How to Land Freelance Clients with Small Business Whisperer Luke Ciciliano [Podcast #211]

Welcome back to the Free Code Campamp podcast. I'm Quincy Larson, teacher and founder of free codecamp. org. Today I'm interviewing Luke Sisiano. He taught himself programming in the 1980s and now has hundreds of freelance clients. Before we get to him, I'm excited to announce that Free Code Camp just published a free 4-hour AI infrastructure course. You'll learn how to pass the NVIDIA infrastructure and operations certification exam. Andrew Brown is a CTO who has passed practically every DevOps exam under the sun and he teaches this course. He'll introduce you to key concepts like GPU architecture, CUDA, and use cases for accelerated computing. Even if you decide not to pursue the certification, you'll still learn a lot from the course. Check it out after you finish listening to this podcast. Freo Camp also published a new course that will teach you full stack JavaScript development by building your own professionalgrade Loomstyle screen sharing platform. You can code along at home as you watch instructor Bo K create a Nex. js app, then add screen and mic capturing using standard media APIs. Then you'll be able to learn how to store video data in the cloud and automatically transcribe it. This is a 1-hour course on the Free Code Camp YouTube channel. Link in the description. You may have heard the term DevOps or development operations. I say it all the time. Well, now there's another emerging field called MLOps or machine learning ops, which I'll call mops. I'm actually not going to call it that. Freaking just published an MLOps for beginners Python course that will teach you how to make your own models and take them beyond the Jupyter notebook and out into the production environments. Along the way, you'll learn tools like hugging face, ML flow, and data bricks. This is a 5-hour course on the free code camp YouTube channel and learn how to enjoy the code review process with what free coamp contributor Abby Pini calls poll request therapy. She explains her own struggles with perfectionism, her anxiety from hostile reviews she's encountered in the past and how she's overcome these hurdles to become a prolific contributor. Abby also shares tips to help you identify friendly open source projects to contribute to. Pro tip, free code camps project is very friendly. Just go to contribute. frecogame. org, but also read Aby's uh article which is linked in the description. This week's song of the week, I love this song. 1983 City of Love by London Progressive Rock Band. Yes, I love the sleazy guitar synth hits the lurching baseline. This song also has a super open airy drum sound to it. Just like a sweet backbeat with like super airy high hats. Top it off with some vocal harmony and some cynical lyrics and you've got a great late night driving anthem. Support for this podcast comes from the 10,338 kind folks who donate to our charity each month. Join them and support our mission at donate. freeccoamp. org. You can also pick up a free Coke camp shirt like this one I'm wearing right here. Ships anywhere in the US with free shipping, $20 US. And if you're outside the US, you can just grab our logo from our assets library screen printed on a shirt if you want, as long as it's not for commercial purposes. You're welcome to make your own shirts. shop. freecodeamp. org.

So for today's interview, I'm hyped to talk to this gentleman. He's a prolific longtime Free Code contributor. He's created many courses with us and he is Luke Sisiano, who has run the modern website design website for many years. This consultancy has built solutions for small to medium businesses. He taught himself programming in the 1980s and started landing clients in the 90s. And he's going to share tips for building your own software development consultancy in your city and winning clients. We talk about how AI tools are creating more potential small business customers, not fewer. We talk about how to engage with clients and close the deal and why long-term relationships are the key to building a business as a freelance developer. Luke Sisiano, welcome to the Free Code Camp podcast. — Thanks for having me. — Yeah, you've long been on my list of people to have on. Uh you've contributed

a great deal over the years on one of those contributions back in 2020 January, right before the pandemic. Uh you published a course on Free Code Camp called How to Make Money Through Freelance Programming Jobs. What has changed since then? — There's been a few things that have changed since then. One of the biggest ones is that um kind of the small to mediumsiz B business niche uh which is what I try to serve and think most freelance developers are trying to serve. That niche has actually become more underserved now. It was really underserved then but it's become even more underserved now. I think there's been a bit of a split in terms of uh you know a lot of developers don't want to work with small to medium-sized businesses anymore. They're trying to just work on larger projects. Um you know that sort of thing. So I think there's even more opportunity in that space now than there was almost 6 years ago. Um the other thing that I think has changed quite a bit is uh the extent to which small businesses are looking for help. Um, and I think there's a few different reasons for that, but I mean, small businesses are uh, small business owners especially are more like proactively seeking out um, you know, anything from, hey, I need a website built to I need some kind of application to, you know, help me manage my workflow, like, etc., etc. I think they're proactively reaching out a little bit more than they were then. So, in short, I think there's actually more opportunity for uh, freelance developers than there was then. That's probably the biggest thing that's changed. — Wow. — Yeah. And I think that's somewhat counterintuitive because people would assume, oh well developers have like all these AI tools and they've got they're able to get things done much faster and the every year like the just kind of like low code and no code tools get better and maybe business owners would just be using those and stuff. But your take is no actually there's like more work right now is kind of what I'm hearing from you if you know how to find it. — Yeah. And one of the and I agree on one hand that might sound counterintuitive. Uh one thing I think we're all guilty of and by we I mean developers. One thing I think we're all probably a little guilty of is we don't appreciate uh and I'm guilty of this too sometimes. We don't appreciate just um I'm going to sound crude when I say this and I don't mean to but we don't appreciate just how technologically illiterate a lot of society is. And so no matter how low code or no code or simple to use, you make a lot of these tools, there's going to be a large swath of people that either need somebody to do that for do they need someone to do it for them cuz they just can't do it at all on their own. They could do it on their own, but they're probably too little intimidated by it to try or they're just not going to do it on their own. Um, so I to be frank, I've come to appreciate I don't care how simple that these tools become, there's always going to be that work there for somebody to do. — Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And a lot of times it's not just a question of whether they could do it, it's it well. And people don't want like a, you know, a halfcocked website or um a halfcocked uh, you know, e-commerce checkout experience or something like that, right? They want things or something that breaks all the time or whatever. Yeah. — Awesome. So, so that sounds like something that hasn't really changed that much. Uh so people are still looking like the market has potentially grown uh in terms of just the sheer volume of people creating small businesses I would imagine is growing right now. Um, what are some things that haven't changed at all since I mean I believe you said you built your free first paid freelance project when you were 12 years old. — Uh, very industrious kid. Uh, like over the years a lot of things have changed. What hasn't changed? — Biggest thing that hasn't changed and when you said I built my first project when I was 12 years old. I'm an old man now. So that was 1987. Uh the thing that hasn't changed from then until now and is never going to change is it's really just about people. You know, if you're if you want to do this kind of work, um you have to be able to talk to your customer. understand what they need. Um kind of work with them, try to anticipate, for example, like what their pain points are going to be in the process. Yeah. You know, like that kind of thing. Um, that's the part that hasn't changed and no level of automation or chat bots or any, you know, LLM powered chat bots or anything is going to change any of that. Uh I really down to the core, you know, like I don't want to sound too dramatic, but down to the core think that the most important part of uh being a developer that helps people is being able to work with them to help them. Half the time you're helping them identify problems that maybe they don't even realize exist, right? and then implementing things and that just requires a lot of soft skills, a lot of working with people um that kind of thing and that's never going to change and that's not going to be automated away. Um — so yeah, so in a way like the experience of consulting on a project and helping people figure out what work needs to be done and then getting them to approve the work that's done and everything is one of kind of like educating them about like okay here's why we need this. uh it may not seem necessary but actually it's very necessary that we have like an SSL certificate on the page and stuff like that right uh so would you say like a lot of the job is kind of like educating customers

customers um I would say 75 75% of what I consider my job is educating the customers and also working them through processes is here's a simple example is probably in the last two years um I built it was within the last couple years um I built out a uh you know an app for a small group of storage complexes um you know just something simple so people could rent you know rent their units online and you know deal with that whole process online and then there was the whole but they still give out uh physical keys to the units so figuring kind of figuring, oh, okay, well, how do you get people their keys and just kind of working through a way where, you know, eliminating as many steps from the process as humanly as humanly possible that go beyond technology like how are we going to take this physical key and put it in the hand of like the customer and just and so that almost became more of uh working out a new logistics method like for them that it wasn't about code at all. was about kind of going through their like in it was almost process engineering, right? Like going through their logistics and figuring out what's the fastest way to get us from here to here. Um, so yeah, educating people on here's what we can do with the software, but also working through them with the problems of we can do this with the software, but here's a choke point that the software can't solve. So kind of talking through the process with them and finding something simpler, you know, if that makes sense. Yeah, absolutely. And what you just described like walking them through like the logistical challenges and the workflows and stuff like that like that's almost kind of an extension of the software in the sense that software is doing what software can do but software is not physically in the real world at this point. We might have enhanced robotics in a few decades that where like pretty much everything. And I mean, you could also potentially just have like pass keys and completely, you know, create new locks for all the storage units where people just receive their uh pass key uh like a four-digit code or a six-digit code or something like that. Like a lot of times if I use like Airbnb or something or if I get a hotel, they'll just give me a code instead of me having to physically show up and get a key from the front desk or something like that. So um but what you're talking about is like walking through people through like the process and kind of whole systems engineering thinking about the fundamental problems that need to be solved and then implementing what you can with code and what you can't with like humanoriented process. — Mhm. Yeah. And if and a lot of those kinds of questions are going to be real industry specific and size of the business specific. Um, but with that being said, if you're doing freelance work, uh, unless you're unless your freelance work is subcontracting for a very large company, like, um, I have a good friend who had his own dev shop up until recently and, you know, they were up to a couple hundred employees and they would subcontract out stuff like from time to time. Unless you're doing subcontract work for a company of that scale all the way up to like a Microsoft or something like that, you're going to be working with smaller businesses that have unique needs and you need to be able to walk them through those things. I just think that's always going to freelance work. Well, be a huge part of it. — Yeah. And just to give the listeners uh the benefit of kind of understanding the context like approximately how large are most of your clients in terms of like you know how big would the business be in like revenue or um the number of people working there? I know it's going to vary dramatically from industry to industry and that's not necessarily a perfect proxy for how much software development work needs to be done for that company but just give us an idea of like your typical clients like law firms. — Uh it Our typical client, if it's a professional service-based business, that would be like an accounting office, a law firm, a real estate brokerage, um things of that nature. Uh they might be hitting revenue into the couple million dollar range every year on the high end. Uh they're usually not employing more than maybe 15 people would be a big number. um that you know it's usually not even quite that many but that would be one of the larger ones for those kinds of businesses. Um we do we have quite a few customers that for example are in the trades um uh like a roofing company might employ you know 10 people you know like things of that uh there's really in the type of clients I almost exclusively work with there's really not anyone that would be employing over say like 20 people. Um, so these are truly like small to mediumsiz businesses and I work with a lot of people where the owner is the business, you know, like the owner is himself. Now, one of the things that's really fun about it is um I can think of lots of examples off the top of my head of somebody when we started working with them, it was him or her, you like it was the person and that was like it. And now here they are x number of years later and they've grown substantially and they've got employees now and you know and stuff like that. But, you know, that that's one of the fun parts of it. But, yeah, we're not working with, you know, I guess the way to put it is we're not going to be working with any company that has a department, right? Like we're not going to talk to a company who's going to go, "Well, let me talk to the finance department, see if we can get approval for this. " Like, that's not a company that we're going to be working with. I'm almost always talking to the owner exclus. I'm almost always It's very rare, I should say, that I'm not uh directly dealing with the owner of the business. — Yeah. Well, that's great because uh they have as much context as anybody in the uh company about what's going on inside that company, what the priorities are. Um so, one of the things that you mentioned that jumped out to me is the fact that like you would be with the company and maybe they would grow over time because you continue to service them well and get things done for them and they kept you on. uh like what is the key to if there is some key some magical like you know advice that like will cure all essentially in terms of being able to retain clients long term. What have you

