I gave my notice, I'm going full-time

Before I created the landing page, I applied to be a freelance tech writer. I found that companies were paying new contributors between $300 and $500. I wrote a few articles like that to learn what they expect.

Next, I started talking to blog managers about those rates. They all said they were negotiable, and most will up to double the rate if you're a good writer. So, I started asking for a rate increase.

Now that I know I can make $600 per post doing one-off freelance writing, I will gladly take new clients who pay $700 per post.

Finally, I do have some competitors who are charging upwards of $1000 per post, so I'm probably still charging too little, but I'll get there eventually.

Thanks, Logan. Conversations with you have been part of my inspiration. Here's hoping I can make it work 🤞

A couple points:

1. I'm already finding more demand than I can supply, so prices are likely to go ⬆️ soon.
2. It takes between 2 and 10 hours for me to write a technical blog post. Right now I'm learning what types of posts are the best for me and the clients so I can guide them in a direction that makes it profitable for me and valuable for them.
3. Productized services are an awesome blend of immediate revenue and potential scalability.

I know there are already several competitors who do technical blogging like this, so I know it's a viable business. Now I just gotta hustle and figure out how to do it myself. Thanks for the encouragement!

My personal network (I'm a big believer in maintaining a strong network), subscribers to my newsletter, and cold outreach.

It helped that I have been writing for 10+ years on my personal blog and have been managing engineers for 5 years so I have some reputation and credentials to back me up.

It's complicated, haha, but I'll share:

1. I was hired as the first engineer at this small startup 4 years ago and now I run the engineering team. We already have a working product and I'm the most expensive salary, so it made sense to cut my hours for a bit to save money. When I talked to my CEO about leaving, I offered to stay half-time for the next couple months to help transition, but I won't have a traditional "severance." This is just as good because I'll keep getting some steady money as I get the business going.

2. I started saving cash and thinking of ideas about a year ago. I played around with a couple things that didn't really work, then in May I started discovering this idea/market.

3. I put aside enough that family would be fine without any income from me for 12 months, but because this is a service-based business, I'm on track to make about 1/3 my old salary in month 2. I may invest more of it back into the business while I still have a part-time job, but having cashflow makes me feel pretty confident.

I totally understand.

To be honest, Indie Hackers are not my target market, haha.

The companies that pay for this are usually mid-sized startups with some funding behind them. For them, taking an engineer off critical work to write a blog post is much more expensive than paying me $700.