What's up, everyone? This is Cortland from EndyHackers.com. And today I've got Clifford

Orevac on the show. He's the founder of Tambu and the author of a very popular series of posts on Medium

entitled The Epic Guide to Bootstrapping a SaaS startup from scratch by yourself.

Today, instead of doing a one-sided interview, I'm going to mix it up a little bit, and we're

going to be doing more of a two-sided, free-flowing discussion.

Our goal is to talk about things from a beginner perspective.

So if you haven't started an online business, or maybe you only recently started making money

online, then we're going to talk about things like why you should take the plunge, what the tradeoffs are, what kinds of knowledge and skills that's important to develop early on, what kind of pitfalls you should avoid, and stuff like that. So I'm pretty excited to see how this format works out. And without further ado, we should just jump right into it.

Clifford Orovac, how you doing? Doing great. How about you? Doing just fine. So let's start with the question of why should anybody try to independently make money online? That's a fun one.

So when you say independently, you mean just by themselves?

Not necessarily.

So let me zoom out and look at the status quo.

If you are, let's say, a software engineer working for a traditional software engineering

company, then who is your customer?

It's not actually the users who are using the software that you build.

It's the company that you work for. They're paying you a salary and return for a lease on your time and your skills. And as a result of that, they care a great deal about how you use your time and your skills, right? They care about what tools you use. They care about who you work with and how you get the job done. They care about how many hours you work. They care about what location you work from, all that stuff, because that's what they're paying you for.

Alternatively, if you are making money independently, at least in the way that I'm using it,

then instead of selling your time to a company or an employer, you are trying to create something of value and sell that directly to the users themselves.

So the question is, why go this route instead of getting a job?

That is a great question.

Having a job is a great way to secure steady income.

So if that's something that's important to you, having a job is a great way of doing that.

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