found works really well for that? — There's a couple of parts to that and as simple as it's all going to sound there things people fail at. Um, number one is, uh, do a good job upfront. Um, let let's get back to what we were just saying. Um, suppose that storage unit, uh, chain had called me and I had, you know, if you were to ask them, I know I'm confident they would say, "Oh, hey, Luke really went out of his way to help us craft a solution. " and kind not trying to pat myself on the back too hard or break my arm doing it, but they would say that, you know, I I'm confident they would say I went the extra mile air quotes to help them get to where they need to be. Um, doing that is the first step in terms of retaining people long term, that's your first impression, right? Like, and if your first impression is, oh, it, you know, took a little longer than we thought it should, and the product's okay, but it doesn't seem special. The person was kind of hard to get a hold of, they're unlikely to want to keep using you, like in the future, you know, like first of all, um, the other thing is that's just real important is doing things in the doing things when you say you're going to do it. Like so if somebody calls you for a second aspect um hey can you we want to add this now piece of functionality now or we want to um make some changes to what we've already done and if you say I can have that to you in 10 days have it to them within 10 days right like don't take 15 um so making a good you know doing that good job upfront going forward doing what you're going to do in the time you say you're going to do it in. Um, which again may seem simple, but it to this day it's still shocking to me how many people don't do don't think that's a priority. And then the last thing I would say in there is actually listen to your clients and um, for lack of a better word, uh, follow up with them and check on them and make sure they have what they need. Uh I have to be a little vague with this but uh I had a customer one time we had just launched our product and she was telling me about another problem she was having that relates to I hate the phrase but relates to lack of a better word like the IT aspect of her business which we didn't have any have anything to do but she was more just asking my input and a question on it and about a week later I just called her back and I just said hey I just wanted to send a quick follow-up did you get that other issue dealt with, you know, in other words, if she needed any additional help from me, I was offered to give it. And she was in a good way, she seemed kind of surprised that I was calling her to follow up on something. In other words, I was calling up to follow up with her to make sure her needs were met, even though that wasn't really technically what I was hoping. She was impressed by that, right? So going the extra mile, anticipating clients needs and doing what you're going to do in the time frame you say you're going to do it in. Um is as simple as those things sound and they sound crazy simple. Uh that is like the key. Uh, last thing I'll say on it is uh I had a uh I I know it goes beyond the scope of what we're talking about, but I had a shoulder injury last year and I had a customer who wanted to build a second project and uh because he's got kind of two aspects of one business. So, we wanted to build a separate project for the second aspect of the business. And because I was going through like physical therapy and stuff like that um for my shoulder, I wasn't available to help. I'd helped him with the first part and I wasn't available to help him with the second part. He actually took the time to call me and tell me that, you know, um he wished I was available to help him with that first part because dealing with the developer he's dealing with now to do that is like pulling teeth, you know, like in other he took the time to call me to tell me, oh, hey, working with you was better. — Yeah. That's quite an endorsement of your methodology in terms of like uh so if I want to recap some of the things you said because I think they're very important. Essentially what you're summarizing, like summarizing what you're saying, professionalism is still very important. Nothing has changed fundamentally. When you say you're going to do something, you should still do it. When you give people like a timeline, you should still try to adhere to it or at least communicate that the timeline has changed and maybe why. Um, and like what I often do when I'm like working with like a grant maker, they'll give free coamp uh a grant and they'll say, "Hey, can you make a course on open telemetry, like some open source library or something like that? " And then we'll develop that course and then uh we'll say this course was made possible by a grant from New Relic and stuff like that. When we're doing that, I'm communicating constantly with them like hey this is where the course is. Here's a course outline. Can you get feedback? And I budget in a lot of extra time. I say it'll take 90 days even if we can do it in 60 days just so they can because pushing back is horrible if you have to delay. You don't want to delay. It's much easier to just build in a little padding up front than it is to uh you know have to tell someone you know it's not going to be ready for like this big you know announcement that they have like a conference coming up or something and it's going to miss that right so uh that is definitely one thing I've learned uh listening to your clients also anticipating their needs um and then even if they ask you about something that's not really in your wheel wheelhouse like you said like uh the woman who was looking for some insight into like how she could address some IT issue you followed up with her like, "Hey, did were you able to get that solved? " And that is like super chill and people remember that because it it's surprising. They didn't expect this level of support on something that wasn't even related to you that they just came to you with it. So, what that comes back to is like the vibe I get is you actually do care about your clients and you care about their success. uh not just in the aspects that you're responsible for, but overall um and I think that's like a really good mindset to take into these long-term

relationships because it's a lot easier to get uh to keep a customer than it is to go out and find a new customer, right? — Yeah. That Yeah, that what you just said. Um, getting back to that 2020 course, how to make money freelancing, air quotes and all that, keeping customers is keeping customers and keeping customers happy. Um, if you're not going to focus on that, make any money working for yourself as a developer. It's I refer to it as new business and existing business. New business is somebody who I've never talked to who doesn't not they're not a referral from a former customer. They're not somebody that knows me from some other source. They're finding me I'm just giving an example. They're finding me online and calling me. Right? That's what I call new business. What I call existing business is repeat business or a referral from an existing customer. If you're going to be 100% reliant on that new business, you know, and this is one of the misperceptions a lot of people have, but if you think you're going to be 100% reliant on new business, in other words, somebody's going to call me, I'm going to build something. I'm going to say, "Here you go. Never going to deal with them again. Someone else fresh is going to call me. I'm going to build something for them, etc., etc. " That that's good luck. You're you are not going to make it that way. It's not going to happen. I don't care who you are. Not going to happen. You have to have repeat business. ongoing referrals. like, etc., etc. That's the only way it's going to be a viable option. That's the only way working for yourself is going to be viable. Um, so number one, you have to have that recurring and ongoing those recurring and ongoing relationships, and you're only going to have those recurring and ongoing relationships unless you're meeting the service standards we were just talking about. — Awesome. And uh yeah, I think that that's a really helpful observation that like by nurturing these relationships long term, software needs to be maintained is the other thing, right? Like — uh I a lot of times if there's some cluji old, you know, unmaintained solution that some other developer implemented years ago, it's just cheaper to like bulldoze it and build an entirely new solution if it's been unmaintained for that long. Just like uh you know a building you know if properly maintained can probably last for a long time but if not properly maintained you may just have to destroy it and build a new building because there may just be foundational problems like literal foundational problems that make it untenable to continue to use the building right um so I want to talk a little bit about tooling that you've used over the years uh WordPress has a huge tool ecosystem and that's one of the many tools you've used to help address the needs of clients uh you could use WordPress for a given job or you could potentially use like a bespoke tool just roll your own everything. Uh have you like what are some circumstances where you are able to just grab kind of like off-the-shelf tooling and implement a solution and what are some examples of situations where it's required more kind of deliberate architectural thought? Yeah. So most of what I do um because and this gets back to the kind of customer I work with. Uh most of what I do um at the lowest level if somebody says will you build me a website? I will build someone a just a basic website and maintain it for them. We will do that. Um that's not really the core of what we do. uh mo most of what I do is um involves and I use WordPress as my primary tool in the sense that I'm using it to build on top of uh like the storage complex going back to that example uh I was able to use the uh Woo Commerce which is the WordPress uh e-commerce functionality to you know handle the handle you know the initial rental like the ongoing payments and you know the inventory and everything else. The one thing I there was not a good option for was uh they charge a security deposit and there was there literally was no good option to implement the security deposit in there. So I had to build a small WordPress plugin really it I wouldn't call it a general use plugin you know like I built it specifically for their project and to run in that environment and with their like specific use case but I had to build a small plugin to make the security deposit functionality work and I maintain that for them. Um, another example would be uh I built out a store for somebody. It was actually one of the cooler projects I've done the last several years uh by uh you know cool uh that uh I a store I built out for somebody uh there were some limitations in terms of uh being able to vary products. Um in other words uh you know um this size versus this size, this color versus this color. there were some limitations in how far they could vary the products. So I had to write maybe literally about 40 lines of PHP, you know, like to make that work um the way we wanted to. Uh so typically what I'm doing is like I said, we will build a website for somebody, but typically what I'm doing is just taking what I can do with WordPress and then just adding the functionality we need on top of it to make it work. if it's because of the kinds of customers I deal with and I'm again I'm talking about my business very specifically. Other people might have different situations than me, but because of what I'm doing, if it's something I can't build on top of WordPress, then it's probably not going to be a customer that I'm working with anyway. I I have not in several years run into a situation where it didn't make more sense for the customer to say, "No, let's do this and I'll just build on top of it. " Because then you're getting into, "Okay, this I can do for you for 7,500 bucks. I can do or like you said, I can just build this whole thing myself for 50,000. " And at the end of the day, we're going to have the exact same thing on both with both. we're going to have essentially the exact same outcome with both of those. So, because of the kinds of customers I work with, that's typically how I'm working, if all that makes sense. — Yeah. So, time is money. Development time is money. And because these having more powerful, you know, platform tools like WordPress, you can get more done more quickly and thus the budget will be smaller. So most companies will just say, "Sure, I'll go with like the less expensive option that you'll and do they largely defer to your expertise as far as like kind of a build or buy mentality like um in terms of like yeah, this has a recurring monthly fee to use Woo Commerce or maybe the transaction fees are like slightly higher than what I would get with like Stripe or something like I'm actually not sure how Woo Commerce works. I haven't used it, but I know a lot of people use it in their projects. Um, but like what are some of the trade-offs where that might push you in the direction of okay, I'm actually gonna just build from scratch or I'm gonna I'm just going to fire up like a you know like I know you do a lot of PHP development. So like I'm going to fire up like a Laravel or a Symphfony project and I'll just build on top of that instead of just using Word WordPress. — Yeah. Um the scenarios I would say where that comes up are very specific use cases. Like I have a customer who uh I'm going be a little vague with this. Um some of my customers don't literally don't mind if I say who they are to the world. Uh other ones like you know unless I kind of like try to keep their information as private as I can for obvious reasons. Um, I have one customer who's uh I'll just leave it at a sports related business and he has a very specific workflow like situation. Um, and what he needs is not going to going to be built from the ground up period. Like that is you know like the end of it. Um it I what I would say is and this gets back to communicating with your customers.

