Leaving the Dev Community a Better Place | Multithreaded Income Episode 23 with Tim Corey

But I decided I really needed to have something outside of my day job that helps supplement my income, but at the same time, also kind of scratch the itch that I had. I'm a software developer and I was doing an I. T. director's position, which isn't really heavy in a software development. Um, so this allowed me to kind of. Keep active, because if you step away from software development for six months, a year, two years, you know, you're really behind.

And so I got to experience, you know, the new stuff and try new things out and experiment with different languages and things like that as a consultant. So it kind of kept my skills fresh, which helped me move then away from that job into more software development, but also supplement my income. And it kind of gave me that cushion to do other things as well.

And so I really focused hard on being there for my kids, being there for my wife, being present, which meant I was doing a lot of, you know, late hours, night work and that kind of thing. So I didn't go too far in the, you know, take every job I could. I tried to, you know, limit to, Hey, what jobs can I do? In the, in the off hours in the time when I have available to me. So I didn't really let that build up until, um, until I lost my job.

And then I spent a year doing just software consultancy, which, you know, having all that. Kind of previous build up experience and working with people and building contacts really helped with that that year on my own.

Same thing. But then when, when I lose my job, well, I can just step right into doing more of it and and be okay. And that was one of the most liberating feelings was not feeling panic. When I didn't have a job

Ramp up the jobs, you know, I started calling contacts and when I came back from Spain, I had a whole bunch of, of new work to, to start on. So it was, yeah, there's, there's always that what's going to happen to unknown. But at the same time, it was, it was not nearly as scary as it really could have been because I had that insurance.

Um, for me, I didn't like the, the constant push and pull the, you know, you're the salesperson, you're the, the marketing person, you're the, um, the accountant and all the rest. And so I really loved software development and helping people. And those two things what I want to do. And now I did do those things, but in smaller quantities and I was expecting or wanting. So, um, that was part of it.

But then the other part of it was I was spending an awful lot of time again, try to build this business up and and do everything. And that took a lot of time away from my family. And so I ended up making a choice just a year into it saying, you know what? This is This is not the way I want to be full time independent. So I picked a job that was working from home remote 40 hours a week. Actually, my, uh, my boss, I love my boss, uh, my former boss, but he said, we insist on 40 hours. No more.

And so that's that job. I'm like, yep, that's the job I want. I'm gonna go ahead and, and take that because it's basically a 40 hour consultancy. At that point where I get to work from home, I get to set me on hours if I wanted to, um, great, great opportunity. But I got to choose and didn't have to panic. So I spent time and said, okay, you know, I looked at some jobs and kind of laughed and was like, no, I am not taking that job.

There was one job that I interviewed for where they said, you know, for a number of hours, we work pretty hard around here. Well, that's, that's a big red flag right there. Um, number, number of days off per year. Well, after a year, you get a week. And I'm like, no, that's that's not work life balance. That's just insane. So I was able to kind of leverage that on my own consultancy to say, you know what?

I can keep doing this thing if I want to, as long as I want to and so I could turn down jobs that would be otherwise good paying jobs, but not the best opportunity in order to find the job that I wanted. And I went back into you. Working full time from there and then, you know, from there is when I started doing YouTube full time. And that was a whole nother story.

You know, seeing the light come on, I had students who came to me who were, um, you know, multiple time failures in this class from previous professors and we're able to, you know, grant, you know, graduate the class with high marks because it was the ability to, to see where they were and help them develop and spend that time. And I had the time, so I was able to, um, you know, see a lot of really fun things come out of that. And that's where I really, really realized.

This is what I like, you know, I, I enjoy helping people. I enjoy teaching. I enjoy this part of software development. And so, you know, even when I was consulting, I'm like, I'm only doing a little part of what I really love. I want to get back to the bigger part of what I really love. So,

So what I started doing was creating these horrible, awful, please don't look for them. Um, I'm embarrassed they're even anywhere near the internet still, um, videos where I said, okay, you know, this is for CIS 163 101 what we learned this week. And I would just cover the topics we learned that week and kind of give them a refresher. They can go back to and, you know, hear what I said before and see what I did on the board or, you know, on the on the video.

