How Developers Can Achieve Parallel Success | Multithreaded Income Episode 27 from CodeMash 2024

This. Particular episode is the recording of a talk I did at the code mash conference in Sandusky, Ohio in January, 2024. Uh, it's my first time giving this particular talk and we go over a lot of the points that I consider the multi-threaded income tenants. And we talk about a lot of different things that you could do to build a multithreaded income. And it was a really good audience, a lot of great questions.

I had to cut out a couple little technical snafoos along the way, but overall, I think a really good talk. And if you have a conference where you'd like me to come present, Multithreaded income. I would love to do that. Just reach out. And enjoy. All right. Hi everyone. Hey, I'm glad you're hope everyone's having a good code mash. Thank you for not leaving because of the impending storm that we're all about to get, um, make sure you're in the right place. Multithreaded income.

How developers can achieve parallel success. I'm not taking credit for this. I was totally jet GPT workshopping with me a bunch of different ideas. Let's start with a story. Uh, this is a building, not the Bayport Credit Union. This used to be the home of Symantec. Um, if you've ever heard of Norton Antivirus, Norton Security, any of that stuff, yeah. Uh, when I graduated from college in 2006, Uh, my first job out of college was working for Symantec, and we were in this building.

And, they owned the entire building. And I remember getting that job and going, yes, I made it big. I got a big business I'm working for. And I went to work at this office and I worked on a part of the Norton security suite called decomposer. Now, without going into details, what decomposer decomposer would do is anytime you had a container file, so like zip files or any file that contain other files are little bit of it.

With uncompressed or pull the files out of those container files so security could go do its own work. Um, I have some really cool stories about that, but not for today. Uh, so one day I walked in the work and they called an all hands meeting and they said, all right, everyone downstairs, the entire building, not a normal. Wait, they would have all hands at least once a month just to say, here's what's going on in the business and.

You know, introduce someone new or whatever random stuff that big businesses do. So we all went downstairs and there was a group of folks and we were visited by the corporate vice president of, you know, whatever, because all these businesses have vice presidents that do all this nothing. And so we had the vice president who came and said, well, you're all doing a great job, but we like money. So we're closing this entire building and that means like 90 percent of you are losing your jobs today.

You don't come back tomorrow. And the other 10 percent we're going to give like three months out. You're going to lose your jobs. And then there's this like 1 percent sliver that can move to Santa Barbara, California. If you'd like to keep your job. Now I'm from Virginia. This building is in Newport News, Virginia, which is absolutely nowhere near Santa Barbara. And I've only been with the company for three months, so I go into my severance, and I'm like, you're gonna keep me on, right?

I'm a crucial employee, and they're like, no, no, here's your check, have a nice day. And they, they let me go home. Uh, so that was the first kind of inkling I had, luckily early in my career, that there's absolutely no such thing as job security. Like, no matter where you are in your career, there's no such thing as job security.

Um, there are some companies that are better than others, but there's absolutely no such thing as job security if you don't take anything else away from this, there's absolutely no such thing as job security. So hi, everyone. My name is Kevin Griffin. I am mostly a developer entrepreneur. I do all kinds of different things. Just a short list of things I've done in my career. I have. I've done everything that we are going to talk about today.

And then some, and I position myself with people who do these sorts of things every day. Um, and I want to talk to you about not just my experiences, but the experiences of friends and colleagues of mine to try to inspire you to go out and do something that's slightly different from what your day job might be. So I am the host of the multi threaded income podcast, mti. to slash podcast. I would love for you to go listen to some of these episodes. Don't start at one.

One is a horrible episode because it was the first episode, but we're, I just recorded episode 27, uh, the other day, like, we're getting up there and we're talking to some fascinating people with a lot of really interesting stories. Um, so I really encourage you to go listen to the podcast after this session. Like, don't listen to it now. Um, uh, we also have a discord. So nti. to slash discord. If you want to.

Ask questions and you want to hang out with the community of folks who are doing everything that we're going to talk about today and if you just need inspiration, this is the place to go do it because this is just a, an open, safe group of folks who want to help you succeed because we've learned throughout our entire careers were better as a team is like this isn't just go off and do your own thing. This is work with other people who are doing this sort of work.

Uh, the agenda for today just, uh. Kind of set things up. I want to talk about what I mean by multi threaded income, the just general tenants of it, because we try to make it into a program per se, not really just a funny phrase, uh, we want to talk about different ways that we can make money and there's more to it than just the money aspect of it, of course.

And hopefully I touch on those points, but specifically we're going to talk about moonlighting, doing side gigs, being an independent consultant. We're going to talk about maybe building your own course on a variety of different topics. We'll talk about writing a book, if that's a thing you feel inclined to do. And then we'll talk about products like, uh, software products. If you want to develop your own desktop app that does something. Or you want to build a SAS that does something else.

Those, that's what we mean by products. Then lastly, just depending on time, I want to have a conversation about ethics and time management. Which is an important conversation to have when we're talking about This sort of not working my day job type things. All right, so big disclaimer. I am not an accountant. I am not a lawyer. I am none of those things. I am everything else I talked about a little bit earlier. I have a lot of experiences and there's a lot of cases where I would tell you.