It's really important in the beginning to say I can do this for you for 10 grand or 50. Don't just throw it out there like that and leave it like that. They need to understand what is the difference? What what am I getting and why? What what's the reason for the cost difference? Some people will just throw out two price points and then the customer goes, "Huh? " Right? Uh so explain to them what the difference is. here's why we need to build this thing versus uh you know just using some pre-existing tools. So really break it down, explain it to your customer. I also explain it to my customers in the sense that hey I can get you 100% of what you want for 50 to $100,000. I can get you 90% of what you want for 8,000 bucks. I'm just making up numbers to prove the point. And if that last 10% is not the end of the world deal breaker for them, which it's typically not, they'll want to go with that cheaper option. Now, in that one scenario I just mentioned, that last 10 that last 10% is the deal breaker. Like that is that was a piece of functionality the business really could not do without. So then, okay, then we're building the whole thing. — Yeah. — You know, if that makes sense. — Yeah, that helps. And one of the things I'm just going to loop back to is essentially what you're doing is kind of like a sales pitch in the sense that you're hoping that they'll choose one of these options. Uh but a lot of that is essentially educating your customer. Uh a lot of people think of sales as like trying to get all buddy with people and get them into some sort of purchasing agreement, taking them out drinking to like lubricate the deal or whatever. Like the way sales is portrayed in like if you watch uh — Mad Men or something. — Yeah. Yeah. Madman or Glenn Gary Glenn Ross I think is the name of the play allmalecast movie. It's free on YouTube by the way right now. Uh after you finish this podcast if you're watching on YouTube you can watch Gary Glenn Ross. I have no idea what it's called. It's named after some real estate thing but it's like the most kind of like unflattering portrayal of salespeople. But essentially when you are a freelancer you are your own salesperson. You have to go out and sell. And that is not like oh shaking their hand, saying their name 20 times during a conversation. Uh it's not those typical things. It's like thinking about their problems and thinking about solutions and educating them why is the 50k solution superior to the 8k solution. Like what edge cases will you cover? Uh and then helping them arrive at that and not trying to trick them into taking the 50k solution because the long term this is an iterated game. you're going to hopefully do lots of business with them and they're going to know if they over spent and they talk to some other developer, oh, you didn't necessarily need to do there's this tool. They're going to feel like they were hoodwinkedked, right? So, so there there's so much that goes into the sales process. And I think a lot of people feel sales is it feels kind of icky like I don't want to do sales. Like I'm just going to just like literally put my price points out there. I don't even want to talk to the customer. they want to talk, if they like what I'm offering with the price, they can click the button and get the meeting with me or something like that. Like people want to abstract developers especially that I find they want to abstract people from the equation and just talk about like the work. Uh and it seems like you have not shied at all away from really nailing these kind of like customer uh like uh discussions essentially like consultations. uh like le walk me through like the flow. So you get an inquiry. Uh this could be like a referral or um something like that. How would you approach let's say you uh helped one law firm uh implement a solution and then they're like, "Oh, hey, my friend over in like three cities over, not my competitor, but just some other friend who does law local to that area also has a firm. He's my buddy from university or whatever. " Like I think you could help him build a similar solution. like you get that warm referral, how would you go about like what's the process generally like? If you can walk us through uh the various steps.

steps. — Yeah. So, so I I'll give you a real world example of this. Um the first step is respond immediately. Okay. And that may sound like duh and it's not duh. Like most people don't respond immediately. Um, so I built out I built out a real estate app. Somebody who uh one of the real estate agents customers when they were meeting with the real estate agent really liked the experience like of that app and that person was self-employed and he was like, "Oh, hey, can you tell me who did that for you? " And then he called me and uh I was actually in a meeting when he called but left a voicemail and I called him back like immediately. I didn't wait till the next day you like or something like that of the sort. I called him back immediately. Uh on a side note, he has since referred me multiple people. One of them has referred me multiple people, etc., etc. Um but so I called him back right away. Uh just said, "Hey, thank you for calling me. Really appreciate it. " Um etc., etc. Uh, and usually in the message, whether they're emailing me or whether they're calling, uh, they'll say blurb, you know, like about what their business is. So, um, the first thing I try to do is say, "You're in business X. " And then they go and they say, "Yes, and then they'll kind of say, I want XYZ. " And I actually say, "Okay. " And again, I appreciate taking the time to call. Let me do this. I'm sure you got some questions for me about my services. I'm going to ask you some background questions about your business and your goals and we'll go from there. And then I just kind of let I start asking background questions. Who do you serve? Like what's your product? Like you know this is really vague obviously but or broad but what's your business? What are your goals? Like how big are you trying to get? Then again talking about like figuring out their processes and like things of that sort. and then start figuring out what we need to do to get them like to those goals, you know, like for lack of a better word. And then from there, I can usually pretty quickly put together options. And I can usually put together some options on that call because again, I'm I you know, I'm not dealing with big multinational corporations that have distribution to, you know, every country in the world or something like that. So, you know, we can usually put together the options um right there on that phone call. And if it's something that I'm just uh building on top of existing tools, um I try to follow a set price structure. So, I can usually price it pretty much like right away. Like including this kind of functionality cost X, costs Y. Um if I have to do some custom development, I have a pretty good idea off the top of my head how long that's because I've been doing this enough. I have a pretty good idea off the top of my head how long that's going to take. Add that in. So I can usually give them the quotes like right there on the phone call. Um you know and then I find that just going through it like that, the fact that they're seeing that I'm taking the time to learn about their business, I actually took the time to ask them what are your goals, you know, right? um uh the fact that when they see that, okay, I'm trying to get to know what their business is and then I'm in there I might propose some solutions that they hadn't even thought of yet. Um and usually those are things where I don't have to convince them they've got a problem. They know as soon as I say we can do we can implement this solution, they know it's solving a problem. Like I don't have to convince them they have like a problem. And then at that point they're, you know, usually pretty much okay, you know, um because we've kind of walked through the whole thing together. Yeah. You know, if that makes sense. — Yeah. I mean, the main thing that jumps out at me is you're spending the first critical few minutes of the call not trying to like posture yourself as like this really reputable, you know, developer or anything like that, but rather like focusing on them. You're not doing the talking. you're asking questions to get them to give you the information that you can then use to right there on that call um start to diagnose and start to treat uh or propose treatment for various needs. Um yeah, so it's very much all about them from the very beginning. It sounds like and how long will one of these calls generally be? If it goes over an hour, that would be rare, but I mean not even that long. If it goes the they're usually 40 to 45 minutes on the high end. You know, they might go like up to an hour. Um I would say in that range it's pretty rare I'm having a call with somebody in 10 minutes again because I'm usually just taking more than 10 minutes just getting information about them and their business, right? Um, so I would say typically 40 to 45 minutes on a long one. I might be on the phone for an hour, you know. So, okay, that's fine. However long they want to talk, however long, I'm happy to talk to them. — So, some questions a lot of people are probably going to get when they are doing similar calls. Uh, what's your hourly rate? Do people ask for your hourly rate or do they just do you just try to shift the conversation back to, well, this is what you want done and this is approximately how much it'll cost? — I can't remember the last time I was asked my hourly rate. And usually, now I will say usually um this is going to sound I don't want to sound condescending towards people. when I say what I'm about to say, I don't want to sound condescending towards the people that call me, but it is just the reality of it, right? Think of it like this. If you go your car is making a funny noise and you don't know anything about cars, you don't go, you know, you go to the auto mechanic and you say, "Tell me what's wrong with it. " Right. Um, you know, if you go to the doctor, you're not going to try to do brain surgery on yourself first. You're going to go to the doctor and say, "Tell me what is wrong with me. " You know, right? Um, I find that when people call me and I take the time to go through their business, talk about their business and go through their options and, you know, and stuff

