Lately I’ve been posting income reports that talk exclusively about Angular on Rails.

I’m not sure what my original intended scope of these “Entrepreneurship Journal” entries was but I think I’ll now include in them everything I do that makes money.

In 2017 I think I can pretty accurately say that I make my money by a mix of three things:
– Custom software development
– Training/mentorship
– Products

In fact, I just got new business cards which say on the back, “Training / Mentorship / Custom Software Development”.

The training service is something I’m doing more of in 2017 than in the past. By the beginning of February my sales of training services were roughly equal to 75% of my total earnings for 2016. That’s a pretty big deal.

The “regular old coding” work I’ve done so far in 2017 is probably about 15% of my total earnings for 2016, so I’m already at about 90% of 2016’s income. Keep in mind that these are sales numbers, and not everything I’ve sold has yet been delivered or paid for. But the contracts are all signed.

This might sound like I have it made for 2017, and in a way I do, but a lot of this money is just going toward back taxes and credit card debt from 2016. I had a dry stretch in 2016 that really put the squeeze on at an inconvenient time. And when you get behind on taxes, it can be very hard to dig yourself out of that hole. So the pressure is still very much on to make a lot more sales over the next few months.

My plan is to first go after as many training gigs as I can, and once I think I’ve exhausted those resources, go after “regular” contracting gigs. And all the while I plan to put in an hour or two a day on Angular on Rails.

Let me talk for a second about the training I’ve done and the training I’m going to do. Last week I taught a 5-day Ruby on Rails class in Vancouver, Washington. In two weeks I’m teaching a 3-day Angular 2 class in Sofia, Bulgaria. Then, in June/July, I’m leading a 5-week coding bootcamp. I have two other leads, both in India, incidentally. One would be a remote teaching gig (in the middle of the night!) and the other would require me and the family to move to India for something like three months.

I also started something called the Grand Rapids JavaScript Meetup. I’m hoping/expecting that this will lead to some training and/or contracting gigs.

My #1 goal for 2017 is to go full-time on Angular on Rails. The way I’ve quantified this is that when I hit a consistent $10K a month from Angular on Rails, that means I’ve hit my goal. Even though I’m only making a few hundred a month right now I have a pretty good feeling about getting there. We’ll see where I am in a few months.