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What jobs did you leave or are planning to leave in order to become a maker?
Hi Makers,
I've become really interested recently in what makes someone leave a job to pursue a career as a maker. I used to be an Archaeologist (its an unusual change I know). I want to know your stories.
What jobs did you give up to pursue your dream?
What job are you planning to leave once your Unicorn takes off?
Why?
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@aarvy Wow, the pandemic has affected so many people in so many different ways. Are you happier now in this situation?
@alex_gorman I am more than happy . I struggle with my side projects during job.But now i m free to learn and make awesome stuffs. Well its been 4 years into the job I am already bored with same role.
@alex_gorman Hahaha U are awesome but I don't consider it success.. I have just started the indie journey. There is much hustle needed in order to survive on my own. Since i m new here, Whatever I have learned I am planning to launch here. Currently done launching with 2 products, more than 20 are on the list. Lol..
@villerdex Well i already have enough to survive for next 2 years, but in these 6 months i am able to grow one of my accounts to 27000+ followers on Instagram and decent 6% of engagement. Its starts paying but not that much. Though i got to learn several ways to grow my products.
I was working for +2 decades as a service provider for marketing & advertising with my own company, but there's no difference to an employee when you deliver nothing else than human brainpower to others. I prefer building something that generates an added value based on automated processes and algorithms. But it took me many years to come up with the right idea, now it's there.
@timz_flowers And its something that you are proud of and its yours. If it creates added value as you say then it is worth it. Scary taking the plunge though.
I was working as a Business Analyst and then Product Manager for past 4 years. I enjoyed it and fell in love with how tech products are created, the fun of working with a team and then seeing something getting developed and then getting used by users is just thrilling for me.
I left my job last year and started working on my own product. I would in fact say it was the love for new products created from this job that made me quit it.
@anamika_chaudhary2 That I can understand, I did contract PM for a while too. It the variation in the daily job that I agree makes the day livable but its the final product and a happy end user that makes it all worthwhile.
@alex_gorman That's true, "happy" end user is important. In jobs at corporates though, usually it's very frustrating when you can't make the decision to make those users happy if they are not, because of all the management around you. That was also one of my reasons to quit and start on my own - take my own decisions!
@anamika_chaudhary2 Exactly how I have felt in the past. Too many bureaucratic layers to get through. Almost to the point that anyone in the pipeline has very little idea of what the user wants. So ultimately happy with your decision?
@alex_gorman very happy. This life does have its own type of struggles. Earlier in the job I had just stopped caring, but here I care every day about everything so much, that sometimes it's just so difficult to get sleep.
But I would still prefer this than that!
Great question Alex! I am planning to take the leap on the 15.03.21 leaving my corporate job as the Head of Growth Marketing for a Chinese Tech Giant and probably the most hated company in the USA (LOL) to embark on a journey to create The Udemy Of Personalized Learning and World's First Tailored e-learning platform of its kind -> The Mastery hub www.themasteryhub.com
@mirko_maccarrone Good luck. Setting a date must be exciting. Even leaving "the most hated company in the USA" is a scary leap. I've been to you page, its very nice. I used to work in online education for 2 years. Its the way of the future, even more so after the pandemic.
@alex_gorman Thank you Alex, I would love to find out what you are up to as an aspiring maker! Feel free to drop me a line if you are keen mirko@themasteryhub.com or Linkedin Mirko Maccarrone
@themasteryhub @mirko_maccarrone Thanks, I would love to get your opinion on my teams work. I'll drop you a line. Bit nervous about plugging it here just yet.
I have a degree and 4 years experience in logistics (road transportations). I gave that career up to take part in building an internet startup, and I've never been happier in my life
I left a senior management position in a well established marketing company in order to pursue my startup 8 years ago. The startup I was running made enough revenue to support my salary and my wife's salary at the time.
@nickduncan 8 years and high up in the company. Again another example of taking the risk and succeeding. I see you actually quite a few products out or coming out. Impressive!
@alex_gorman Thanks Alex! Plenty more on the horizon until we find that magical one that shows massive potential!
I was working in a project-based service firm as a sales head. I tried several times to build something side with my colleague. But nothing worked as pressure from the job was so high that I am unable to focus on multiple things. So finally I quit the job in 2018. took a year break and started the plan of developing a saas platform in 2019. Now we are a team of 3 people working on a product.
it depends on the person and job. For me, I cannot focus on multiple things simultaneously.
6 years of consulting and co-founding startups. Failed at 8 out of 10. Decided to convert our failures into learnings and finally into a product. Launching in November. Took us almost an year to diverge and converge with the ideas. Imagine an app that helps you become a founder through a read, play, learn approach - that's what we're building. We call it 8infinity.
@sreekar Great name. I believe it it was the head of a certain food company who said "persistence is the key to success". Good on you for pushing forward. Good luck with 8infinity.
Here looking for inspiration. My Job sucks(micromanagement, overtime, shitty shifts,.. endless list), and almost every alternative day I'm on the verge of planning to fill exit form and devote more time to the idea that I'm working on. But I don't have money to live more than a few months without salary.
Talk about switch? My damn portfolio/Resume (ohyash.github.io) never makes it out of level 0 filtration (ATS/Recruiter eyes).
Thanks for listening to my rant. I'll get back to reading responses here.
