hah fun read. #3 is a stretch - the car will obviously drop me in the most convenient location possible and then circle the block or go park itself. I'd love to see driverless cars just for #6. Not because I want to work more but simply to know what the "future iteration of email" will be!
Nice overview of the process! Had an "Oatmeal-esque" feel to the animations.
On a more serious note, who's tired of big organizations pretending to be Agile while demanding all the process/overhead/documentation of waterfall? We have 3 week sprints and my manager recently asked for a "bug triage" plan stretching out 4 months... I had no words.
The toughest part will be getting your foot in the door at a new firm since your resume will read as a demotion. That said, while more difficult to describe on your resume, it's all about the story you tell. In your post, your desire to code more, manage less makes a lot of sense and I bet resonates with many others who have felt similarly. Also, as @davismwfl mentioned, you can tweak your resume to avoid getting 'scanned out' without being misleading. In their own world, the difference between a Lead and Senior Recruiter is thin - generally Lead means they own fewer, higher level reqs themselves and manage staff. Senior Recruiters produce greater output since they don't have the overhead of managing others. Not really a step down, just a different job - why not call yourself a Lead/Senior Developer?
It's already been mentioned but giving them the discount (provided you don't immediately need the revenue) in exchange for a 24 mo contract seems ideal. I believe the longest you can contract would be 24 mos (12 mo w/ 12 mo auto renew but it might be worth asking an attorney/search a bit online. I would also ensure you can use their name to leverage into additional customers. Congrats by the way, this seems like a nice problem to have :)
Do it! Uni is the perfect time to do this, most of all because you will never have as much free time as you in college. In terms of finding clients, start calling potentials - generate a list of leads, rank in terms of potential and prioritize. Follow up; be polite but persistent. No shortcuts, just hard work.
Gone are the days of billionaires buying sports teams, buying newspapers and blogs still seems to be in but not quite as hot as space exploration. With SpaceX and Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin sort of seems like a "me too" venture...
You could try browsing sites like UpWork to check out available projects - maybe these requirement more commitment than you'd like but you'd get an idea of what's available/what others are working on. You could also try trawling business or engineering school message boards - there are often tons of small-scale projects looking for someone to pop in to lend a hand. Short of finding someone else's project to work on, you could focus your efforts on an "mvp of an mvp" - something so incremental and yet complete you could have it in the app store or in beta in a matter of weeks.
The simpler tools definitely encourage adoption. On a larger project I work on, we use Rally - most abominable platform I've had the displeasure of using - solely because the project manager is able to assign "points" to user stories, which translate to hours of work per story. Hence, when a dev is at x number of points, s/he's at y% capacity for that sprint. We tried Jira but without being able to assign capacity, ruled it out. I've heard good things about Basecamp...
Yeah I agree with specifying which are more meaningful for the app/product. For my larger team we've done just that but the GA specialist is pretty gung-ho about tracking everything -- the cost is developer time and effort -- and for me, working with the analytics team to decipher the output from tracking it all -- a lot of event tags (descriptors) to keep in your head!
I work at a very large company so you won't be surprised to hear we use a variety of tools and there's often overlap. Almost everything goes to Confluence (our program wiki) including tech specs and marketing documentation. The product team often uses something simple, such as Quip to store and collaborate on their docs. Marketing tends to migrate toward Drive. I think the best advice I can offer is to keep one "source of truth". This isn't too difficult when your team is small but as you start to grow, having one place devs, marketing, sales can go really helps streamline things.
Love the simplicity of PadMapper. Haven't used them since the last time I searched for a pad but I'm glad to see they're still around -- and with a relatively new web interface it seems (not to mention an Android app!).
You layout a glorious strategy for proving/disproving a hypothesis. As Steve Blank said, "get out of the building [and talk to customers]!"