I don't know the answer to that question. You need to talk to someone a little bit more vetted than I am. But that's what the discord is for. So if you have questions afterwards that I'm not able to answer, let's go to Discord and let's continue this conversation. So first, what is multi threaded income? Multi threaded income is absolutely not a give rich quick scheme. It's very easy for someone to come in and say, Follow my process and you'll get rich quickly. No, because I'm not rich.

I'm better off than I think I was 15, 20 years ago. But I'm not rich by any means. I'm trying to become better. I'm trying to become comfortable. I use the term financial freedom a lot, financial independence. I don't want to be tied down to the thing I'm doing every day. I want to be able to enjoy life with my wife and my kids. That's the type of life I'm going after. It's not about being Elon Musk, whatever your opinions of him are. But, like, I don't need, I mean, don't get me wrong.

I would love to have his amount of money, like there's a lot of problems I could solve with that much money, but that's not my goal. My goal is just to be free to do what I want to with my time. So, uh, so multi threat income is basically looking at your skill set and assuming you're all developers or I. T. technologies of some type in here, you have a particular set of skills. I really should put a taken image in here. Uh, thought for future Kevin at a taken slide.

We want to take our particular set of skills and we are now using those probably for our day job. You go to work every day. You trade your time and your skills for money and usually for some sort of benefits you get, you get some value for your time that you're giving, but you're constantly giving your time in exchange for money and when multi threaded income says, well, that's awesome. If you love working your day job, you love the team that you're working with. Continue doing that.

Like, I'm not like anti job. I want you to start thinking about taking your same set of skills and applying it in different ways. So maybe you want to set up some sort of moonlighting that you do to build up other skills that you can later take on to your day job or to a new day job. Uh, you might want to create a course if you're really passionate about teaching or wanting to just explain what you do to others in a way that might make sense to someone. Of course, is a great way to do that.

Your own products. Maybe you're sitting there working and you're like, I really wish I had a tool that did X, Y and Z. It would make my day job so much easier. Why don't you just go build that tool? We'll talk about that.

Finally, you have your, you have books like I, not the huge, huge advocate for books because I think books are not how most people learn nowadays, but there's still a good number of folks who enjoy reading a book or referencing a book to learn a topic or a set of topics, so we'll talk about that. Primarily, multithreaded income is insurance. So I told the story about going and getting kind of my quote, dream job out of college, and three months later I got let go from that job.

Now, so many people, when you get laid off, you go through the various degrees of, Denial, guilt, um, and then eventually acceptance. What you don't want to do during that time is then have to immediately start panicking to find the next new job. Because depending on your financial situation, you might just take whatever you get coming in next. Like, oh, someone is offering to just pay me. I'm there. I'm going to take that. Multi entitled income. I want to say.

Let's start building other forms of income that you could potentially fall back to in case you ever lost your day job or you decide, you know, we've had this case on the podcast more than once. Who has a bad manager? Your bad managers in the room with you just blink twice. All right, well, I think you can relate. There's bad managers. There's bad team members and just a simple management change.

Can drastically decrease how happy a team is that you might be happy today, but next quarter you might not be happy anymore. Wanted to be nice. If you could have other income streams or threads that you could rely on, go, well, maybe I'm going to quit this job and go look for another job. That's what we mean by insurance. It's ensuring yourself against anything that might possibly happen in the future.

Let's assume the job goes away, you're stuck, and we want to start building up these other threads of income to potentially protect ourselves from the case of losing the job. So first, we're going to start with freelancing, and I'm going to try attack these all kind of the same way, answer a couple common questions. I'll give a moment or two for specific questions from you all, and then we'll move on to the next topic.

Uh, so freelancing moonlighting is basically the idea that you're working your day job, but in your free time, you're off time, you're working on other projects for other people, for money. And the number one question I get from anyone when approaching the subject is where do you find your first clients, which there's a variety of different ways. The first thing you really need to accept if you're becoming a freelancer or a moonlighter.

Just out of the gate and you have no prior experience doing it is you're probably going to work for a lower rate than you normally would on the outside and I am completely transparent with rates and stuff. If you were to hire me today to do an independent consulting task, depending on how they were looking at roughly between two and 250 an hour. But if I was coming on as a moonlighter, moonlighter.

A more reasonable expectation is like between 50 and 80 an hour for software developer to, to work through a set of tasks. And that's mostly because I don't have a proven track record of delivering projects and being, being successful. Um, you can go back to your day job and say, say, look at my day job. I've done all these things, but you really have to build up that trust as the independent consultant, as the freelancer, as the moonlighter before you can start commanding higher rates.

And eventually you can. First big place you could probably look are things like Upwork and People Per Hour. They're, they're freelancer marketplaces. And you can go there and you can say these are the set of skills I have. And there's constantly folks going to these services looking for freelancers to, to do things. It might be as simple as I need someone to write an Excel macro that does some calculations for me just to save me some time.