And so that kind of gave my students a refresher, which was, you know, I'd get. Five, 10 hits a week, which I was not expecting to build an audience here. I was just trying to help my students. And then I started getting 50 hits and a hundred hits and 500 hits and a thousand hits. And I'm like, I don't have a thousand students and either I have some students who are really being diligent about going back and watching it over and over again.

Um, try to learn by osmosis, you know, like, you know, loop, um, or maybe I'm helping other people and that's when the comments started rolling in. Hey, this was helpful. Can you help me in this? And so I just started creating videos to help people in a more broad sense. And that's where YouTube started. I never had a, a purpose for other than to help people. I never even monetization was like this way out there thought I never even thought I could monetize.

Um, and so that first hundred dollar check from YouTube came, it was a, it was a big deal.

But, um, as far as YouTube actually making me money, um, I actually had this conversation with someone who, uh, was pretty sure that I did a video just for the clicks. And, which I don't do. Um, I, I am vehemently opposed to clickbait, to the point where I probably kill my own YouTube numbers just because I don't wanna be clickbait or close to it. But, um, but you know, the thought was, well, you're just trying to make that sweet, sweet YouTube.

Ad revenue, um, which my, so I have almost 600 videos on YouTube and I had consistently in the millions of views per month or per quarter, I think it's per month now. I don't remember. I don't watch the numbers, but with all of that, my YouTube income is about 28, 000 a year. is not, I mean, I'm, I'm not saying it's a bad thing. I mean, 20 grand is 28 grand. It's a, it's a lot of money, but it's also not exactly, you know, balling out getting rich money.

Um, so it's definitely not my primary income stream. And if I try to make it my primary income stream, I'm not going to do real well.

There's the, the, all the things that go around that. Like, how do you work with a team? How do you, uh, what are the best practices you established? How do you establish those? How do you work with a rough boss? How do you, what do you put in your portfolio? All those kind of questions that don't really involve code on a screen. Those are the questions I answer my dev questions podcast. So that's Twice a week, um, is typical. I'll do more once in a while when certain things pop up.

Um, I'll, I'm not a news station, but every once in a while I'll talk about something that came out in developer news that is important. Those types of things.

Now, ideally, I'd be a month ahead. It doesn't happen. Um, so I tend to do it. I tend to batch and try and do a lot. And then I can focus on other things that that I want to focus on, um, creating, you know, uh, creating courses is one. I try to do. Uh, block everything off. Like you won't hear me respond to email. I'll be really bad about responding to email for probably a week because I'm just heads down doing nothing but recording for a course.

Um, the same thing is true for the larger, uh, blocks of YouTube content. Uh, so for example, I'm working on right now, we're working through a couple different, like full courses that I want to produce for YouTube. So normally a course is a paid course. It goes just on, I am Tim Corey. com. But I really like to. Again, help people. And I can't have everybody pay for stuff and trying to figure out a way to make everybody of like, I mean, available to everybody for paid is just too hard.

So I do that. I talked to sponsors and I say, Hey, would you sponsor making this a free course? And so make it a free course. We'll make it a win, win, win for everybody. Um, and so I'm working on those right now. So that's, yeah. Another area was going to take additional time, but it will give me a little bit of a buffer later. Um, so it was just kind of a batch process. Some days are great and some weeks I'm at way ahead and some weeks I'm just so far behind.

Um, and one of the things that when I started off on YouTube, one of my kind of focuses was I'm gonna respond to every single content comment. So if you make a comment, I will respond, um, even it's just, you know, thanks. You're welcome. I'm gonna try and respond to everything. Now, I, I ended that streak about two years ago where I'm like, I just don't have time for every single one, especially when people are asking in depth. Like, okay, if this happens and this happens, what about this?

