Basically, it boils down to this:
Start positioning yourself as a consultant instead of a developer. This requires two things:
1) You must actively work to understand what business problem you are tasked with solving, and take ownership of solving it for the customer. Go from churning specifications into a product to identifying and solving core business needs by pushing back on the customer and doing some intelligent inquiry.
2) Hire someone else to do at least a chunk of the labor. They should be a contractor, so that they get no equity upside and you can pay them a fixed hourly rate while you bill at whatever you can get away with.
Hope that helps.