Um, you and I both know that's probably a couple hours worth of work if you know what you're doing. If you don't know what you're doing, it's a couple hours of work plus some googling and chat GPT. Um, but what they're looking is just for someone other than them to come do that work. You fit in nicely there. Uh, my good friend, Brett Fisher, uh, he is episodes three, four. I actually don't remember which he got his start as. Uh, consultant, moonlighting from Upwork.

Eventually built a portfolio of successful projects. He took a lot of those relationships from Upwork, moved them off Upwork, and he doubled, he tripled his rate. So he started at a lower rate, but eventually moved up to the higher rates. And all while he was working his full time job. There's other ways you can do this. Uh, just asking your network is probably the best way.

And that can be a little iffy if you are working the full time job, so going out to LinkedIn or going out to Twitter or wherever your social is and saying, Hey, I'm looking for some side work. Is anyone need a programmer for 10, 15, 20 hours a week? That's probably the place you'll get the most success. 95 percent of the work I've had is because of word of mouth. It's people who know me and know the work I've done.

Um, the other 5 percent are random folks who have seen articles and content I've put out on the internet. So that's, that's kind of the gambit. No one's coming to you for work unless they already know who you are in some way, shape, or form. Or they know someone who knows you. Like, network is really important. There's a third case, which I think is fascinating. Episode we released this week, um, with, uh, Kaylee Hamray. She found freelancing clients by going to her local chamber of commerce.

Looking at the list of all the businesses and just cold spamming them, saying, Hi, my name's Kaylee. I do X, Y and Z. Are you looking for anyone to help you with websites or whatever? And she's actually gotten a good amount of work just from doing that. So never underestimate the power of spam. Like it's worse. Uh, I've already touched on this a little bit, but this next big question is how much do I charge? And it really depends. And you should be charging anything.

A common misconception I hear from a lot of people that talk about freelancing is you should be prepared to do some work for free. I think that's a horrible move, but you are a skilled professional. There is nothing that you should be doing for free unless, I mean, there's always, it depends, right? If you're helping a dog shelter get a new web page up, maybe do that for free and then you have something that you can show off.

But if there's a business that is making money and they're not willing to pay you money for your skills, they're probably not worth your time. They wouldn't be a good client to begin with. I've never had a good client that hasn't already been willing to pay me. Then you get into the negotiation. Well, how much do you charge when you charge something? Depends on how often you're going to charge. Uh, I don't really do hourly work anymore.

The smallest amount of work I will charge is based off a week, uh, and then more likely I want to charge a month of my time or a monthly retainer. If you're going to work with me, you're going to pay a minimum of 5, 000, and that's a very large number, and actually, depending on the business, that's a, that's a small number, like, that's like, oh, I will gladly pay you 5, 000, and There's a variety of work I'll do for that amount of money. Uh, my largest retainer is 23, 000 a month.

Um, that, that's a good time right there. And, but that's safe, secure money that I know is coming in. And I go and I do the work. And also at the same time, I'm not taking other retainer clients. So, uh, I'm really dedicating my time to one, maybe two things in that given month. But you could do weekly, you could do monthly charging, you could also do project rates. I'm not against charging for just a project, but make sure you're not underestimating your time on something.

If you think it's going to take 5 hours to do the work, charge like it's 15. And, best case scenario, you get it done in 5. Worst case scenario, you get it done in 15. So, either way, you should win in all these situations. Uh, the last big question, really, I get for freelancing is incorporating. Raw. United States citizens here probably maybe doesn't matter. We're based in the U. S. More. Most likely your customers are based in the U. S. as well. Do you incorporate? The answer is it depends.

I think if we're only talking a maybe 500, 600. It's not really worth your time incorporating. I don't talk about incorporating a list. We're talking thousands of dollars. And this is where my I'm not an account hack goes on. There are very specific reasons why you want to incorporate around taxes. It has to do not just with federal taxes, but also state and county taxes, wherever you are.

But by not incorporating and taking thousands of dollars from non W 2 income, you could potentially be liable for up to 15 percent more in taxes than you normally would be if you weren't incorporated. So that is a conversation, that's a much longer conversation than for this.

Uh, that same Topic goes for everything else that we're talking about when I talk about courses and I talk about books and I talk about products, I don't talk about incorporation until it's making decent enough money where it matters. The other big reason you might want to incorporate is because of legalities and just the corporate veil of security, which is kind of a miss misnomer. Some people say, well, you shouldn't incorporate because.

If you were ever get sued by the person that you're working for, they're suing the corporation or they're suing your LLC. And that's right, except the laws have changed enough where you could still be liable as the sole owner of that corporation. There's a lot of details and I'd be happy to talk to, to you more about it either in the discord or outside the doors. So, all right, before I move on, any other like general questions around freelancing, moonlighting? Yes, sir. Is there?

So the question is, is there a magic formula to figure out what your hourly rate should be kind of dictated by what you might be making now at your day job? My answer is probably there's a lot of people out there will tell you. Oh, here's my magic formula for determining your hourly rate. Nine times out of 10. They are a digit off what you should be charging yourself.