@ohy4sh well its always hard during initial days. If you really want to switch, i'd suggest to work on your portfolio.. It seems you haven't made right efforts to make it standout. major keywords are missing, deep stuffing, standout projects are essential. If you are from India you should leverage the services like geektrust, instahyre, hackerrank job hackathons, devpost, techgig etc.
@aarvy Haven't heard of GeekTrust before, looks good this one.
And, also I'll update the portfolio. Thanks a lot for feedback!
I used to be head of digital at an agency, but then came across that quote about making other peoples dreams come true. Decided to start the my own consultancy that became my personal Angel fund - As I was paid for the consultant you, the money went back into the various builds and experiments.
I’m now slowly transitioning my company to the tools I’m building rather than charging time. Reckon one more year. Past two years have been about balancing the client work with the side gig. Getting there!
@vincenthaywood Now that is a business model. How do you balance the two? I would worry I would focus on the interesting side gig and "accidentally" forget about my clients.
@alex_gorman oh that happened. Constantly distracted. Took some time to work it out but think I have it nailed.
One thing I did was install rescuetime on my Mac, set goals. For instance 4 hours on side gig, 3 on client work. Rescue time allows you to tag what’s things you do and then measure accordingly. Every now and again I’ll get a notification if I’m doing too little on the goals
@vincenthaywood Nice! I've been looking for something like that. I'll give it a try, thanks for the info
Reading through comments people are moving from such serious positions I'm starting to feel like I didn't risk anything at all, haha. I used to be a leading Product Designer in a music software company in LA. I left to start my digital studio for startups, but also to finally implement some product ideas I have been thinking of for years.
Good luck everyone! Great to be part of such community.
I left my career being a Pipeline Inspector to become a Maker. It was a tough decision, and it's tough starting from scratch, but I needed to leave because the work environment became Toxic for myself and my family.
Hey I was an ex-Wall Street Trader, currently doing data science research work at the intersection of medicine and AI. Working on a project to educate people about the quantitative finance industry and figuring out how to create content blog or product regarding my learning.
Love being a maker ever since trading has gotten me cognisant that I could build things that generate value. Definitely the dream is to work hard right now so that I have greater optionality to pursue other passions I have in life.
@jack_gan My university supervisor always said to me "work hard now, get a great job, then catch on the fun you missed while working so hard". Maybe not the best advice but similar to your idea or really pushing now and reaping the rewards later.
I like the idea of an ex-wall street trader having their stock traded on wall street. Kind of poetic.
I would love to learn how the previous experience can be useful for becoming a maker. Please leave your reply here!
I used to write AI algorithms for Missile Defense (ICBM). Then moved to WeWork to build out data. But I became a maker when I realized that AI is kind of useless when companies struggle to actually get the data they need out.
I found all issues to boil down to data modeling so I built: https://www.producthunt.com/post...
I just left my sweet job at Shopify to take a crack at making my own thing. I wrote an article about my decision making process https://www.adamwaselnuk.com/202...
@adam_waselnuk That quite the story. Really good read. The 50 hour week is ridiculous. I left a job last year which had me doing the same sort of hours. I think education through D&D might be the way for. Thanks for the read and sharing your story.
I used work in mid-management in a retail bank. Left it after a few months of working.
Unlike most other people I enjoyed banking and accounting. I just wanted to a bit more free time to pursue a good passive income project and learn from people who are doing business and startups on a day to day basis.
@anyfactor Fair point. We always think that there are horror stories which drove people away from other jobs when in fact many people actually enjoyed their work.
I will say that one thing I never really understood before breaking out was the benefit of learning from people who are actually doing the creating. I have huge respect for them. The farmer knows far more about their produce than the store that sells it.
@alex_gorman I think creating a product or performing a service is difficult but selling it and making a profit is an incredibly task.
@anyfactor I agree to a point, I'm not devaluing the the sales and marketing side of a product or team (they ensure there is food n the table) I could never do what they do. I feel that it takes all types to make a successful product but its that idea and creation that breathes first life into it. All other aspects of the team help it grow into the product it can be.
Digital Media analyst and Ad tech consultant. I was working with ad tech platforms and media publishers and moved in a totally different direction. Probably not as big a change as coming from Archeology :)
@samanthamerlivat Any change is a big change in my books. If you find yourself doing something brand new and it was your choice to do that makes you impressive. So what direction are you going now?
@alex_gorman hah, well thank you for saying that. I'm curious what direction you're going into then? I moved to edTech, to help children with learning difficulties. It's a very personal issue to me and I find it very rewarding. At some point it became difficult to be as engaged with my day job as I was with this work, even if I loved my old job :)
@samanthamerlivat I imagine there is a link between digital media and education. Getting people interested and keeping their interest through imagery and excitement. Would you agree? Very interesting.
The project I'm working on now is in health and predictive modeling. I have another idea which would bring in some of my archaeological background. Heres hoping the first one works out.
I am a product manager for now. And frankly speaking I am going to combine it with software engineering for now
I left my full-time job as a Product Manager, to start my own trip planning market place. Built a team, grew the revenue stream (positive) and had to recently close it down for a few reasons.
My thoughts are - if I had to do it again, I would probably have stayed on at my full-time job while at least getting a MVP out and getting some level of product - validation done.
In retrospect, I did manage to do a good level of business development, but nothing comes close to launching a product and going through validation phase.
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