Knowing When to Pull the Plug | Multithreaded Income Episode 17

And I want to start this whole conversation with projects where I didn't know when the pull the plug. So a long time ago. Year 2013. 20 14, 20 15, around that time. I was working on a startup. It was called the wind. Sitter in, um, myself in a very good friend of mine. Brett Fisher, who was a previous guest on the show. We were working on the startup. That we were building topper to help CIS ministers manage windows, servers, and production.

And this is kind of at the onset of the cloud everywhere. Everyone moving to the cloud, moving everything to the cloud. And. It was a really solid idea, but bread and I really had difficulty. Marketing it and figuring out who we are going to try to sell it to. And every time Brett and I would get together as area. What's the next thing we need to work on. And the answer all the time was always marketing. We needed to work on marketing, but we didn't want to work on marketing.

We wanted to work on the technical problems like, oh, I could go add another feature that does X, Y, and Z. And it's easy for us as developers to dive in and solve the technical problems, but we really don't want to solve the problems that we should be working on. To bring this back to the point, working on wind sitter. Day after day after day. And we did this for months and months turned into years. And. Bread. And I would always get together and go, you know, is this. Is this done?

Like, should we just shut this down? We have a handful of paying customers. There's money coming in, but it's not. What people would call F-you money. Like there's no quitting your job. There's no quitting. You're. Your livelihood to go all in on that product. And we let this go on way too long. Do eventually. Two years probably after we should have pulled the plug. Brett and I had the. Conversation. Should we pull the plug on this and go work on something different for a change.

And the answer that was yes. Yeah. We had to go. Work on something else. So we didn't finish that. When we shut up and. Yeah, lessons learned. So let's bring that to the future. Into the current to the present and I'm working on multithreaded income with my very good friends. Sean Marin and Chad Carter. Uh, we have this vision of being able to help developers. Figure out how to insure themselves against. Future job loss. How do you build multiple threads of income? So you're never looking for.

A job at the wrong moment, your don't ever find yourself at a point where you don't have income from any source. You are a super talented person. Why don't you. Take that talent and go do something with it. And. Hopefully we're, we're helping you. If you're been listening to the show. But multithreaded income is. Time-boxed.

Because while I love helping people, there has to be individual point where this entity makes some money and we have a variety of different ways that we're planning on doing that. We're having that hard conversation. When is the point with multithreaded income that we pull the plug. So you're listening to this episode. Uh, at whatever time, but I'm recording it on November 15th, 2023.

And there is a time box that says when we get to February of 20, 24, A couple of hard decisions going to have be made. If we haven't made significant progress. In. Bringing in dollars into the business. It is fun. To work on things. I love working on side projects, but. Dedicating. An extravagant amount of your time to OSI project. That's not producing any fruits. Is. Sometimes not. Time, well spent. Uh, so multithreaded income coming back to this. I love doing multithreaded income.

I love the people I interview. I love the people out in the community that I'm talking to. And I'm learning from, and I'm helping teach. That all brings me joy. But there are a considerable number of things in this life that bring me joy. So if I found myself in the next three, four months, and I know Sean, Chadfill the exact same way. If we find ourselves in this position where a multi-threaded income is taking up time. But it's not producing the end result. The return on investment.

Which is money. We need to cut that out of our lives. So coming back to the Nate conversation, Nate really touched on this and like, let's make sure that when we're evaluating different things that we're doing. That we have outs. We know when. Enough is enough. We have done what we could with a project and don't be afraid to say no, like, no, it was the most. Powerful word you can possibly use in your career. Feel free to say no to things. There's a famous saying somewhere.

And I don't remember what it's from. I've heard it in 15,000 different contexts. But when you are evaluating anything in your life, If it's not. Uh, hell yes, it needs to be a no. So at the moment multi-threaded income, this is how, yes. I love doing this. Let's talk more about making. Developers financially independence. And. Yeah, let's talk more about that. So if I'm still around in March, you know, that something has succeeded.

If I'm not, you know, it's failed, but that's because we probably time box the experiments. To, to move on. The next topic that Nate touched on that I think is worth talking a little bit more is around the concept of consulting. So I'm a consultant. Uh, Chad to consultant and Sean's doing consulting as well. Um, a lot of you out there are probably thinking about I'm getting, looking forward to getting into independent consulting. I want to start freelancing.

I want to start doing this work on the side. And I, 100% thing, everyone should do a little bit of freelancing on the side. Uh, just to get some breadth of skillset. The biggest benefit that consulting is primarily you work with a variety of different clients and customers. And they all have different problems and they're all different people. So you don't get siloed into working with a particular team in a particular way. Because no two companies operate in the exact same way.

Uh, I've worked with everything from military to fortune 50 companies to little mom and pop shops, and they all have a. Different way of thinking about businesses and how different folks in the business should operate. So it's good for you to just kind of work with different people and build up that skillset. Now on top of that, you might pick up additional skills and tech that you might not necessarily had before. So spend some time and do a little bit of freelancing. I love how Nate uses.

Consulting though, because ultimately like, Nate, once you use consulting, just the fund. His future projects. And I don't think this is a topic that really anyone else on the show has, has gone too deeply in is that you are capable of buying your own time. When. I do consulting work. I get paid for that and I take that money and I put it into a bank account. It's used to pay for the things that I pay for, but I could also use a little bit of that money to pay for by Tom and other projects.

For example, if I had a product idea, a SAS that I wanted to work on. I could easily pay myself to work on that. By not taking consulting work. But just kind of eating into the coffers of the consulting work that I'd done previously. That's exactly what Nate does. He does enough consulting. To fund the product work that he wants to do. And he has really a cool concept. For anyone out there. Your working on. Your day job. You started doing some freelancing on the side.

You're gonna start building those coffers up. And eventually you get to the point where maybe the freelancing of the consulting takes over and that can become your full-time job. Well, now you can say that to science are working out something else. Going back to my previous conversation about when sitter, when I was doing wind sitter. I basically funded the winds that are time with consulting time that I had on the side. So 80% of my time is consulting. And then 20% of my time with. When sitter.

It leads into another big thing that I think Nate was hitting on. Is that. Eventually as. A consultant or a freelancer or a product. Producer. You have 100%. Control. Over your time. When. When do you wake up? When do you go to your computer? When do you take a break? Do you want to take a long lunch? Do you want to go out to coffee with someone? These are all things that you can't really easily do when you're working a W2 full-time job, you don't have full control over your schedule.

At least not as much as you might want. Uh, I just got back from a business retreat with a group of friends in. Uh, Austin, Texas. And I just took a couple days off. And what I did was I told my clients, I was working with. But Hey, just quick FYI. I'm not going to be available Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. I'll check slack periodically. But I'm not going to be productive, nothing getting done that week. Take care and I'll see you when I get back. That's the type of control over my time. I want.

I want to be able to go to kids' baseball games or. Any event that they have going on, I can do that. I don't have to ask permission. I just go do it. It's this kind of holy grail of, I can do literally whatever I want. Now the downside of like cases is if I'm not working, I'm not making money, but I can selectively choose. When those times are. If I don't want to work past three o'clock in the afternoon. I don't work past three o'clock in the afternoon.

It's completely up to me to control my time. 100%. So I'm going to put out a question to. The multithreaded income community. How. Would you like it? If you could control 100% of your time, what would you do differently? And how can the multi-threaded income community help you? By achieving some of those goals. So, thank you all so much for hanging out with me today and I'll see you on next. Week's up. So.