If I went through any of those calculators right now, they would probably say, Kevin, you should be charging 60 an hour, but I don't charge 60 an hour. I charge way more than 60 an hour. My general rule formula for it is what do you want to get paid? Like what amount of money makes it worth your time to do the work and work backwards from there? Because if you follow a formula, it's going to come to a number and it's going to be a low number and then maybe take that number and double it.

Call that Kevin's formula. Um, like just always, and never be afraid to raise your rate, um, ever because you're always going to find someone who's willing to pay it. Um, so, so no, there's not a magic formula. There are people that will say there are magic formulas. I usually just go with what's the market going to bear. I could find plenty of like outsourced, um, moonlighting gigs right now for 60 to 80 without any questions asked.

Uh, if you want to start there, that's, I think that's a great starting point. I would aim to go a little bit higher, so at least 100 an hour, maybe more. It also depends, like everything, where your customers are based, where you're based. Uh, my friends who consult from and live in LA, they don't charge the rates of someone who lives in Southern Ohio. Uh, it's just, they're different markets, different needs.

Although So, eventually you can get to the point where you're charging the LA rates no matter where you're living. Um, so, I hope that answers your question. To, maybe to a degree. A lot of the formulas are the take, take what you're getting paid now, like, reduce that to an hourly rate, and multiply it by 1. 2. Or, it's usually people trying to sell books and, and stuff like that. That's why I never, I never talk about rates.

I just talk about what you want to make my first rate when I went out on my own was 60 an hour and I did that gig and then the next day I'm like, I'm going to bump this up to 80 an hour or 75 an hour and I did that gig and then next day I'm like, I'm going to try 100 an hour on for size and then I just kept gradually going up from there. Um, so no. Maybe that's an important point. Your first rate should not be the rate you stay at.

You should always increase your rate with every new client, um, until eventually, eventually, if you ever get to like 500 an hour lawyer rates, like, I mean, that's not a bad problem to have. Um, but that first initial rate, I wouldn't try to use a formula. I would just pick a number, a nice big round number, uh, that you're comfortable with a straight face going in asking someone to pay you.

Uh, because the clients that you eventually want to pay you a hundred or plus more, uh, dollars an hour aren't going to Fiverr. Upwork, you're funding them through other networking means. Um, the, in the Fiverr, Upwork community, you're also not just competing with like people in this room. You are competing with folks in India and in much lower places where. Say 10, 20 an hour goes much farther there than it does here in the States.

Um, it's why it's a good place to start is not a place you, I see a lot of people staying for a long period of time. Um, awesome. All right. I'll take one more question. Actually, I'll take you one, two. Yep. So the, the question is, you've, how do you do the time, the time work and life management of it all to, like, it's a good amount of money. Hopefully you get to a good amount of money coming in. How do you deal with that when you have baseball games and stuff like that?

Uh, the rule I come back to and I'll say later is I never sacrifice family time. Um, anything I do after quote work hour hours is it. Very specifically, because I can, instead of watching TV or YouTube or playing video games, I might go off and work on a project for a little bit of time. Um, when I was younger, I didn't have any kids. I am much more ample free time than I do today. Now I have three kids, so my life today is I might work an extra hour in the day into the day.

But other than that, it's family time for the rest and I will never sacrifice family time for the work because it goes down to no one's ever going to remember you for the extra work that you did, but your kids will remember the time that you weren't at their game, that you weren't at the thing that they were doing, and they will definitely remember the time that you were always up in your office or off working on other projects. I never sacrifice that. So great question.

Yes, yeah., The question is, how do you differentiate yourself from a say a 10 an hour person doing potentially the same work as someone charging say 150 an hour? Uh, the real answer is I'm not doing 20. I'm doing 150 work. Uh, so to get to those higher rates, I have to think about businesses and engagements differently than I was when I was charging 50 an hour, um, and even or less in those cases, you're kind of a button in a seat. You're just doing a work.

You're told, please do X, Y and Z. And at my rate is more. All right. Why do you want to do X, Y and Z? All right. That might not be the best way to solve this problem. Let's talk about processes. I understand business way more than I did 15 years ago. Um, okay. I understand systems way better than I did 15 years ago.

I have gone in and fixed so many systems developed by 20 an hour contractors and actually working on some code this week by that type of person going, well, what were they thinking? Well, because they are not at that level of thinking, I don't want to use the word maturity because it's not a maturity issue, it's just a, um, it's a context issue. They just haven't. Tried to think that deeply. Their problems have been just go and solve the problem. Get out and that's not how I roll.

I go into everything better. Try to leave it better than how I left it. That's how I continue to keep the same clients over and over again at the rates that I charge. Um, and that's how I get recommended for other projects at the rates that I charge. It's because you know, if I come in, I'm not people. Business owners have an idea of the problem that they have. They just don't know a solution to it.