like that. Um, I don't want to say you'd mentioned earlier, uh, deferring to defer, you know, deferring to my viewpoints. I mean, at that point, people feel pretty comfortable that I know what I'm talking about and they're willing to say, — so, you know, and I've already quoted them prices, too, at that point. So, I've I can't remember the last time I was at because I've already quoted them prices and they feel comfortable with me. I can't remember the last time I was uh quoted my or had to quote my hourly rate to somebody. — Yeah. And I suppose just through asking intelligent questions, you communicate like your sophistication and your familiarity with these types of situations with working with these small businesses. So, there's that degree of confidence as well just by jumping straight to the questions. And how like okay let's say hypothetically I am u you know a locksmith and I just need like a simple uh website that where people can like you know reserve like having a locksmith come by maybe they can pay in advance through uh you know Stripe or through Woo Commerce or something like that and like let's say it's a fairly routine job like that um I'm not sure if any job with a small business is truly routine but to the extent that it's a fairly routine thing and you could pretty quickly like come up with okay this will be how much it'll cost. Can you kind of like give me like let's jump to that part of the conversation where I'm the locksmith we'll roleplay it and now is the time for you to broach the price associated with like how you deliver that. — So at that point we've talked about you know your uh we uh you know like what you just said your needs uh who you serve like we've talked a lot about the geography you serve. Um, I've asked you about what do you what are you using uh like internally? Like are you using Google calendar for your like where how do you keep track of your own schedule? Do you use Google calendar for example or like what are you using? And usually with those kinds of businesses they've got quincy locksmith@gmail. com and they just use you know they just use their you know the Google calendar comes with that for that. Um and and usually with those kinds of calls that you're talking about, that's a person who doesn't even have a website and it's all word of mouth is how it's all coming in and now they want to maybe start doing some advertising and um advertising their business a little bit. And I explain to them uh one thing is to not sell somebody overkill. So I just explain to them all you need in that situation that I just laid out is a onepage website. Did I lay out why they just need a s, you know, they don't need a, a big grand website. They just literally need a, for lack of a better word, an online business card and uh the online scheduling that I function that I can build into that, that is something I can do for a,000 bucks. Um, and then to maintain it for them on an ongoing basis. Every month I charge 75 bucks a month for that to keep it on my server and uh maintain it for them. Uh, and then I explain to them the process, which is I'm going to send you a contract and an invoice. I'm going to charge 60% of that upfront. Once we get that back from you, I'm going to give you a quick call. We'll discuss the here's a list of things I need from you. And then, uh, once I have everything I need from you, uh, then we'll have this project done within 30 days. And they're going to say, "Okay. " Um, I'm going to send them the contract, send them the invoice. that usually gets signed and back to me right away. And again, the split second they've signed and paid, I call them right back and I say, you know, I call them or I email them right back and I say, "Hey, here's when I'm available. When can we get started on this? " Uh, and then I'll just send them, you know, a folder for an ad where we they can upload everything we need and then we just go from there. — Wow. So, like very responsive is one of the things I'm reading. And also, it sounds like you communicate so much upfront like, "Okay, here's the price. Here's how we handle the payments. I'm going to send you a contract and an invoice. Do you use like Docu Sign? What tools do you use to send the contract? — Uh I So the contract goes out uh we use DockHub which is the equivalent of Docu Sign. Yeah. Same thing as Docu Sign. They're all the same thing. — So yeah, we just send them the contract through DocYsine and I use uh Wave accounting uh for uh you know like we use Wave accounting for like bookkeeping and invoicing and you know that sort of thing. So, we just send them the invoice through Wave and uh send them the contract and they usually sign the invoice and it's pretty the invoice and contractor are if they're not taken care of on the spot, they're usually taken care of within 24 hours. Um, one thing I do, I'll say as a quick side note to all this is, and this may sound counterintuitive to a lot of people

I don't when Quincy Locksmith calls me after that initial conversation and if you say, "Yeah, send me over the contract and the invoice. " I don't do a ton of followup. like, you know, if it's been a day or two and you haven't signed the contract and paid the invoice, um, I'll call you once to say, "Hey, did hey, Quincy, I just want to see do you have any other questions for me? " Um, you know, etc., but I don't do a whole lot of followup after that. And I look at it like if I have to chase someone around to become my customer, I'm probably going to have to chase them around to get what I need from them to build the project. And then if I ever need something from them in the future to do something else they've asked me to do, I'm probably going to have to chase them around for that, right? Um, so I try to avoid situations where I might have I've been here's this thing. I'm going to build it, but man, I can't get what I need from the customer to build it. You know, I try I really try to avoid those situations and not chasing people around to become my customers is one of my for — lack of a better word screening tools, you know, to screen out the people that are going to be problematic. — Absolutely. Like one of the screening tools I'll use when uh like an organization like a company approaches us about creating a grant is I tell them the price right at right up front and a lot of people will buck at that price. Oh, that's more than I expected. uh because they'll see us as like a charity like oh you know how much would a charity actually charge to develop you know a course and put it on their YouTube channel and stuff like that. Uh but by charging like a higher amount, you're kind of signaling to them like you're serious. You mean business and um and then like not following up. Exactly. Because you don't want to have to actually actively manage your clients generally. You want them to like I mean the perfect client is the one who's like cool that all sounds reasonable. Okay, I paid it. Okay. And then it sounds like uh based on your pricing uh a lot of it is you have like a low initial entry point in the sense that like $1,000 to build all that seems very reasonable and then uh $75 a month to host it. And so you offer like services, hosting, maintenance, stuff like that. And then that's like $75 a month and that's recurring monthly income. And then if you strap enough of those kind of revenue streams together, you've got a business going, — right? Is would you say like most of your income comes from like recurring kind of like maintenance and service agreements rather than upfront? I have been doing this well. I' I've been doing this long enough now that the recurring service agreements are a big majority of my revenue. And it's something where I could sit here and build all, you know, I could be building a lot of stuff and it's just there are there's a good number of recurring service agreements, you know, um and uh those tend to be very sticky. I mean, uh, there are people that I'm thinking of off the top of my head where I literally built them a true basic, very much a starter website, and I did that for $500, which may not sound like a lot of it's not a lot of money, but you also have to remember, let's call it a 45minut initial conversation. They were real responsive, so I got everything I needed from them the next day. And then I built the thing in half a day, right? Um and then deployed it. So not a whole not all the time in the world goes into getting that like out the door, but now they've been paying me 75 bucks a month for years. And there are people that fall into what I just described that they have been paying me $75 a month for years and I have not talked to them and they literally have not called me in like five years. Yeah, I mean I'm just saying it's — Yeah, but it's much easier for them to continue paying $75 a month and just have that problem solved and taken care of by somebody else than to reevaluate. Oh, do I want to go through this entire process again and go find somebody else or do I want to shift over to this like, you know, turnkey solution that I saw like I heard about on like a podcast advertisement or something like that. Like there's risk there and there's no real risk in continuing to just pay you $75, have everything just work like it's supposed to, right? Especially because when you're dealing with small businesses like I do, there's one particular customer I'm thinking of that falls into that I think I've had to I think he's called me once and you know his project his product is out there and I maintain it but I don't think I've spoken with him probably in about five years and I say that he he's a cool dude but I'm just saying that in the sense that it doesn't take a lot of my time.

