Hi Everyone. I ran into Steemit on Reddit and have been lurking since Friday, exploring the technology, looking for code on github to help me examine more of what was going on, trying to figure out what to post.
I have made money in technology for over a decade now. First through affiliate marketing and blogging and a little bit of SEO consulting, back in the days when Google's search algorithms were much less advanced. I made decent money with a few hours of work each week, but still had a day job to fill in as an ecommerce webmaster. And it worked for a long time, around 8 years. I knew the errors I was making. I heard the horror stories. But I stupidly thought I was smart enough I could keep things going.
The 8 year business was something I thought up one day when I was making $24,000 a year and instantly had a family of 3 with one on the way. I taught myself PHP and MySql in a weekend and built a website and waited. Two days later I was making $100/day. I added Adsense. I pumped in Adwords advertising and was clearing about $200. My yearly Adsense bill during one of those years was like $52,000. But I had slowly built my own tracking system that would alert me on hot products and when ROI went below 50%. I was confident spending $20 a click on some campaigns because I had numbers to back it. All of this was doomed.
At the same time I had a blog which I kept legit and although not earth shattering traffic, it got about 2000 visitors a day. For months, I posted at least 5 posts a week. I tried advertising, but to me. $30 a month was not worth the trouble. It was something that kept me busy and kept me writing when I had a little extra time to do something that didn't have to have a price tag attached to it. Writing was something I always wanted to do and if other things had to fund it, so be it. The blog still exists at stephanmiller.com.
But as the money I made dwindled, I tried to hold onto what I was doing and blogging was just not worth the time. And sometimes I could fix things for a few weeks or a month, but I still didn't look up and around for something different. I had become a decent PHP and Python developer over the years at my ecommerce job, coming up with tools for price checking, product rank checking and custom erp. In 6 years, a $400,000/year company become a $3,500,000/year company. But still my 2 hours of work a week to bring home $1500 was now every hour I had free to squeeze out maybe $300-$400. I spent less time with my family and was separated and then divorced from my wife.
I spent the first few month of the separation squeezing overtime out of my ecommerce job. That's all I could get. I asked. After all, I was one of the highest paid employees there at $20/hour. I picked up a side job. And still, I was living paycheck to paycheck. At the same time, I was finishing my first tech book for Packt Publishing. The money was not worth the time I put in, but I was pivoting. I was going to be a developer now as well as a published author. I had made my name in SEO and was tired of the whole game. And I was done with working for scraps. What was I scared of? I had just basically lost everything and the future did not look great. I forgot to mention here that I have no degree. I actually only have a G.E.D.
I finally picked up a call from a recruiter and was making $32 building marketing sites in Drupal and Jquery two weeks later. My book was published a few months later. 9 months later I got another job doing complex price analysis in a custom application written in PHP, Oracle and Java for $45 an hour. The next move was a plateau to get away from a bad situation at the job I had just left and I got more this time. Since then I have worked in PHP, nodeJS, Python. I have written fraud detection applications using neural networks and won a few machine learning contests. I now make 6 figures four years later. And it's all just stupid. It doesn't mean a thing. It means I could have saved a lot of things if I had taken my head out of my ass earlier.
So this is about regrets. Yeah, a lot of that sounded cocky, but I was at one time. But that's all it was. If I really was smart, I would have started this trek earlier, when I saw the warming signs, when I heard the horror stories and said it could never happen to me. It was my fault I never saw what was possible until I hit rock bottom.
But even that is an younger me, because you have to move on. And hopefully that means more time to write.