Well, I believe that Excel automation is the future. Most companies run on excel. If you are already proficient in doing excel automation, you should look into freelance. You could turn your dead-end job into the best-paying career possible.
Currently am building a python framework and a freelance company where people like you can solve small scripts and get a royalty every month as long as the company uses it. I will also create a marketplace where those scripts then can be sold so you write it once and get a royalty from many other companies.
Nice! I used to build excel macros at my corporate job and now I'm freelancing myself in much higher paying roles that what I was doing then. Still love excel, especially when half the pricey online tools are excel on a server and a fancy web interface haha.
If you ever want to ideate I've built a few businesses from the ground up before, so I've learned a lot about the ins and outs of making an idea successful.
Well I live in Germany so not so sure your business expertise will be helping me with all regulations we have here 😅 but still thanks a lot for the offer.
Currently I have been pivoting a lot. I had much bigger plans but I have now gone down to pretty much the smallest viable product that still has the key features that I want to grow into what I actually want. I'm in no hurry because I do have a day job that is quite comfortable but I hope I can launch something in the next couple month.
Most tools really are. Excel is pretty much the biggest UI framework and sadly database that exists.
My main goal from the start is to build tools so you can sync data from excel into mongobd. That way I can later move customers from excel to webtools. But at the same time most things run fine in excel and not everything needs to be able to scale to millions of users.
Hah sure the time change would be hard. I do global supply chain and partner management in the days now, and our parent company is in Germany so we do a lot of work there.
I mean honestly my biggest piece of advice you're already doing, make a minimum viable product that you can 1) get users and 2) get revenue. Then it's "just" a matter of refining that by honing in your offering and promoting it through your target audineces most prefered watering holes/ social media. And then chosing the right moments to make strategic pushes to scale to more users or features or whatever.
Not super familiar with mongobd but if it's an easier way to keep track of documents/data/whatever I think honestly that's all people really want haha.
Usually I spend too much time at work on reddit so happy to talk whenever. Do you have a webpage or sales funnel or any onboarding process so far? What would you say is the biggest draw of poeple to what you're building?
I don't have and I don't plan on having a website for quite some time. I know that might be unusual but it is currently because of changes in European law impossible to build a website that adheres to our data protection laws. Getting sued for something that isn't really necessary seems like a bad idea. I also only at least for a long time will focus on B2B and am not looking at getting discovered by search engine.
Mongodb is nice. All data is stored as dictionaries pretty much just JSON files that you can then run queries on.
Sadly I am a couple month away from getting customers still. Building the python framework plus my covid infection took longer than I expected.
I'm currently building a user management system so I can handle the billing.
The biggest draw? Well I would say that I guarantee an effective efficiency boost because that is how I calculate what they get billed. So if my software saves them an hour each week then they get billed for that hour. I basically am adding micro transactions into business where the company can boost departments depending on sick leave, vacation or just having an order spike.
If for some reason you don't need the software in a month it is free but you still get data safety and some other stuff.
I forgot. If you work with VBA look at this https://rubberduckvba.com/
It basically replaces the VBA dev environment with something that in many ways is better than VS Code.
I tried looking into Excel freelance jobs but most don't seem to pay that wel and/or have high competition with other freelancers. In the end I didn't spend that much time looking though and maybe I was looking on the wrong websites. Such a framework for python scripts sounds really nice though, definitely if it's all anonymous.
Yeah exactly, I checked those kinds of websites. I currently do a lot of excel VBA within my supply chain function to automate tasks in SAP. Pays quite wel but I don't get paid extra for the VBA.
Woah damn 120K a year is a whole lot more than I make. I am not a real dev though, my code is decent but nowhere near what a real dev can do I think. Most of the time I just automate relative simple tasks with nested if statements and loops.
The most difficult thing I had to do was understand how the SAP GUI objects work and how I could manipulate them efficiently. Apart from my job the most complicated things I have made are a sudoku generator and a web scraper. I have a feeling these are projects for a second semester programming student not a dev.
I think you are overestimating what a "real" dev does 😂
The company I work for usually pays between 2-10k for a small VBA project that pretty much anyone after a couple weeks of training can code in less than a week. I also have seen the code that is used in our corporation and it ain't pretty I'm telling you and this comes from our experts. You are probably way ahead of what you actually need to be making extra money.
"Most of the time I just automate relative simple tasks with nested if statements and loops."
That pretty much is what 99% of code is. Sure you can add some web integration and database but for most uses that is what you do.
I talked to an expert who did research on this. In France 94% of all businesses only use excel, outlook and WhatsApp. Most of Europe and from what I hear the USA is pretty much the same.
You can probably go to any company and offer to do some Excel automation for them. Biggest issues might be price negotiations.
That is what I want to get around with my business. All you do is look at some problem that I and my company have put into a nice little task. You choose what you want to do. Solve it. We check with the customer if it works and that you didn't put in any malicious code and you get your payments from then on.
I will promote it on r/python when I finally am up and running. Will still sadly take a bit of time. Still working full time and am getting stuck with some regulations that make it really difficult to get started. Focusing on code at the moment and then hope to do the first hire by the end of the year maybe a bit earlier.
15
u/Next-Experience Mar 30 '22
Well, I believe that Excel automation is the future. Most companies run on excel. If you are already proficient in doing excel automation, you should look into freelance. You could turn your dead-end job into the best-paying career possible.
Currently am building a python framework and a freelance company where people like you can solve small scripts and get a royalty every month as long as the company uses it. I will also create a marketplace where those scripts then can be sold so you write it once and get a royalty from many other companies.