[laidbutnotpaid]

Man, I really love that first bit of advice. You're right about interests changing, if I were to get a job again I think I want to do something low-level/backend/more dev oriented, possibly in golang for a company that makes a PaaS or hosting. Open to other industries/roles too but I wanna be closer to the dev side rather than DevOps (which feels like glorified sysadmin/server monkey a lot).

I have self confidence that is swinging between "I can do this, I can do anything, I can take something off the ground, I've made 10s of thousands of dollars in addition to my job! on the side! and I'm smart and capable." and "I am so dumb. Why would I try to take a shot like this, I don't even have a path or approach. What, I'm going to write blog posts every week? Or be a web designer? I'm mediocre at both of those. How could I ever do anything and make it happen and make it be profitable...I should just get a job and dip my toe in to this stuff...This self employment shit is so unrealistic and romantic."

Back to that first bit of advice, this is just me journaling to myself, and maybe I sound crazy and this is unrealistic

"If I was smart, I'd..."

- research industries and niches and pick one I'm interested in and can tolerate the people in it - talk to a load of people in that industry and learn their painpoints with some process they do daily - mock something up for them and have them help me develop it. just wireframe type stuff. - build real Software for them, quickly and leanly and get them to commit to paying. No crazy features or frameworks, just a bare MVP. - sell through outbound sales, make sure I have a big enough market and cost (which has to be backed by immense value) to support myself in ~6 months. - iterate - hustle like crazy

I realize the long slow SaaS ramp of death is a thing...and maybe this is all just so utterly stupid and naïve of me. But it is my gut reaction to that sentence hah.