How are you sustaining yourself?
You work on your thing. You don't know when you'll reach a point where it makes you enough $ to sustain yourself. How are you sustaining yourself in the meanwhile?
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I do freelance software development for the company I used to work for full time.
After reading the comments here I am definitely going to look into grants.
I'm very blessed that I'm building a stock market analysis algorithm, so I get to 1) verify that it works and 2) see the value that such an idea has.
Within a year, I've personally made a little over 600%. Though, that's a far cry from the 39455.453% that my algorithm has found, but that's because I don't take part every day.
Up until now, I was getting unemployment fees, but that has finished now and I am living from my savings... I actually recorded a podcast episode just about that.
Freelance and hopefully grants or sponsors soon.
I'm freelancing PM + Dev for nonprofits, NGOs and ethical organisations in general.
Also on the side I'm building a community for others like me that are techies interesting in social impact: https://www.developmenthackers.com/
I'd like to get a grant for the community and eventually sponsors, so that I could give it more time in my community/freelance ratio. Both "projects" kind of work well together though :)
For me, it's a mix of freelancing and grants.
I live in Germany and here we have a bunch of grants that are basically no-strings-attached, i.e. you don't sell parts of your business in order to get money.
Freelancing + grants sustained me for the last 12 months and will sustain me for at least another 12 months. I also have savings but didn't need to touch them as of now.
TBH, this might be a bit of a double-edged sword though. I don't feel financial pressure to generate revenue (yet), which gives me the freedom to try things out. But yea, I also don't feel financial pressure, which would probably be helpful to generate revenue more quickly :D
\* buys a ticket to Germany *
I worked to build two years worth of savings, and freelance now and then for living costs.
Where do you find freelance work?
My network. I also prefer longer-term projects.
A bunch of contract work. Work that takes me 1-2 hours to complete, compared to a full-time job. That way, I could spend the rest on working on my own things. Plus, the work isn't time sensitive (meaning I could do it a few days from now, don't have to do it each day).