— Yeah. Now, I'm mentioning him specifically because he called me in a panic because he had just had a complete nightmare scenario with another developer. Yeah. So, given his prior experience and that those are calls I get a lot. Um, so given the — Yeah. just to put a pin on that like I want to hear what like that nightmare scenario was to the extent that you can share it or some similar kind of nightmare scenario because it's kind of like you know the botched surgeries type uh people love that or the botched renovations and stuff like that the uh like there there's this fascination I think with like how badly things can go wrong and then you call in the person that has to like clean with a mess essentially and uh but I didn't mean to interrupt your flow I would love to hear a little bit about that. — Uh so it's a professional service business and uh it's just a website and scheduling app. Um there's a few other things in there where uh people can upload documents to the business and you know uh upload some things. There's some like customer portals for lack of a better word. Uh but it's a professional service business with some add some extra functionality. And uh the gist of it was someone had built him the previous product. He was never quite happy with it. Aspects of it just never worked right. And then the person completely disappeared that had been working for he hadn't been able to reach the person in 3 months. And then he uh and then one day the project's just gone. You know, like he looks at the website that all this stuff is integrated for. It's just gone. You know, it's like it's down. And it's, you know, like it's um, you know, he's just getting a 404 error. Uh, you know, when he goes to or, you know, it has just disappeared. He finally gets the developer on the phone and for lack of a better word, the de and it this was just the this is the recapping of the experience that was given to me, but that the person was being really ky and uh didn't have any backups of anything and didn't know when they'd be able to look at it again. um you know like etc etc. Uh and he was talking about like all the background noise he was hearing when he finally and it sounded like the guy was on vacation like in like a party environment as he's — saying I don't know when I'll be able to look at it again. — And meanwhile this person calling me who's had this experience is in a blind panic because he's got customers calling him going hey are you still in business? I'm trying to upload my stuff and your website's gone. Yeah. Right. So, he's got customers calling him thinking that he's literally out of business. Um, at this point, uh, so, you know, we went through all that and like I said, it turned out the guy didn't even have any backups of anything to, you know, to where he could just restore something. What a nightmare. Yeah. ASAP. — Yeah. Man, and this happens like people get addicted drugs or they just have like midlife crisises and they just walk on all their responsibilities. Uh, and it sounds like that's what the dev did. — They were calling me completely out of the blue. They found me online. They're calling they he called me, found me online, called me out of the blue in a blind panic because his customers are calling him freaking out. Um, so I had a conversation with him. I tried to impress upon him. I understand this is urgent, you know. So, I got something up ASA I got just a like a basic onepage website up for him ASAP saying, you know, coming soon, you know, right? Um, and then got him what he needed pretty quickly. Um, it was it only took me a couple of days to build it. It wasn't a complicated build. Um, and then we deployed it and since then he's been paying me 75 bucks a month to take care of it and I haven't talked to him since. And I'm I I'm happy to talk to him every day if he wants to. He just has not called me needing anything. Yeah. And I mean, I'm sure lots of people like to just hang out and talk with you and stuff, but they've got other things going on. Maybe they'd rather be talking to their kids or, you know, uh doing other activities. So, to some extent, it works to your favor that everybody's so busy. And when business is going well and there's no problem, there's no need for communication overhead. Are you like one of those types of people that sends out Christmas cards every year and stuff like that? Like, — no, no, no. I don't send out Christmas cards. happy birthday notices. I don't have a business card. Like card that I would hand somebody, you know. Um uh yeah. No, I don't send out Christmas cards. I don't send out happy birthday. I don't send out congratulations on just having a child or something like that. I meet I try to meet people's needs when they need to be met. And I think that kind of speaks for itself. Um, in the grand scheme of things, I consider some of that stuff a little silly. Um, and that's just my personal view. I know a lot of people don't, but I consider that stuff a little silly. Like, I don't I can't think of a scenario where someone's going to call me and go, "Well, that app you built me doesn't work, but thank you for the Christmas card. " Right. Like, — oh my goodness. Yeah, that's a great observation. like uh and whenever I get one of those Christmas cards or like a birthday card and like first of all I'm like how did you get my birthday? Like it's irritating when I get like birthday notices. I will always block if somebody sends me a happy birthday uh email. Um because like that's just information you extracted from like my insurer or something like that. Like I didn't voluntarily give you my birth date. Uh I had to because of like some sort of like interest requirement or something like that. So yeah, in a way it's kind of like creepy and it's a reminder that like this person is wasting money on sending me cards that I don't want in the mail, even if it's just like 50 cents postage uh and like 50 cents for the card and envelope and everything when they could be using that money to actually serve my needs. Is this what my 75 bucks a month is paying for? Christmas cards, you know? So, so to an extent like um you know like I shop at Walmart a lot because it's cheap and it's close and uh like if Walmart ever started sending me Christmas cards I would think I would start asking questions. Are they really giving me the lowest prices they can — see I would probably go into Walmart and say this thing you just charge me $9. 99 for how about I pay you $9. 49 and you keep the Christmas card. I mean I would probably say something like that to them. — Yeah. Just bring the Christmas card back in like hey I'd like to even this Christmas card for 50 cents off. — Yeah. Give me Yeah. give me credit, you know, but yeah, I find all that stuff silly, you know, just for, you know, if you're providing a good service, that all speaks for itself. Yeah. Well, I want to get into you as a person because you have an interesting background. Uh you grew up in Las Vegas, which is pretty cool. Uh you were raised mostly by your grandparents. they were children of the great depression uh which is this event if for anybody who's unfamiliar with the US history there was this era like 101 15 years of just like huge economic like struggle essentially like the stock market cratered and pretty much everybody was in the stock market at that point so everybody lost a ton of money and uh there just wasn't like there weren't jobs and uh it was just a very tumultuous miserable period in American history maybe one of the roughest uh periods of US history other than like the Civil War and stuff like that, right? Like so uh your parents your grandparents grew up in that and my grandparents also period and it just completely changed their world worldview. Uh it like they were extremely careful about money. They were kind of always like paranoid like that there was always like this uh this feeling that like the prosperity that they were enjoying could just disappear at any moment. I don't know if that's how you remember your grandparents being. — Oh yeah. My grandparents especially my grandfather was like a really big influence on me. Um they in he died financially comfortable. Um but he uh yeah like until well into their 80s like my grandmother cut my grandfather's hair by putting a bowl on his head and just you know like cutting his hair and — Wow. a literal bull cut. — Yeah. You know, like they they wouldn't spend a dollar that they didn't think needed to be spent. Um you know, uh they also really in a very big way uh valued stability. Um uh and that was kind of instilled on me or that you know that was instilled on me quite a bit I should say. Um yeah, because you have to understand they uh so my grandfather immigrated to the US when he was four years old and this was a time when well I don't know if there's ever been a time that there wasn't but this was a time when there was a lot of anti-immigrant settlement um — in the United States especially towards people from southern Italy and uh so the gist of it is he only went to school through about the fourth grade um you know for a few different reasons. Um and then during the height of the depression he and his brothers uh left the Midwest and went to Las Vegas to help build the Hoover Dam. Uh so because that's that was the work they could get. So and then from there he went uh so after working on the dam for quite a while uh he was drafted into World War II. After World War II, he was a superintendent of construction at the Nevada test site and in his off hours built his own house. Um, as in like with his own two hands. Um, and spent that and literally lived for he had a multi-year stretch where it was work 7 to 7 days a week at the test site, build your own house at night. Um, so and it was really a get a stable job, have stability, you know, like know you're secure. I mean, I was just really instilled with that, you know, like if that makes sense. Um, so yeah, I was I I'm just someone that I consider myself very fortunate to I do feel like I got a little bit of my work ethic from my grandfather. — Yeah. And the test site you're referring to, like there's when I was in Las Vegas uh a few years ago, I went to the nuclear test uh site museum. And so when you say test site, that's where they were like blowing up atomic weapons underground to like measure. — No, they did it above ground for a little while. Um — yeah, now they can simulate it. — They haven't been having to actually set off nuclear weapons generally. They can just test them theoretically with like these big machines and stuff, but like a lot of Vegas was just like, you know, sprinkled in radioactive isotopes, right? — I have. or not Vegas, but like outside of Vegas. — I have three different relatives. My aunt my aunt, one of my other aunt's husbands um both worked for a long time at the test site and both passed away. The gist of it is there's a history in my family of people working at the test site and passing away from cancer, you know, because like all the radiation and stuff. Yeah. — Yeah. Well, that so that's the work he was doing. But your grandfather, was he affected by the radiation from working at the test sites? — No. Uh-huh. No. Well, no. And this would have been like in the 50s and the 60s and in the area he was in. No. The answer to your question is no. He wasn't like impacted by — Yeah. And uh so you were kind of drilled stability, stability. Like figure out a way to sustain yourself. Uh the world is not going to take care of you. Like you need to take care of yourself. Kind of like to some extent like radical independence. Not to the extent that you're going out and building a log cabin, but he literally did build his own house with his own two hands, which is pretty cool. Uh, so he probably had to learn a lot along the way about like how to build a proper pour a proper foundation, how to like, you know, the various different kind of like um aspects of like framing a house and stuff like that. So he how did he learn all that? Did he just learn it like through books or did he have friends that had done it? — Yeah. Um, well, some of it was again he went to work on the dam. He'd worked in construction a lot of his, you know, he'd gotten construction jobs and worked in construction, so there's going to be a lot of picking that stuff up from that. But yeah, and I mean, and not to turn this into like too much of my family history, but he was a really interesting guy. Like he even though he only went through went to school through the fourth grade, he was like really well educated in terms of physics and he read a lot of books, so he was like really like well educated in terms of physics and, you know, and stuff like that. — Yeah. And we mentioned Mad Men earlier. Uh, great show. one of my favorite alltime shows uh because we were talking about sales and one of the things I remember about Madmen because it's set in the 1960s uh all the main characters served in like World War II or like the younger character uh Don Draper, he served in the Korean War. Um, and uh, one of the things they say in the show that really stuck with me is like they had this, you know, kind of like younger guy Pete who had gone to college and they joked like, "Yeah, we went to the military, they went to college, you know, same difference like we learned like what we needed to learn serving in the military and they learned what they needed to learn like going to university essentially. " So to some extent for like a lot of that generation or those generations uh military service because there were a lot of wars during that period was kind of like a standin for helping people uh learn how to skills and — Yeah. to Yeah. And it used to be and it in the context of freelancing if you want to be a freelance developer. I mean it kind of shows why there's a lot of I personally think there's just a lot of opportunity out there for people today in terms of choice. Um you know cuz people like you know like your grandparents age and my grandparents age the question like we might ask people oh were you in the military back then? It was what did you do during the in other words what you were in the military like you know like you didn't have like a good choice a lot of people were for it and again I'm speaking to the US but we had a 50-y year history in this country where a lot of people were drafted into the military like involuntarily so they didn't get an option I mean we're very fortunate today in the sense that hey if I want to go be a freelance developer you know if I want to learn to code and go be a developer I can do that because I don't have to worry about being, you know, having to go to the military against my will, you know, like for lack of a better. — Well, you started programming very early, — uh, and you got your first paid client at age 12. So, let's talk about