Yeah. So being able to combine the problem space and the solution space together, um, that's what they're paying you for. So, great question. All right, let's move on. Uh, let's let's talk about courses. Next, um, courses are exactly what they say. You take a topic or a set of topics and you teach people how to do it. There's mostly video courses. That's folks used to do this, but it's really nice. It's low entry for anyone in here to get started. That big question is what do I do? Of course on.

It's mostly folks is imposter syndrome kicking in. I'm not qualified to talk about anything. And I use the same answer to this question as I do for people who are interested in doing talks. So if you've thought about doing a talk at a, at a Codemash or a local event, how do you come up with that topic? You don't feel like you're qualified to do it. There have been a number of talks I've done. Courses. Things I've talked about where I didn't feel qualified to talk about it.

But what I've learned is I am knowledgeable about a lot of different things and a lot of different things. I feel like an imposter when when talking about it, but there's A person out there that you can teach and you don't realize it. I'll give you an example. It's not a course, but my first or second set of talks when I started presenting professionally was on jQuery. Yay, which, you know, jQuery never dies. The apocalypse is gonna come. We're gonna have cockroaches, Twinkie, and jQuery.

Like, that's, that's all we're gonna have left. Uh, so I did a jQuery talk, and my imposter syndrome was super high. Like, I, there are so many better speakers talking about this topic. And I went and I did the talk. And the year later, I came back to the same conference, and someone came up to me and said, Hey, Kevin. I didn't get a chance to talk to you, but, uh, I took your jQuery session last year. Uh, you were the one who actually explained it to me in a way that I understood.

And I was able to go back to work, and we started doing jQuery all over the place. And now, it's all jQuery. Like, our success is because of how you presented the information. Now, my ego was like, woo! Like, yeah, I was feeling good after that. No one could bring me down. But courses are the same way. You might have a way of teaching a topic or showing, um, a set of topics in a way that someone understands better than they learn from somewhere else.

And it's really intimidating if you, like, there's a number of folks here at this conference who have done courses, done a lot of courses, very professional courses. Sometimes they're a little boring or obtuse or confusing. They use big words. I don't like big words. Who likes big words? I use small words. It's also personality driven. Like, uh, I try to use, uh, I try to be animated a little bit in my courses.

Because I find people learn from that better than someone just telling you about how ASP. NET Core does X, Y, and Z. There's a difference. And that's, and that's something that can be learned. Like, you can just go into any topic, you can teach yourself to be a better presenter. Um, so what are you doing now? All my courses come from the topics that I do daily or potentially things that I want to learn more about.

I know what you're saying, Kevin, why would you teach a topic that you don't know anything of anything about? It's because I want to learn more about those topics. So that's kind of how I start and don't ever worry that there's someone else teaching that information. There's room for plenty of competitors in these spaces. So let's say, assuming you decide to host a course, uh, where do you host it? And there's a variety of different ways to do this too.

Uh, the first and way I'd probably recommend folks get started are on different, uh, hosting platforms like Udemy or Skillshare. I have two Udemy courses right now. And it's basically a marketplace of people looking to learn something quickly. At a fairly low cost, uh, you still get a hundred percent control over your content. That's a really nice thing about Udemy. I have the content up there. I'm basically giving Udemy a lease to it. So they can, they can sell it.

And if I ever decide I want to take that course and put it somewhere else, I am fully allowed to do that legally. Like, they don't own my content. You do get a lower rate per person. So if someone buys my course for ten dollars, Depending on how they got to the course, I might get 2 of that, or I might get 8 of that. It really depends. Uh, the other way are things like Pluralsight.

Uh, I did work for Wintelec now, uh, a long, long time ago, which is a, I would call them a competitor, but that's really giving them too much, um, status. And I say that because I haven't got a royalty check from them in like two years. So, you know, you draw your own conclusions. Um, it's also a super outdated topic. Um, but, so when to like now on Pluralsight? Pluralsight's kind of the, the elephant in the room that everyone tries to compete with. But, you know, there's downsides to that.

You don't own the content that you give to Pluralsight. You also get very little flexibility over the content you're creating. Pluralsight's not going to invite you to build an ASP. NET Core Masterclass. And it has nothing to do that you're not able to present it. It's that they have proven celebrity people that they are going to let do that course. You're going to get how to integrate ASP. NET and Go on a mainframe. Like, yeah.

That's the course they want you to do because they like to have it in their catalog. And you're low enough on the totem pole that you get to do that topic. Now you could do these topics and build up some stature and eventually you get the topics that you want to do, but you're not going to get that out of the gate. That's why I really like Udemy. Uh, these are my two courses on Udemy.

This brings up, now just being transparent, I get about four or five hundred dollars a month from these two courses. And I haven't touched these courses in I haven't touched single or mastery since last year. No, that's a bad, bad thing to say. Uh, since I think it was early 2023, I touched it. I did some updates, uh, building background services. I think I touched a couple months ago, but these are still bringing in a good amount of money. Like I don't do anything on them.

