Ironically, I solo-built an AI bookkeeper for solopreneurs all of last year on my own dime. Predictably, I ran out of money and had to go back to contracting.
It was incredibly hard for me and I started to lose my mental health. It was a struggle to get any positive or negative validation, to get anyone to pay any kind of attention whatsoever. It was a great luxury for me when an investor actually said "no," most blew smoke up my butt and strung me along. Even my paying users seemed to not really care one way or another.
After I ran out of money and all but abandoned the project, I had an incredible stroke of good luck when an established player in my niche out of nowhere decided to incubate a new version of my app built on their platform. For a minute, I was finally getting real traction as this company's founder started promoting me across their socials: people signing up, giving feedback, folks adding me on LinkedIn, messaging me to set up partnerships.
The deal eventually fell apart and everything went cold again, but for a second I saw how much easier this all is when you have social proof. It was frustrating. Nothing had changed in me or my product other than a famous person backing me. I was the exact same entrepreneur with the exact same offering, but somehow now I was worthy because someone else said so. Well, I guess that's how the world works.
I want to say "hang in there," but honestly for me the whole episode was the straw that broke the camel's back. After 12+ years of working for myself, I'm seriously reconsidering my life choices and whether I still want this. I'm currently focused on contracting and paying down my debt.
I think that I'm coming back, slowly, to the entrepreneurial path, shorn of many of the BS narratives the tech industry tells about startups. The loneliness is very real and I feel every inch of your pain. You are not alone.
If you ever want to share or reach out, feel free to shoot me an email: me@ersinakinci.com. I'm also trying to write more about my journey at www.ersinakinci.com, although I haven't written yet about the startup failure--too raw still, and frankly, I'm afraid of telling the whole truth.
As a freelance web dev who also has an Airbnb side hustle, I got tired of expensive bookkeeping for a few transactions per month. I tried DIY, but my time is worth more than that.
Most importantly, both pros and DIY got subtle things wrong and caused me to miss out on thousands of dollars in deductions and credits.
So I’m making an AI bookkeeping chatbot that will handle all that for me. The aim is full automation while surfacing tax deduction and credit opportunities throughout the year. Like wouldn’t it be awesome to just have the research and tax credit or do home office deductions with zero effort?
At the end of the year, Kumbara puts together a series of financial reports that you plug into your tax software or hand to your CPA.
Working hand-in-hand with CPAs and some platform partners on this. Would love to hear from other solopreneurs or engineers who want to help build the future of financial freedom.
I procrastinate on taxes for the silliest of reasons: I don't want to spend the time to create a P&L for my side gig to give to my accountant. Takes less than an hour but it is just annoyingly tedious.
All my income and the majority of my expenses are done through PayPal because I want to minimize the bookkeeping effort. For some unknown reason, they don't have an annual P&L statement as a standard report. This year I tried a bunch of things with Copilot using PayPal reports. The most eye-opening result was that I could give it a .csv file with all my transactions for the year and tell it to generate a P&L statement with expense categories. It managed the task almost flawlessly. The only cleanup I had to do was to recategorize a couple of items. To say that I was blown away is an understatement.
> After seven years in San Diego, my wife and I have decided to uproot our family and move to the Bay Area. While there were many factors (a new job opportunity, family), a significant reason was finding a community of truth-seeking people.
Funny. The lack of truth-seeking and truth-telling is one of the chief reasons I moved away from the Bay Area.
You'll find unquestioning dogmatism everywhere you go unfortunately.
For what it's worth, the odds for rationally evaluating political ideas tend to go up around folks that have gone to universities that are known for some decent level of intellectual rigor.
Still not great though, some of the most dogmatic people I've met in my life were professors and undergrads. But those that were the opposite more than made up for that.
Have you tried renting a truck from Home Depot before? There's no way to reserve one in advance. Most Home Depots have one or maybe two trucks, you just have to show up and hope that it's available.
Uhaul is much more reliable, but in my experience renting from them is expensive and very time consuming. Each checkout usually takes me 20-30 minutes, even when I use the app ahead of time (their app is horrible).