how you went about learning programming. — So, yeah. And I'm really going to sound like the old man to a lot of the audience. Going to be 51 later this year um, in 2026. some people someone younger probably wouldn't get like a lot of the references. Uh, so my first computer was a Commodore 64. Back then learning to code meant back then if you had a computer it was you could buy applications for a home computer back then, but for the most part it was just kind of it was as much a tinkerer's toy as it was a um for let me back up a little bit. Computers back then were for office use mainly, you know, like if you owned a professional office and you know, like for word processor, spreadsheets and things like that. If you had one in the house, it was as much for tinkering as it was for most households. It was going to be as much for tinkering as it was for doing anything productive. And my Commodore uh computers back then like my Commodore came with a book uh that would teach you how to code. It uh it was a version of ba basic called commodore basic. So you would actually learn to code. They would come up with an instruction book teaching you how to code you know and you it basically like a little learn to code on this new toy you just bought and this new fancy machine you know like you just bought. And there was a deli by houses back when playing game video games at the 7-Eleven and you know the the local you know the local deli and all that stuff was — Yeah. the golden era of arcade games. Yeah. And he was and uh the owner of the deli was having a uh having a tournament. Essentially, it was a way to get all the kids in, have the kids hang out for the day, spending like spending money and stuff like that. And I wrote just a little basic app for him for track, you know, for tracking. This person just beat this person, so now let's match them up with this person. And, you know, because they were like versus games and, you know, and he paid me to do that and I was 12. And then I spent all the money playing video games. — That's awesome. So — I spent pretty much all of it in the deli actually. — But that's cool. I mean it's still paid for your way and it's a paid job. I mean that's like important. Everybody has to lay in their first paid client somehow. And you built like a tournament bracket matching system in basic. That's really cool. So uh you keep doing this. Did you manage to get some other clients during your teenage years before you went off to university? — Yeah. Um, so and again this is where like some people might this might sound weird to like a younger audience but in the US it was illegal for an average person to log on to the internet before 1994 either 93 or 94 I think uh when it was opened up uh maybe '92. But then yeah, as I was getting into college and you know this new dialup internet was this new f this new fangled dial up internet was becoming a thing. You know at first in those days you could say to a small business, oh do you have a website? And they would just half of them would ask you what's a website and if you explained to them what it was they would laugh at you like why would I need something like that? But there were two to three times a year um you know in like my late teen years and I was working other jobs. I had a lot of responsibilities as a teenager. Um uh but so I had like what you would call traditional jobs but uh you know two to three times a year somebody would need a website or you say hey I think I want one of these new websites for my business or have some kind of other software thing that you know like maybe they wanted um so two to three times a year I would do a side project on top of what whatever else I was doing to earn money. Um, and it was always just kind of a side hustle thing for me up until, you know, uh, a little after 2010 where I just finally said, you know what, I'm just going to do software full-time. — Yeah. And so you came to that conclusion, but you did go to school and study accounting rather than programming. Why not study computer science or programming? — Um, so a I knew how to code. Um I just kind of looked at it like a few people asked me, "Oh, are you guys are you going to study uh computer science? " And I knew how to code. I didn't see the no point in going to school to learn something I knew how to do. Um just to not to sound too flippant, you know, like when I say it that way, but I was like I — But it's a practical thing. I mean, like I talked to a lot of people who get computer science degrees who feel like they still didn't even learn how to program — during that because they just learned a lot of theory and math and stuff and here you are, you already know how to do it. you're actually getting paid clients and stuff and uh accounting skills are extremely useful as well. — Yeah. No, the two things I'll say to that is um and it does get back to the whole looking back should I have majored in business? No, probably not. But uh looking back um it I will say it was just this idea of stable career path, right? Um and uh that you know that was it was just it's still just seen as a very stable profession which is why I was studying accounting. Um and also it I will say my accounting background has served me very well being self-employed. Um you know it's like helped me a lot um in that regard. But as I was wrapping up my degree, uh I went to work for a small CPA firm. And in a CPA firm, they uh you have uh your senior accountants, but then you have at the lowest level, you have what are called your staff accountants. And those are what we would call a junior developer. And uh so this firm I started, it was me and four other sta staff accountants. So a total of five of us starting the same day. And we come in, it's our f it's the first day for all of us. And we realize this is a decentsized accounting firm that's been around for a while. And we realize we're the only five staff accountants. Like there are no other staff accountants. And which like, okay, well, who's been working here? And it was about a month after I'd been working there. Um, I had to go with one of the senior accountants to uh a client's office. And when we came out from the client's office, uh, the senior, she had a flat tire. So, I was helping her change the tire. And while I'm changing, I just asked her, I go, "We're just, you know, those of us in the staff room, we were just wondering, you know, what happened to the last staff? " Cuz we just find all five of us just found it so weird that we were all hired at the same time, right? I mean, it was just kind of bizarre. So, we asked her, we said, "What happened to the last staff? " And she gave me this look like I had just asked the forbidden question. And then after about a 15-second pause, she blurts out, "They all moved. " Yeah. And I was like, "Okay. " You know, like with that one. And yeah. So it wasn't for me. I worked there for about six months. And Yeah. — What happened to the five of you when you they all moved like they didn't like the job. Like just very vague. Uh did they So a lot of organizations are like a burn and churn. Like we're just going to use the — chief. You realize that's what it was. It was a burn and churn. Um, there was one person working there. I remember I I'd only been working there literally about a week and there was one person working there and they were, man, things sure have changed around here. I remember when this person wasn't here and that this person was uh still here and they talking about all this turnover in the office and I was like, wow, how long have you worked here? And he goes, three weeks. — Wow. — Yeah. So, yeah. So I worked there for about little call it five and a half months and that was — I mean that may have just been that firm though. Is that typical because — I mean you mentioned it is typical. — Yeah. — Okay. They're just trying to get their CPA required experience and the firms are explaining that essentially. — Yeah. Um Yeah. And I just so I just realized that wasn't for me. And like you know like I've had different like everything from service jobs to office jobs and whatever job I was working whatever I was doing there wasn't really a time where I wasn't doing some kind of a side project you know and usually just to be frank usually the if I were to sit down and figure out how much am I making per hour put into all this I was usually making more per hour doing the side projects than I was at whatever my job was you know like at the time. And so I mean economically I probably should have just a lot earlier said you know what I'm just going to build software for people. — Yeah. But I mean growing up the uh grandchild of people who went through the depression uh this stability driven into you choosing accounting I mean accounting in theory seems like the most stable job. Uh the only two things that are certain in life death and taxes. Accountants deal with one I guess. So undertaker would be another very stable profession. Um but basically like you chose a risky path at this point which is just going out and finding your own clients and essentially working for yourself. Uh and that was the main thing is just seeing like hey this doesn't look that stable either. Working for other people is not necessarily like a surefire path to stability. Did you at the time see working for clients? I mean, you saw that you'd be making a higher hourly rate, but do you see that as potentially more stable than being beholden to the whims of a manager who just is ky about why she's burning and turning? Yeah, you um I have come to appreciate as I've gotten older that um I've come to appreciate that I've gotten older that jobs aren't stable and not in a way that I think a lot of people complain about. Um I think jobs aren't stable in the sense that I think a lot of people who have only ever worked for somebody else have and this is my personal view, but I think a lot of people who have only worked for somebody else have this idea that they go to work and their employer's making plenty of money and you know, like your employer may be barely making it payroll to payroll and you just don't know it, right? Um, you know, your employer can go out of business at any time. — Yeah. You know, — and I hear horror stories about people who like, oh, like they said they're late processing the paycheck. They had some technical issue. They've worked an extra six months or not six months maybe, but like six or eight weeks usually. And then they re start to realize it starts to dawn on everybody in the office. Hey, we're not going to get paid. Like this company is not solvent. Uh the manager is like leaving town and changing their name. I mean, like, you know, uh, yeah, like I've heard some real heartbreaking stories about people who kind of like felt that it was safe, like it felt stable, you know, but it's I guess it's pretty easy if you don't really care about the people working for you to pretend and just to lead them on and have them continue to do the work. Um, that I've heard so many of those stories. So, — yeah. — Well, and the world's changed a lot. So like when I was in college, the discussion was about how if this internet thing catches on, it's really going to revolutionize commerce. So I mean like the you know like the world's changed a lot and there were a lot of careers that existed when I was younger. Um my wife's aunt used to be you know she's been retired for many years now. My wife's aunt used to be a travel agent. — Yeah. It's difficult to think of a field more disrupted by the internet than travel agencies. Like they just don't exist. like we have gone to like we needed to get like a long-term tourist visa and we went to like a uh to China cuz my wife's from China and so we go back and we visit family and stuff there and uh that we used a travel agency and travel agents are still around in like more bureaucratic places like China and stuff but here where you literally just get the plane ticket and you go and you book the hotel and it takes like maybe 30 minutes of research and you do it like that has been utterly destroyed by the internet totally disintermediated. — Yeah. Right. — My Well, as a kid, I had a friend whose dad used to develop photos for a living. — Yeah. I mean, so I only say those examples to prove the point that I personally don't see working for yourself. I as I've gotten older, I've come to appreciate I don't think working for yourself is as risky as some people think it is in the sense that a job is not as stable as some people think it is because the industry can go away, the employer can go insolvent like, etc., etc. Yeah. Well, that's a perfect opportunity for us to talk about uh the role of like AI code generation tools and AI prototyping tools and things like that and uh how they are impacting the expectations of clients that you're working with. They may see like, oh, over the weekend I used, you know, Bolt or Lovable or Vzero or one of these