And I'm like, I don't know. Um, I have to research that. I don't have time to research everything, but I still spend an awful lot of time talking to people, listening to people. And so I've been able to hear what they say. You know, and, and here the repeating patterns, but then I think it was two years ago, I built a suggestion site is actually one of the courses. That's free on YouTube that MongoDB sponsored. And so we put a course on YouTube. That was me building a suggestion site.

And then it's now live and that's the site where you can go leave suggestions for me for future content. So suggestions. I am Tim core. com. And if any other careers out there want to steal from that, cool, you know, go through the list, figure out what people are asking for and build your own content. Um, but no, there's a, a way to leave your own suggestion there, upvote other suggestions and.

You know, and I try to go through that list a lot and say, okay, I'm going to answer those, those things. And you can't answer every, every question or respond to every request for a video, but I've got 700 different, um, entries right now that I'm, I'm working through.

Trying to learn, you know, C sharp or trying to learn. In that case, it was a VB five and six. Um, I learned the hard way. You know, I, I figured out all these wrong ways of doing things. And I even got some things to work that were just horrible. And, you know, looking back at your code now, you're like, I wish you'd never would have done that. But

And where I was, how can I teach this in a way that would be revelatory the idea that, you know, it, it opens your eyes and it really becomes practical. Um, one of the things that's always frustrated me is the, um, you know, how to, how to draw a horse. You know, you got the, the four stick lines and the oval and all of a sudden next photo is like this photo realistic horse. And you're like, I'm missing a step somewhere. And so I try to do that.

I try to fill in those gaps and be, you know, thorough in my teaching. And, and so I just found that I'm solving my problem. This is my problem. This is what I struggled with. So I just solved that problem thinking that maybe there's others out there like me. And one of the things I found is that I'm not a unique person. I mean, maybe generally overall. Sure. But the way I feel others have felt too.

And so by solving my problem in the way that worked well for me, there was others like me that also solve that problem for and. I am not like everyone. So there's other people out there who learn differently, who want different things or have different perspectives on how learning should be. And so if you just teach to your voice to teach to what works for me, you know, it may be a smaller audience, maybe a bigger audience, but you'll find there's an audience of people who really resonate with.

With how you do things. So just get out there and do it.

I didn't feel, feel like I should have been up there talking about it, but I did this talk, it was introduction to jQuery and I will never forget someone came up afterwards and went, I have sat through, I don't know how many sessions on jQuery and you explained it in a way that totally made sense to me. I can go back and run with that now. So it was like so many smarter people than me have done that sort of content. And this guy.

Couldn't understand it, but little old me went up and did exactly what you just said, talked about it from my perspective, the issues I ran into, how I overcame those issues. You know, this guy was able to go, I see what Kevin's talking about. Okay. I can move on from here. So I got him over that. What? 10 percent hump of just understanding what you need to know to get started. And then it's all up from there.

It really helps encourage them to do more of, because, you know, if, if you're out there looking for something and you're finding resources, who created those. Somebody invested the time, so give them those kudos and a lot of people will either be silent or will be negative if they didn't like something, you know, be just as positive, you know, I encourage someone the other day, you know, they were, I think the comment was C sharp as trash. I'm like, awesome. Um, and my, you know, I first.

Response is snark, and I would love just be snarky, but I say, you know, there's, there's two different ways of approaching the world. One is to, to build something or encourage something to be built. And the other is to just be miserable and tear things down. Be the former, either former, um, make the world a better place. Don't make it a worse place. And, and it really changes lives because it changes. You remember that one person because one person said this made a difference.

And I have those people too, that this encouraged me to keep going, or this encouraged me to, to do more.

And so my thought was, Hey, if I sold a course and people actually wanted to buy it and people are actually interested in what I have to teach, then I could replace some of my consulting income, which means I wouldn't have to do as much consulting. And if I didn't have to do as much consulting, I can spend more time creating YouTube content for free. And so I pitched this to the audience and like, Hey, this is what I'm going to do. This is how I'm going to do it.