They just bring in reoccurring income. That's a great question. Uh, so the question was, is there anything on me to keep these maintained? No, there's a lot of authors who push them up, never touch them again. Now there are, there's some algorithm. I'm talking you to me specific. There's some algorithm where if you go and make an update, say every month, it keeps you higher up in the search results. Um, there's some psychology to when people buy these courses.

If you type SignalR into Udemy, I'm one of 10 courses. I have the best seller mark, so I get higher up on the rank. I'm also the most recently updated course, so that helps a little bit too. I'm also the highest rated course, so that helps a lot as well. The biggest thing that really contributes to the success of courses, especially in development, is being a native English speaker, enunciating and projecting my voice. And also, my videos have me in the frame.

It's not voice behind slides or voice behind code. So when you're going through one of my courses, it's as if I'm pairing right next to you. Um, which I think makes a big difference. When you're looking at some of the other courses, it's someone talking behind slides. And a lot of times, not native English speaker.

Still speaking fine English, but heavily accented, difficult to understand, and because a lot of the audience is U. S. based primarily, it makes a difference just in how you present yourself. Now, that said, there are plenty of course developers in India, Pakistan, Singapore, they still speak amazing English, probably better English than I do. Like, their English is gooder.

But they do the voice behind the slides, and I think some people love that, like that personality of, hey, I'm learning from a person. I'm not just learning from a voiceover slides, but yeah, if I had more ample free time, I would do more updates to this.

I'm also trying to get more courses into the portfolio because there's a whole marketing strategy of I can take similar mastery students and more easily get them over to my other courses and just keep Incrementing my income, uh, month over month, over month. That's a great question. When you, uh, so the question was, do you control the prices? You do. You, they let you select price tiers. And when you sign up for Udemy, you could say, only sell my course for 80. And that is a mistake.

The, and not because of 80. You're Mastery easily should be an hour. Uh, I'm sorry. Uh, usually it should be a hundred to 200 course. Like there's a lot of content in there. Well presented. However, by telling you to me that it can control the price is also going to advertise your course. It's going to put you into sales, things like black Friday. It's going to promote you. I got a Facebook ad for my course one day without like knowing that they were going to promote me.

My wife and my friends got Facebook ads for my course, and it was awesome, and I got a ton of sales that month when that happened. So that's the biggest reason you let Udemy do it. If you tell Udemy, only sell it for my price, nothing else, they're never going to promote you. And I'd like to also say they probably knock you down in the search results as well. Um, no Udemy for 80 courses. They only go to Udemy for the 10 to 15 courses.

And the last big question is, do I really need any special equipment? No, you need a machine that you can record on. And I would say a good microphone and a good microphone is maybe 50 to 80 to get started with. Uh, I've seen some people record off their phones. Like phones have really good mics in them. You could put in a pair of air pods and record your course. And it's going to be better audio than I could have gotten. Um, five years ago with top of the line audio equipment.

Uh, things like OBS for recording your screen, recording your slides, that's all free. I'm recording the slides right now with OBS. And, I mean, that's all free available stuff. I don't need to do anything fancy with it. You don't really need fancy equipment. You just need to start with something, and you probably have everything you already need to get started. You just need a topic. Design the curriculum, that's a whole other topic by itself.

But, I feel like courses are a great way for folks to get started. Alright. Uh, just for the sake of time, let's also tack on the conversation about books. Books. Are really, I like courses more than I like books. I think books, technical books, are kind of boring and obtuse. But they work for some people. And that might be a reason enough to try to do a book. Uh, what do you do a book about? It's just like courses. Pick the thing that you're passionate about.

A lot of the tech books I see out there try to be these master. How do you combine technology A with technology B? How do you do Angular with ASP. NET Core? How do you do React with Vue, uh, or I'm sorry, React with, uh, Go, and everything in between. Uh, you know, to be sure, some of the best books I've ever gotten have been self published. They've just been independent authors who said, I want to talk about a topic, but a traditional publisher won't publish my book.

And it's just like Pluralsight. You have to convince them that you're the person to talk about something. And get them to take a risk on you to publish it. Then it goes to the next question is, Do you use a publisher or do you self publish? Uh, we have two topics of this on the podcast. The, the one, the one is with, uh, Alvin Ashcraft. He's only done published books with, uh, uh, publishers. And he's had good success from it.

And, The big thing with books is you don't do it for the money, you do it for all the other reasons that you would publish a book. But, he's had good success with it. Uh, Matt Eland, which, Matt's not in this room, is he? Alright. So, Matt's at the conference, he's in Codemash somewhere, he's one of the speakers. But Matt had a published book through a publisher, had a second book he wanted to do, and started shipping it to, or, shipping it around to different publishers.

Because it was a topic he wanted, he wasn't sure if a publisher was going to take his book idea. And his worst case was, he was going to self publish it. And I feel like in this economy, in this industry, self publishing is a really good way to go just to get something out there. If you self publish a book, you can get an ISDN, so you can be in the Library of Congress, which is super official. And So you have that book, and now you can call yourself the author.