tools and I built like a really simple version of an application that I used to maybe like pay somebody $1,000 to build for me. Um so how is that affecting you as somebody who works with freelance clients? — Yeah. So, um, the ways I'm seeing it the most, um, or there's a few different answers to that. One is, um, I just have to answer more questions about it in the sense that I've had customers ask me now, do you build this or do you And again, you have to understand, like I said, I'm dealing with a lot of people who maybe aren't the most techsavvy people in the world. Um, so I I answer the question a lot. Okay, now are you going to build this or are you just going to have chat GPT do it like you know and people think at that basic level I can just go to chat GPT or you know Gemini and put in a prompt and it's just going to spit out the application you know like or something like that. Um — well that's what the marketers say. That's what the hypeman trying to get their uh billion or trillion dollar capital market caps say. It's going to do that and it's going to cure all diseases. Um, you know, uh, the, uh, but so I have to answer basic questions like that a lot. One way it's impacted business um that I find kind of interesting is I feel like it's created some opportunity for me in the sense that um there have been multiple times in the last couple years, probably at least a dozen where someone has called me wanting to talk about building a project, excuse me, and they'll actually send me a proposal that somebody else had put together. In other words, they've already talked to another developer and said, "Hey, here's a proposal and they'll forward me that proposal. " And the proposal was clearly something that, you know, an AI bot had spit out. Um, you could just tell by looking at it. So, uh, let's go back to your locksmith example, you know, that you used earlier, uh, where so-called developer just went on Gemini and said, "I need a proposal for a website and scheduling application for a locksmith and it just spit it out and it and it even had like language. this one. It would even have language in it that says — problems a business like this might face are you know like you could clearly tell that like AI had like and the the potential customer knew that AI had spit it out — and they weren't thrilled with that you know so — yeah it's rare that AI generated you know slop as I like to call it willp yeah it is sometimes it's very useful in some context again I want to emphasize I use it all the time I'm not like an AI hater But uh to the idea of taking something wholesale generated by AI and just sending it to somebody without making any revisions to it or anything like that speaks to a level of laziness. I definitely wouldn't want to hire that person. — Yeah. And in some ways that's made in some ways those situations have made the fact that I take the time to talk to people stand out a little more. I like to think right because it shows a contrast there. I just talked to this developer and he's sending me slop versus this guy who's taking the time to talk to me and learn about my business. So, it's impacted me in that way in a positive way. Um I do get the things uh I think it was last week an existing customer wanted uh wants to build a second project and uh called me to build it and he had actually gone on to you know one of the AI engines to uh basically have it start putting together what he think what it thinks like a user interface um should look like. And so he sent it to me and was like wanting to know a is it a viable idea and my thoughts on the viability of the whole idea and then also um you know like what do I think of this like interface and potential interface of putting on the interface I put together was terrible. Uh but um you know so I I've had that a few times where a customer said hey I asked I want to build X I as I'm just I'm not picking on chat GPT I'm just using as the example. Hey, I want to build X. I asked ChatGBT what it should look like. Can you build this for me? And what do you think of what chat GBT says it should look like? So, so it has created some situations where people are coming to me with um — preconceptions on what they think the final interface should look like that maybe I wasn't getting before. So it's created a aspect to my job where like in that situation I had to explain to the customer well you see how with this interface to get from A to B you got to click like 17 times you know like um that's not a good user experience right — you know so I you know it's uh added a level of discussion about just using that simple example like in that case it's added a level of discussion about here's why this UI that it says is great wouldn't work or be problematic or here's why this thing it says would be great. Might not be the best idea. Like, so I it's added the need to have some of those discussions. I would say those are the ways that it's impacted me the most with what I do for a living. Yeah. I mean, it kind of reminds me of like physicians complaining that like they're WebMD. They like people would spend all night up like trying to like diagnose random things and like, oh, I'm pretty sure I've got this random disease that like based on my research on WebMD and then going into the physician and the physician has to spend a whole lot of time deprogramming them essentially. No, you don't have this disease, you know. Uh so it's creating more work for you essentially in the sense that you have to before there might be some degree of difference, but now that people have the illusion of competence, the illusion that anybody can just go and build their own app uh that expertise is you know funible or not even that important. This is something that uh has constantly been like uh any expert has been embattled for really years in the sense that like these tools are democratizing of capabilities but it's elucery right it's not real capability like to an extent like you wouldn't want to deploy to production something that you just vibe coded and then trust that it works especially if you don't know what it is doing because you're not a developer you can't go in and fix it and stuff and people are doing this and they're uh messing around and they're finding out right but uh But like how is that uh changing I guess the expectations of you? Do people think like well because I can just spit out a prototype for basically free using the free tier of some uh codegen tool that's just using a large language model and it's trained on all of the open source code bases on GitHub and stuff. Uh because I can do that maybe I can pay you less. Have you heard people say that or — I have not been asked that one time. — Okay, that's great. That's very uh relieving to hear. So, it's not like it's going to put downward pressure on the rates that devs charge necessarily. — My rates haven't changed at No. I No, I don't think it will. Um I have not been asked one time. Um well, are you just paraphrasing? using AI and can't you charge less or something like that? I Yeah. And uh yeah, in any to any extent people calling me uh want to haggle over price, it's no different than it's always been. I mean, there's always going to be that random person that calls you and, you know, wants you to do something for 60% of what you would normally charge and tell them no, first of all, but um — so you just to be clear, do you haggle at all? Like if if no haggling you just have your set rate and the minute you start bending on that I mean to some extent that's the first compromise that maybe represents a series of compromises that you that will be expected of you if you bend any there. — Uh I would agree with that yeah like you know what else I want the where I could really see that haggling is hey I'll build this for you for 5,000 bucks. Well, can you do it for 3500? And I go, sure. Right. And then, uh, 3 months later, hey, I need you to do these four or five modifications. Oh, okay. Going to be $1,000 to do these modifications. Now, they're going to expect you to do it for 600 or something like that, right? Um, yeah. So, your price is your price, and don't knock it down. And you know, I don't want to paint with too broad of a brush, but I think it's just how the world works. It goes beyond development. People who the people who want to pay the least and want to haggle the most are going to be the ones who complain the most. They're that think that, you know, they can blow up your phone every 10 minutes. Um, like, etc., etc. The people who want to haggle you on price and who want to pay the least are usually going to be the most problematic customers. — Yeah. — And one of the biggest mistakes somebody can make is taking on somebody like that. Again, here's a $5,000 project. I let them haggle me down to 3,500 bucks. Well, next thing I know, they're taking up so much of my time because they're calling every five minutes. They um you know, they keep wanting to change the parameters of the project. They want to call every five minutes. they're being late getting me things I need from them, etc., etc. Next thing you know, they're taking up so much of your time it's interfering with your ability to do the full priced work, — you know? So, it's really important your price is your price and just say no to that. — Have you ever had to like fire a customer after you accepted them? How what does that conversation how does that go? How do you know when you need to fire them and then how do you handle that? Uh so there are some situations where um someone like for example one somebody called me uh thinking something was a problem and it wasn't. I was trying to explain though this is you don't have to worry about that and I was talking just like I'm talking to you right now and uh I need to be a little vague with this but it very quickly devolved into them like having like personal insults — like against me and getting like real personal and I was just like hey this is not — like working out you know I think it would I if you get in a situation where you need to fire a client. Best way to deal with that is which is not what most people would do. Most people would make the mistake of I am firing you because right um the best way to deal with that is to say look I don't feel I can give you the service you deserve because you know like in other words I am cutting ties with you so that you can get the service you need — not that's a good way to frame it — it's not you it's me and they're like I don't want to leave you with bad vibes because I just want you out of my life, frankly. Like it doesn't matter to me. Like, cheers, you know? Uh yeah, that sounds great. So, so like it's a big mistake to like engage that and once you realize that the relationship is not going to work out, just make a polite exit essentially. Um and there's no harm in being, — you know, self- differential uh in doing that. — Yeah. It's not personal. I mean, it's just business. It's not personal, you know, like — self-deprecating. I meant to say self-deprecating, not self-differential. — Yeah. All that matters in the grand scheme of things is get the if and now, have I had to fire a client? Yes. That is very rare. Um I in the last 5 years, it hasn't even been maybe three times. Yeah. Um out of a fairly large number of people. And one of them was really similar in the simple in the sense that uh I mean like I said they got it got to the point where they were like letting personal insults and like screaming and like everything else and I was like okay yeah this ain't going to work and a couple of them were just situations where uh look you can't get me what I need from you. Um, so you know, listen, I'm concerned about getting this project out the door for you. You know, I want to help you move your business along like like, etc., etc. It might be better if you found somebody else who could be more available on like a, you know, x amount of time basis for you, you know, like that kind of thing. Um, yeah, it's you usually if I have to let somebody go, um, it falls into those two scenarios like I said like the one person I don't think anyone would have continued to work with them given how they were conducting themselves. Yeah. Um and then uh but those like scenarios where it's just like this is just going to drag on like forever. The thing's never going to dep um deploy. So, you know, just having that conversation with them. Um, one lesson I learned, uh, I do protect myself in my contracts with all my contracts I signed with a customer. Um, I send Quincy Locksmith, using our example from earlier, I send Quincy Locksmith a contract, you know, it talks about the 60% down and all that. It also says the 60% down is non-refundable and it reserves my availability for up to six months. So in other words, if we get to the end of six months and I have not been able to deliver the project because you have not given me what I need from you, a the 60% is non-refundable that you've already paid me and B I am not required to continue working on it at this point. — Yeah, that's really smart. So essentially just covering yourself against somebody that kind of like blows you off or like oh I've got I paid the 60% down like I can just deal with them next year or like somebody who goes in communicado and then appears out of the blue. — First of all, you probably don't want to work with them if they did that to you. Uh but then you don't have to worry about like suddenly — coming up with the cash to refund them. — Mhm. — Yeah. — So I have a few other questions. Uh like kind of like a lightning round because you've already shared so much insight. This is much longer than the podcast I've been doing, but because you have so much lived experience working as a freelance dev, I just wanted to get as much as I could out of you. Um, — well, some of that is probably too because I have been told more than once that I'm guilty of using two words when one will do just fine. So, so go ahead. I didn't mean to interrupt you. Go ahead. — Yeah, absolutely. So, uh, one of the things you said, I'm going to read