Where I live, I'd say trucks make up 30% of the vehicles on the road. It's a big part of the culture here and extremely practical. There are no practical rental options. Lots of places in the US are like that. That's what led me to eventually buy a pickup for myself.
Someone needs to create Zipcar for trucks for those of us not living in dense urban cores.
If you order from a slightly more upscale hardware place they'll do delivery for a reasonable price usually next day. Seattle has a place called Dunn's. Their lumber is somewhat more expensive but it's all premium grade or better and you don't have to sort through 50 2x4s to find 5 good ones. In fact everything I've had delivered was high quality except one piece. I called them back and they swapped it out at no charge to me. Better if you're ordering with a truck you can fit much larger pieces like beams or 20' trex pieces that you can't get in a pickup. Delivery is $75-150 depending on how much of the truck you use last I checked. I stopped getting anything but instant fixed from Lowes or home Depot. For any big project thses places also discount in bulk better. We put in a 1k sqft paver patio. Was half as much buying from a local supplier who delivered for $50 on 5 pallets. No way I could have gotten that in a pickup with or without a forklift. Had a dingo delivered. Sure I could have trailered that but I'd have to rent and return a trailer. It was dropped off by a rental place and picked up a month later included in the rental. 8 minutes of my time. 15 total if you include the phone call to rent. I've spent an hour renting a chipper from home Depot.
Same for metal working. Moving sheet steel by yourself is stupid unless you want to slice up yourself and your vehicle. Deliver trucks have cranes. Even better you can get 24' lengths of tube steel which really cuts down on price. They put the pavers 30 feet from the street sneaking under power line easily.
If your doing a house how many trips are you making with a pickup full of drywall. How much are you racking up in gas in that sucker going to hd?
He does some processing on the area of the footage with the crt's to make them look nicer on video. You can't actually see the screen, it's just a square the same size as the monitor that seems to be making that region darker.
If you could pick any language to migrate these programs to, which one would you pick and why?
I've never used Java professionally, but that's probably what I'd pick. Seems to hit the sweet spot between time-tested, widely-used, enterprise-proven, performant, future-proof/portable, and well-understood. Seems from another comment that's what US DOD is betting on, as well.
I had one for the first time from our local co-op. It was definitely firmer than any other apple I’ve had but I wouldn’t call it “teeth-shattering” by any means.
Oh, but the flavor. Exquisite. Floral, fragrant. Tasted half like a really good apple, half like a perfectly ripe Bosc pear.
Do yourself a favor and find a ripe Arkansas Black apple. Best apple I ever had.
Ironically, I solo-built an AI bookkeeper for solopreneurs all of last year on my own dime. Predictably, I ran out of money and had to go back to contracting.
It was incredibly hard for me and I started to lose my mental health. It was a struggle to get any positive or negative validation, to get anyone to pay any kind of attention whatsoever. It was a great luxury for me when an investor actually said "no," most blew smoke up my butt and strung me along. Even my paying users seemed to not really care one way or another.
After I ran out of money and all but abandoned the project, I had an incredible stroke of good luck when an established player in my niche out of nowhere decided to incubate a new version of my app built on their platform. For a minute, I was finally getting real traction as this company's founder started promoting me across their socials: people signing up, giving feedback, folks adding me on LinkedIn, messaging me to set up partnerships.
The deal eventually fell apart and everything went cold again, but for a second I saw how much easier this all is when you have social proof. It was frustrating. Nothing had changed in me or my product other than a famous person backing me. I was the exact same entrepreneur with the exact same offering, but somehow now I was worthy because someone else said so. Well, I guess that's how the world works.
I want to say "hang in there," but honestly for me the whole episode was the straw that broke the camel's back. After 12+ years of working for myself, I'm seriously reconsidering my life choices and whether I still want this. I'm currently focused on contracting and paying down my debt.
I think that I'm coming back, slowly, to the entrepreneurial path, shorn of many of the BS narratives the tech industry tells about startups. The loneliness is very real and I feel every inch of your pain. You are not alone.
If you ever want to share or reach out, feel free to shoot me an email: me@ersinakinci.com. I'm also trying to write more about my journey at www.ersinakinci.com, although I haven't written yet about the startup failure--too raw still, and frankly, I'm afraid of telling the whole truth.