You'll see in my bio, you know, Kevin is an author, speaker, teacher, blah blah blah. Well, the book I wrote was this. The Twilio Blueprint. And I wrote it on a whim. And it sold Alright. Transparency, right? I've made about 4, 000 with this book. Before I took it off sale. 3, 600 of that was to Twilio. for a conference. The other 400 was from friends and random people I knew on the internet. Like, this was not a best seller. No one's, no one's talking about this book afterwards.

But it was an experiment to see, could I write, could I design a book? And the truth was, yeah, I could. So I sold it as an e book copy. Now, you can go on Amazon, use their KDP system, and I could take this book and get a physical copy of my book.

Uh, David Neal, one of the speakers here, probably well known amongst you all, has a book of dad jokes, which is amazing, and now it's a 50 book, but it's because it's all full color, but he didn't go to a publisher, he just made the book, published it on KDP, and so if you want a copy of it, you go order his book, it gets printed on demand and sent to you. So the, the barrier to entry for. Self publishing is really low now. You can take any book and, and go get it published.

Uh, but do authors even make any money? Some do. Like, I don't know, Walter Isaacson is making a lot of money right now. He's got a book with a publisher. Um, Twilio Blueprint didn't make any money at all. It was enough for, I don't even know what I did with money. I just put it in the bank. And, but I don't think I would go out of my way to do another book right now. I, there are cases, things always change. I'd probably do a course before I do another book.

Alright, last topic that I kind of want to touch on here is products. So, so the product is the idea of building, I'm going to talk about digital products, so software products, whether you're writing desktop applications, or you're building some sort of SAS or web application that you're selling for.

Uh, Years and years ago, I created one called Windsitter with a friend of mine, Brett Fisher, who I talked about earlier and we built a SAS, a software as a service that would monitor Windows servers and this was before the cloud really came, came up big and we made a couple grand off of Windsitter, but we had a slew of marketing issues that we were trying to deal with and historically just didn't work. It's difficult to market to developers and IT professionals.

Uh, and there's a lot of really good ways to do that. But eventually we hit a point with Windsitter where we, we said it just wasn't worth the time and effort we were putting into it. We decided to shut it down. Um, so Windsitter is not what you'd call a success story. It is a more, the reality story of we all have dumb ideas. Sometimes you get your dumb ideas to market. And sometimes you have to shut down your dumb ideas.

Nothing wrong with that because I learned a ton about product and businesses from building WinCenter. So I don't regret that time at all. And I have the coolest graphic that is still better than 90 percent of what you see on the internet today. So we call his, his name was Joe, Joe the IT admin. Uh, and that's because the guy who drew it, his name was Joe. But I want to give you some success stories. Um, uh.

I have a friend, uh, Dave Seia has this product called Recut, and Dave was making videos for YouTube and he was spending the majority of his time just cutting out, um, white space in his video just empty, empty space. He's like, I really wish I just had an app that no did this, that would just cut out all the white space and it was before all the major video apps were doing this. So he wrote an app that would cut out the white space.

And you could export it to other programs, and we do all this really cool stuff. Talking to a couple other, like, YouTubers or video creators, people said, I really would like that. Can I pay you for a copy? So he turned it into a business. And he sells ReCut. And it's not a subscription, you just pay one time for the software. Which is amazing, because no one does that anymore. Wouldn't it be great if you could just pay for something and use it forever? So ReCut is on that model.

Now Dave makes, I'm not giving any of Dave's numbers away, but he makes enough with ReCut where he is happy he doesn't need to work a day job. He doesn't need to consult anymore. He could just live off ReCut, which is not an insignificant amount of money. So there is success here with this sort of thing. And he's working on improving ReCut, making it better and better. Uh, our Podcast is hosted on a system called Transistor.

I like Transistor because it was created by another friend of mine, Justin Jackson, who, uh, is a big advocate of the startup and product community. And, I kind of, I remember when Transistor got started off the ground as an idea. Can you make podcast hosting better? At the time, I had a podcast. It was called Two Frugal Dudes with my friend Sean. And we just had so much, so many issues with our, uh, Lipsyn podcast hosting.

It was like, it would really be nice if there was a better way to do this. We ended up shutting down Two Frugal Dudes. And when we started the multi threaded income podcast, I said, well, I'm going to try Transistor out and see how that goes. So we signed up to support Justin, but I still pay him the full amount. I don't get a friend discount or anything. But it's a very good piece of software.

And Justin If you go back through the years, he's recorded his process in his, they call it build in public. So they built Transistor in public, and you know that they started from zero dollars, originally got those first couple subscribers, and now, again, they're in a place where they have multiple employees, and it's their full time job, it's just running the system. They had started as, just as a side gig.

They were working on it out of the side, eventually went full time on it, eventually brought on employees. And now it's a, I'm not going to call it a juggernaut, but it's becoming a player in the podcast hosting space, which I think is really a testament to, any of us can start with nothing and build it into something. Um, and these are way better applications than WindSitter ever was.

Alright, as I come down to the end of my time, let's have a quick discussion of just ethics and time management. Because I think this is important. Uh, first question is, is it ethical to do your work on the side if you have a W 2? And the answer to that is absolutely it's ethical, it's your time. Never let your employer dictate what you do with your free time. And, I'm gonna go off my hot take here.

