This is a great time to be solo building your company. Most of the services have generous free tier. These are the ones I use personally.
* Hosting + DNS with AWS & Cloudflare
* Code with GitHub and mirror to GitLab
* Domain with Godaddy
* Transactional emails with PostMark
* Errors with Sentry
* Docs, Mail, Calendar with Google Workspace
- Join Toptal (https://toptal.com) or similar sites. I've found their criteria of getting developers on board to be quite hard. Brush up your skills. You'll end up getting good projects overall. The upside is huge. People generally don't bid too low.
- Start by cold emailing executives at small-medium tier startups. You can find those companies on Crunchbase (https://www.crunchbase.com/) and AngelList(https://angel.co). Find engineering manager or a C-team executive (CTO, CEO) on Linkedin and message them (or cold email). Tell them how you can add value to their engineering team instead of just asking if you can get a project. All depends on your ability to write a well-crafted email.
- Build relationships. I've freelanced before and can vouch that finding good clients is HARD. Keep a healthy relationship with the ones who hired you before, ask them for referral, etc.
- Write a useful blog and convert clients from there. Assume it to be your sales funnel if you will.
- Tweet, connect with people virtually. Be genuinely nice. Many people I know got their "big break" in freelancing via Twitter.
- If you have Wordpress skills, you can go so far with managing instances for people who don't know a thing. I know people earning $3K a month pretty easily by invoicing a handful of bloggers. Again, cold email is your friend.
My parting advice would be to not look for freelance projects. They're a waste of time. Instead, just look for high paying remote PHP jobs. You'll work much less and earn a lot more. I was skeptical at first but YES remote companies pay well too. Go to DailyRemote (https://dailyremote.com) and filter jobs by $70k+. Start applying to those positions. Also, remote companies that are not actively hiring would be interested in a good candidate if you just tell them that you're looking out. Tell them why they need to have you on the team. Most of them would be happy to accommodate.
If you're in a country where Stripe allows account with Sole proprietorship, then it's the best away ahead. Having access to API and underlying implementation is game changing if you're doing online ecom.
Otherwise you may look into Gumroad. It hides away all the implementation and pays you directly into Paypal account. But I am not so sure about the Shopify integration part.
I don't get it. Why solve other people's problem when you can solve yours! Scratch your own itch.
It's hard to imagine working on a problem for 10+ years which isn't yours. Of course, it feels so much better to get ideas from other people to work on but in all honesty, those are just ideas.
Realizing the amount of value you can create as a programmer working for a company is an eye-opener.
I've worked at a startup making millions of dollar in revenue every quarter. Realized that I was just making someone else rich and got paid in pennies. Quit the job and took the plunge.
Hands down the best autobiography I have read. I personally learned a lot about how a brand is created rather than a business. How businesses were built even before VC capital was a thing. And how life is all about making tradeoffs.
I have used Digital Ocean and Linode both in the past and have not found any major differences between the two of them. I have found Linode servers slightly more efficient but the speed tradeoff is negligible as compared to what Digital Ocean provides as a service. I really like the Floating IP and the fact that load balancer rules are so easy to create.
Again, it depends on you and your use case. I'd personally use Linode if the project is one off which I'd deploy and forget. DO if I am spinning 2-3 servers.
One thing I miss is Vue like v-bind directives that sync with a property on the state. I hate writing a function just to sync the current value with the state.
* Hosting + DNS with AWS & Cloudflare * Code with GitHub and mirror to GitLab * Domain with Godaddy * Transactional emails with PostMark * Errors with Sentry * Docs, Mail, Calendar with Google Workspace