And by the same time I was, I was terrified that no one would buy, you know, it's the, I threw a party and no one came. Um, I really thought that would happen. And so I also didn't really love the idea of making people pay for something because my goal was not. Make more money. My goal was to help people.

And so I didn't want to just put something out there and, and, you know, I've, I've kind of changed my philosophy a little bit on this, but I really didn't want to just be like, Hey, there's this, this hidden thing that only the elite can have.

So what I ended up doing was I ended up giving away all the videos in the course for free and I'm like, I was going to put on YouTube, but if you want the source code, if you want them all at once, instead of dripped out on YouTube, if you want them with a certificate completion, and if I didn't do one bonus video. I'm like, I'll do one bonus video on, I think, emailing that I'll put in there and the paid course.

So I gave everything away, but then charged 67 for the course and blew the doors off. Like I, I did not expect anyone to buy. And I had hundreds of people buying. So I'm like, Oh, this, this works. Um, and that was kind of the start of me thinking about. Creating content to replace first my consulting income, and then eventually, you know, I, I never thought this would happen, but eventually my, my day job, um, and then, you know, from there, build a actual company out of it.

But, you know, even after I had that paid course, I still had that imposter syndrome of, well, I'm not good enough. I can't create content is perfect. So I spent, I think, two years. Creating and throwing away what is now my C sharp master course. So I'm, I wanted to create something from the ground up. Like if you know nothing about C sharp to start from zero and become a junior or mid level C sharp developer skill level wise. And it was never good enough. It was never good enough.

So I spent two years creating and throwing away content until finally I'm like, I just have to put something out the door. And I started putting stuff out the door and saying, it's okay not to be perfect. And once I started to allow myself to not be perfect, um, I started creating more content and now at the point where in 2019 I went full time with, you know, just my core sales and then in 2020 I hired my first employee and I'm now up to four employees that work on creating content.

Well, I'm the one that creates content right now, but the rest of them support that content creation.

And so he was doing my designs kind of as his side job and I was paying him to do some designs for me. But when I needed more of that and I'm like, Hey, would you help me? You know, and so he came on full time as my designer. He's also my marketing person. He's also my social media person. He's, he wears a lot of hats. Um, he does a lot of strategic planning with me as well. So I hired him. My first hire was March 1st of 2020, which was pandemic. Perfect.

So that was great timing, but, but then I hired a community manager as Tom. He does, um, all the interactions with like people who have purchased courses that need help or that, you know, you need a receipt or invoice or, um, he works with vendors and he works with, you know, a lot of different people. Plus he just interacts with the community in general. Um, and then in 2021, I hired a, uh, very rookie. Web developer. Um, I needed web development done.

I can do it, but that's not course development. And so again, there was an area where I'm like, I can take something off my plate and give it to somebody else. And so I kind of trained him up and taught him how to do web development. And so he does all of my website work now, which is awesome. So Daniel did a design for, and then Noah does the actual work for it. And then goodness, I forget when was it September? No, it's been before that.

I remember, but I hired a, um, executive assistant to start awfully my work as well. So she's awesome. She's a, um, a person that will take something as run with it. And so she, um, viciously rips things away from me that I'm like, well, I could do that. She's like, no, you know, you can't take it away from me, which is great because that's what I need is, is someone to take away the things that, um, others can do.

That I could do as well, um, because what the real focus is, is, you know, get me back into doing more and more software development, teaching and training. So that's where we're at right now. And we're going to probably grow again next year.

Just want to have full control over everything. But, Having full control over everything means nothing gets done, or at least gets done in a manner that I would be happy with and having those people to just take the things from you and doing a good job of it, or a better job than I would do is the icing on the cake.

But, um, but really thinking through the idea of what is it that, you know, if you want to talk to strictly business, what is it that I do that no one else can do that brings in the money. And for me, that's teaching. Now, you know, we're a little bit different company. We don't focus on dollars first. We focus on helping people first. But that means what can I do to help people first? And that is building content. So really, that's the area I have to focus on, which means I have to give away.