Like my employer, like I work for a variety of different clients, but I'm done working at 5 o'clock in the afternoon. Maybe 4. Maybe two if I feel like it. Like, it really depends on what I feel like my time needs to be. My clients are getting value from me, but I have complete control over my time. If they need anything at 8, 9 o'clock in the evening, that's cool. I am available sometimes, but there is also a penalty to be paid when that occurs. Um, I don't, I, I covered my free time.

That's what I like to say. Um, I think it's absolutely. ethical to use your free time in whatever way, shape or form you want to, uh, there's this term that was kind of taking the internet during COVID of over employment where you're working two or more full time jobs. At the time, I don't like that. I think that I think that's doing, uh, instead of I still want you to do your job. If you have a full time job, do your job. Well, don't have two jobs that you do poorly.

Because that's not going to help you anywhere in your career, is being a bad employee at two, two businesses. Um, yeah. And if you're a bad employee at one business, that's a whole different problem. But, don't, don't do the multiple jobs. When I talk about multi threaded income, it's the taking a couple hours in the evening or on a weekend to do some work. It's not taking a completely second job. Now, if you're single, you have no life, you do you, but I'm not going to advocate for that.

If you're working a full time job, there's a couple things you absolutely need to keep in mind. Do not use your work equipment for anything that you're doing on the side. I've seen, there are laughs when people do this. Um, because usually you have better hardware with your employer than you might have personally. Get yourself a personal laptop, personal something. Uh, don't do this work on your.

Work machine, and the biggest reason is that you probably, uh, have some sort of clause in your employment agreement that says anything written on your work equipment is the property of your employer, and don't even, yeah, don't even push it, just have a separate machine for all that work that you're going to do. Don't use work time if your employer is expecting you to be productive between a set number of hours, say 9 to 5. Don't spend any of that time to work on side projects.

I mean, it depends. If you have a flexible enough job where you could do work at lunchtime and it's not a big deal, you know, that's up to you. I'm more of a play it safe. Don't get caught working on something that's not work during the time that your job thinks that you should be working. Uh, also, you need to make sure you don't have a non compete or some sort of IP agreement with your employer. This is the big one, because you might have signed something and not realized it.

A lot of us don't read the employment agreements. When we, we're just happy we're getting paid. So, you just sign on the dotted line. They are better today than they were a long time ago. They used to be very Very, uh, restrictive, so you might have a case where the employer says, Any thought you have, I don't care if it's during working hours, I don't care if it's in the shower. Any thought you have, any napkin you write a note on belongs to the company. And, that's a little restrictive.

Just a little. Um, but it also means that, let's say you were working on something on the side, And you try to monetize it, the employer can come back and say, that is owned by us, we have the paperwork to prove it, and you now owe us the residuals that you made from that product. Don't put yourself in that position. Oh, but Kevin, there's a clause where you could write in all your previous inventions and your new inventions. Yeah, that's a lot of effort.

Um, I don't sign on IP agreements anymore, unless it's non restrictive, or, it's very narrow to, to a use case. I will give you the IP for anything that I write, granted that, uh, you pay me for it. So, you're paying me for a very specific thing that I'm working on, also has to be in the statement of work, that you can't just pick and choose what I've worked on, and get the IP rights to it. So that's, uh, that's important, um, Uh, and lastly, and we kinda touched on this a little bit earlier.

I don't. I don't agree with sacrificing your life or your family just to make a few extra dollars. If you are working paycheck to paycheck, absolutely take some of these ideas and try to run with it, to just become more financially free. Give yourself some options. But, if you're thinking about missing a baseball game, or whatnot, to crank out some more code, that is never going to be worth it, and I will never advocate for that. Um, so, that's all I have.

The other thoughts, the biggest place to start is, all this begins with your network, so a lot of success in consulting products, books, courses, whatever, starts with how social you are, and it doesn't mean that you're thousands of followers on Twitter, it just means maybe start with LinkedIn, uh, there are multiple people on the Multithreaded Income podcast that will tell you, start with LinkedIn, it's not Twitter, it's Twitter.

Thankfully, but it's a good way to kind of build your network and put out some content so people know who you are. People are more inclined to give money to people that they know and people that they trust. And if you can build some sort of that trust socially, people are more willing to give you money. So if you're trying to sell a course, having a good social network will give you people who want to pay you for your course.

Uh, if you want to start freelancing or moonlighting or become an independent consultant. LinkedIn is a great place to go for those sort of people because everyone's always looking. Even in a somewhat down economy of folks losing their job left and right, there are still always folks looking on LinkedIn. Go to LinkedIn. Like, I won't advocate for anything other than LinkedIn at this moment. Um, so again, we have the multi threaded income podcast.

I would love for you to listen and get some ideas. And I would love your feedback on our Discord if you'd like to come join the conversation. But with that Thank you all so much for hanging out with me today. I'm happy to answer questions.