Moving From Developer To Tech Entrepreneur Required Mindset Shift - My Struggles

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. No excuses
  3. My inner conflict
  4. Necesary actions I must take
  5. The next problem I have is that I want to use Clojure
  6. Conclusions

Introduction

I've been a self-development nerd for most of my early adult life. I have read many books and tried many different tactics. Most of them work for a time but then stop because either I forget about them or I moved on to the next shiny self discipline practice.

I feel I am not doing enough to further myself. I see that I am not consistent. This is my biggest critique to myself. I am not consistent with the things that are hard to do but need doing.

No excuses

Recently I've been reading Brian Tracy's Eat that frog and No excuses books. Brian has been a big influence on my life ever since I picked up his book No Excuses when I was 23 or 24. Since then I started to better myself:

  • I started taking courses religiously. I dedicated a hefty portion of my income to further my education in software development and this helped me advance and double my income several times in a short period of time

  • I was waking up early and doing 30 minutes - 1 hour of education every day

However, currently I see that my progress has stopped. I have changed my focus from being in the top software developers to being an entrepreneur. This change comes with it's own challenges and to be successful I need a different mindset.

Successfull people do the hard things they don't want to do, most of time

My inner conflict

I see clearly that to be a successful entrepreneur in the tech space, I need to focus more on sales and marketing than on coding and building products.

The problem is I truly enjoy coding.

This is a conflict that many developers have when they first start building their own products. And most of them, if they don't resolve this conflict, fail.

I know this is the final result of focusing on building and not on the problem and the people you are building it for yet I am not willing to do this sacrifice.

Necesary actions I must take

Here is a list of things I can do in order to get out of this rut:

  • Go to local meetups of businesses and start solving real problems for them with code.

  • Write daily on social media.

  • Prospect potential clients on social media.

  • DM or call the prospects and sell them on the potential offer I have.

The next problem I have is that I want to use Clojure

From a business standpoint, this is not very productive because projects with Clojure have a slow start but make up for it in time. This means that clojure is not very suitable for software projects like:

  • Build an MVP for you in 2 weeks (it can work if you have a lot of boilerplate ready)

  • Landing or presentation website service

Areas where it shines:

  • Long term and very complex SaaS like financial, accounting, law related or any domain where you need a lot of data.

  • Automation scripts and glue code through babashka and AI given I have experience doing this

Conclusions

My next move should be to contact businesses and offer automation services using clojure and from there I can see if there is any space to do a long term SaaS product.