Everything else, if I can't, and that means that I don't do things like, well, I mean, a simple one book, my trips, you know, why am I booking trips? Well, because I know exactly what I want. Okay. Communicate that, communicate that to somebody else and let them do it. Let it go. And it won't be perfect. The first few times. It won't be perfect, something will be different or missed or not the way exactly what you do it. But you know what?

Having somebody else do it, build them up, teach them how to do it right. Have them go beyond what you could do. And the same time you're spending the time you need on the areas that are most important to your business.

You know, so you have a thumb drive and have this little application on it that would have all your code snippets for working on a server, all the PowerShell scripts or whatever you needed to have. Um, and I just didn't quite wrap it up and finish it. Now it's kind of accidental. Like, I didn't ever get that last 20 percent done or it wasn't perfect. And so I just didn't finish it. And so it's an accidental thing like that. But I think now for me, I look for that.

I look for what things can I abandoned and, you know, as a business, one of the things that we have to think through is, is not getting stuck in the sunk cost fallacy, not getting stuck in the, well, you've already spent six months on this. We need to keep going. No, throw that. Throw that out because if it's not working, it's not working. And so one of the things that we're pretty ruthless on is we meet once a month as a team in person.

We're all remote right now, but we meet once, once a month in person and we go through what are you working on? And, you know, where's the focus? And we may look at what we're doing, saying that's not working. Throw it out.

And it's hard because, you know, as a business owner, I can look at how much I'm paying in salary and how much time you spent on it and go, that's 50, 000 right there that I'm throwing away, you know, but I could throw 50, 000 away or I could throw 80, away, which do I rather do throw the 50 away. So what we have to do is, is make wise choices, but then. You know, as far as moving forward, but then look at what are the things that we need to cut out that will make us better.

And so we have cut projects that. That are good, but that take our time away from completing other projects, um, that, you know, we want to do. There's, there's a, a project right now that we have started working on a couple of times, and it would be one that would really help students. And it's a project we will do, and it's one that I think will revolutionize even the training industry for software development, but we've had to cut it at least twice now. Where I've said, yeah, that's great.

We don't have the time right now. Yeah, that's great. We don't have the energy to do that and this other thing, and this other thing is more important right now. So it's, it's a good versus great, a better versus best. Um, we've had to make that choice a lot.

One of the things I see, let's call them rookies do is they'll skip from thing to thing and they'll start on something, learn all the flashy, cool stuff and then move on to the next flashy, cool thing when things get hard. And I always tell, you know, C sharp developers. You're just learning C sharp, then don't learn java, don't learn java script, don't learn, you know, stop it, learn C sharp. Well, and even then don't learn the UI, learn the code.

Um, in my C sharp master course, we spend the first major section of the course in nothing but console applications. They're ugly, they're messy, they're, they're simple, there's nothing flashy or cool about them. But what you do is you learn C sharp code well, and you establish that foundation and you go deeper and deeper into the code itself because it's not when you look at a person's resume, you don't look for, you know, worked on a flashy thing.

Number one, number two, number three, number four. It's how deep did you go? Like, can you actually fix real problems? Can you build real applications? This thing, or have you seen how to do a hello world or a to do app in eight different types? So, you know, going deep into something, committing to something and, and getting through that, that hard time. And that's kind of number two is if you're banging your head against the desk, you're probably in the right spot.

Um, it's, it's not the, the easy thing that is what will help you succeed. It's the pushing through the hard thing. Is what will get you there and when you are trying to just do something, it becomes, it's super easy, super easy, super easy.

You know, you feel like you're conquering the world when you get to that spot where it's like, I've bogged down and now I, you know, it's so hard push through it because when you push through it, first of all, you're in a better, whatever it is, better business owner, better developer, better consultant and that happens. You will have that real world skill and experience that others won't because they didn't push through and that's what kind of separates people. It's the filter.

Cause I think I've done something similar to this and it makes your whole life easier. Tim, anything to promote?