some quotes from you and you can react to them because I think these are great quotes. provide as much value as you can to people and it will work its way back to you. — What do you mean by this? — Um, it goes a little so as examples like I was saying earlier, hey, a customer had this other problem that's not even really part of what I'm doing, but calling them and saying, "Hey, I just want to make sure did you get that resolved? Do you need any other help with it? " um the more value you are providing to people and by value I mean you know is Quincy Locksmith's business better because I'm associated with him right um is your business is your life e is your business running smoother are you making more money whatever um the more value you are providing to a business and it you know it can be the things you've directly contracted for things beyond that um maybe going in the wheelhouse of what you've contracted for but going a little bit beyond on that you know like for example the more value I provide to Quincy Locksmith the more indispensable I become to Quincy Locksmith which means that you are going to remain my customer longer. It also means you are going to uh you know refer me more business right um the number of people that I've built second projects for there's a lot of people where I could go back and say well how did I get this customer they were referred to me by this customer you know and you can go four or five levels back in the chain on some of them — wow so the more value you're providing the people the more you turn one customer into 10. That's why I very much think every time if I get an email through our the contact form on my website right now or if somebody calls me and says, "Hey, I need something. " I need to think of that as this one customer is actually 10. This is actually 10 potential customers calling me on the phone, right? Because I'm going to do a good job for that person. Then they're going to refer me two or three people. each of them might refer me a few people, right? So, a phone call is not a phone call. It's 10 phone one phone call is 10 c customers. — That's a great way of looking at it. — Yeah. And that's a profound argument for putting your best foot forward every single time you got on the phone with somebody because the stakes are very high. I mean, 10 customers, that's a lot of uh potential business coming your way if you do a good job with this person — and recurring revenue on all of them. — Yeah. Uh one of the things that uh since you started learning programming at a very young age uh and you yourself are a parent um if somebody listening to this they have ambitious kids and they want to encourage their kids to go out and not only learn programming but potentially try to find business opportunities clients like start to build sustainability for themselves uh like you did with the uh pizza parlor arcade tournament. Um, like what would you do to encourage kids to like parents to like yeah they their kids could go mow lawns, babysit, but programming that's another thing that they can do potentially to make money. There is a like in the US I think you have to be like 16 to get a job, but you can get like special work permission when you're younger. But there's no legal limit to like the age at which you can like um you know potentially become like a developer contractor. uh your parents may have to be involved in like signing the contract for you if you're under 18, but like what advice would you give to uh parents who have a kid and they like, "Hey, I want this kid to be able to like learn vital life skills by potentially going out and uh doing it. " And I'm just going to read a quote from you before you answer that question because I think it's a very profound quote. Uh you said um if you want to learn about people, deal with an array of small businesses. So yeah, I really believe that. — Yeah. So you've got this kid and you want them to be able to learn how to deal with people because fundamentally technology may change, but people don't change. Uh we're the same software, same hardware as basically 100,000 years ago. We're still waiting for that firmware update. Um right like so, so this is an opportunity for a kid to learn those skills, uh to learn how to work with people while they're also applying their programming skills. What would you say to a parent uh who has kids and they want to encourage their kids in that direction? What

advice would you give? — Assuming it's something the kid shows an apt has an aptitude for and shows an interest in. Um because a lot of parents want to try to shove their square peg into a round hole. Right. — Um assuming it's something the child is interested in and is showing an aptitude for. the biggest skill to for them to find opportunities to help people and it translates way beyond it's just a good skill to have period I guess is keep your ears open okay um in the sense of I was 12 years old uh you know in the arcade playing Street Fighter right um you know because that's what we did back then uh or at the you know at the deli playing Street Fighter and talking to the owner um you know and he was just talking about how man all you kids are just in here and there probably 15 kids in there. He's like all you kids are just in here all the time and he goes and he was just talking about he goes I need to do something — and he he's kind of he's literally doing this with his hands. He's trying to find a way to articulate it. He goes, "I need to do like and then after Paul he goes an event. " And he's just kind of trying to find a word and I remember I go, "A tournament. " And he goes, "Yeah. " You know, like that. And uh so and then one of my friends who was standing next to me, my friend uh Dennis me says to him how much fun it would be and like more kids would show up for man I'd basically say, "Man, I'd show up for that tournament and like that'd be cool. " you know, and like like blah blah. And then I said to him, you know, and what you could do is we could put together you could actually do it on your computer where you know, you're not having to write it on a board. And all I said was, you don't have to write it on a board. You could actually do it on your computer where it'll figure out who should be playing each other is how I it's more or less how like Wow. — how I articulated it to him. And he and then he said to me, "Can you help me with that? " — Yeah. Um, so more keep keeping your ears open and engaging in conversation, right? Because what would that have looked like if he had said, "Man, I wish there was a way to get like more of you kids in here. " And we just kind of went, "Yeah. " Yeah. Right. Um, but you kind of helped him finish the idea and that idea ended up being fruitful for you. So, yeah. like whether it was intentional or not, you were helping him cuz your instinct is to help people. It seems uh helping your uh boss change her tire, helping uh people like navigate around like business considerations, stuff like that. And in this case, you were just helping him kind of like finish his thought uh with an insight that you had and that ultimately helped you by helping him. — Yeah. But if you just talk even at a young age like we're talk we're talking about this in the context of young people, right? like and even at a young age like learning to engage with people, learning to ask questions, right? Be curious, be inquisitive, right? Um I mean, teaching your kid to be inquisitive, to be curious, to ask follow-up questions, to engage with people. I mean, that's how a younger person can get some of those kinds of opportunities that come along. So, it's just kind of keeping your ears open and being willing to engage. As broad and vague as that sounds, that would be the biggest piece of advice I have on that front. — Yeah. Well, that's super useful for me with young kids. It's like I'm trying to get them to engage more not fear the adult world and feel that adults are other from kids because like I take them my son to uh my like Chinese practice like conversation corner and he goes there and he practices Chinese and like yeah these people he's talking to they're in their 30s 40s 50s 60s uh I don't want him to be daunted by those people uh because you clearly weren't daunted by talking with this guy um and I want my kids to be like you essentially let's talk about advice. This is the final question. You're 12 years old. You are taking magazines. You're writing programs like verbatim. You're learning data structures and algorithms and different programming uh considerations by kind of wrote repeating them and typing them into a machine so you can have playable games on your Commodore 64. uh and like the entire notion of making money uh through programming which has led to a you know prodigious career and a whole lot of businesses that you've served over the years that is just like a twinkle in your eye right um what advice would you send back to yourself if let's say you had like a mechanism through which you could send some advice that would maybe make your life just a little bit easier and of course the often the answer is like I wouldn't change a thing because I saw that Star Trek episode tapestry and he changed his mistakes and he ended up like in a horrible situation. He needed those mistakes. But like practically like that's the easy answer of course, but like what would you actually send back to yourself or you know that would maybe save you some trouble along the way? Uh without giving the I wouldn't change a thing answer. Um the one thing I would say is it was don't think that a job working for somebody it's not a question of the stability of a job versus the risk of working you know like for myself. I mean, I would have I would have just honestly I probably would have if I could jump back into my 12-year-old brain with all the knowledge I have now and memories I have now. I mean, I would like, oh, okay. Yeah. Probably would have gotten a like like, you know, a CS gone to school for computer science and moved to San Francisco at a young age and like you know, like in and everything else. um in the sense that to the extent um I felt like no this is the stable path man you know like is an illusion you know so uh yeah I mean I probably would have dived head first into just making software my career you know like from uh much earlier um that would be the one thing but with that being said uh I do feel a lot of the choices I made early on have made me appreciate what I do now that much more. — Yeah. You know, it's given me a perspective that I don't know if I would appreciate what I do for a living as much as uh as much as I do if I didn't have some of those perspectives. — Yeah. And perspective at the end of the road, that's what you look back and you kind of like appreciate the different facets of your life. If everything goes smoothly, then you don't really have much to think about, right? but because you had those ups and downs and those hard-earned lessons. Um, job stability is an illusion. Keep your ears open. So many different things you've said here that I think are going to be very helpful for listeners as they go forth and uh learn more skills as they work with people as they put themselves out there fearlessly and try to solve other people's problems, try to diagnose and figure out the problems uh try to find the business opportunities. uh this has been like uh kind of like a real clinic in how to be a developer consultant uh and to lead a small business that helps other small businesses. — Well, thank you. No, I'm really just glad you had me on. So, um uh yeah, you know, I just think go working for yourself can be really gratifying if you apply yourself to it, you know. Um, I've had conversations, a few people have called me over the years. I've had conversate, you know, people wanting to start their own, uh, you know, maybe like freelance development business or something have called me and saying, "Oh, uh, you know, here here's why I'm thinking about freelancing and you know, they've got like a lot of misconceptions about it or whatnot. " And, you know, is it hard? Yeah. But can it be incredibly rewarding? Yeah. Like, but you got to apply yourself at it is kind of like the closing words I would give on that. — Yeah. As uh Abe Lincoln said, whatever you do, be a good one. — Good advice. — Yeah. Well, uh Luke, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for your many contributions to the free code camp community through your courses, through your articles that you've written over the years. I'm going to link to those in the description and a few other interesting things about Luke for anybody who wants to learn more about him. Uh until next time, everybody, happy coding.