I Was Making Life Hard - Part 2 ⇒

Please make sure you read Part 1 first.

The Realization

My Keboola contract ended before I left on our wonderful family vacation to France, Italy & Croatia, so I had lots of time to contemplate.

When I got back I talked to several folks I respect, and came to realize that sales just isn’t for me. While I really enjoy helping people solve their problems, there are many more components in a scaleable, successful sales process:

• lead generation
• prospect research
• messaging
• negotiation

I really, really don’t like those steps, nor do I like the constant pressure. Combine that with the fact that sales people are always the first to go when revenue dips and I’ve got a role that I’m not well suited for, nor enjoy.

A Digression (Or Is It?)

In the last 5 years, my continued but casual interest in development has unintentionally turned into a little side business. Making my blog led me through several CMSes, like pMachine, ExpressionEngine, Wordpress and finally, Statamic. Somewhat accidentally, I got heavily involved in the Statamic community, becoming the unofficial support person.

As I got deeper into the ecosystem, I was spending more time making addons for the community, both free and commercial. This led to regular contracts where I helped folks with their Statamic websites. Somewhat ironically, I set my hourly rate quite high, to limit the work I got. This meant that a decent sized contract was actually a good amount of money.

I was enjoying myself so much, I started to learn new technologies like Laravel & Vue, and take some non-Statamic contracts.

Why did I stop coding in the first place?

Part 3…