And, a fun technicality - I truly self-employed in the sense that I have a salary and a payroll …

This is super cool! I was/am a startup founder too, bootstrapped an open source project, raised VC money, but ultimately it didn't work out. Now thinking about a solo business again and the studio model was exactly what I was looking at. How did you decide what to build?

Wow! I’m working on the same thing at https://stackstudio.dev right now. Your blog post was really eloquent, it’s always inspiring when someone else shares your idea. Best of luck.

I have a similar story. I’ve been self-employed for the last 6 months after 14 years of startups. Started out as an engineer in TN, and moved to SF a couple years ago where I got into management just in time to help with rounds of layoffs. Got some severe burnout, quit, and now I’m working on my own products while doing consulting/contracting on the side through my agency. I live fulltime in an RV traveling the country and working remotely. At the moment, I never want to work for someone else again.

Really cool - I’m in a similar boat, having created startups and also was a PM in senior roles at a few great companies. I’ve been consulting, which is fine, but wanted something with a little more connection to the project so I just set up https://metaluna.io and am aiming for something on the agency route. That said, I really like the way you’re thinking of a “digital project studio”. Is there a community of people doing this somewhere?

> And, a fun technicality - I truly self-employed in the sense that I have a salary and a payroll system. That's how most devs here in Norway would do it. Make a "proper" company, where you own 100 % of the shares. Then hire yourself, and pay yourself salary, withhold taxes, pay into a pension program etc. Mainly because if you make good money, it's better to leave some of it in the company (and for instance re-invest it into some index funds or something), instead of taking it out immediately as salary and getting it taxed before re-investing. But then still take enough salary to cover your expenses, get social security benefits etc.

Love the comparison against Grand Seiko. I'm a self-proclaimed watch nerd and owner of a Shunbun. Grand Seiko makes beautiful watches!

This is awesome! Nice work. This model was a dream of mine for a while -- I generally love being solo but even a small group of 3-6 people working on a revenue-generating digital product studio has so much potential to be super super fun. Good luck with it and keep us posted!

Same here! I've been running my own digital products ( https://flat.social and some smaller ones) and bridging the gap with consulting. For me, the flexibility lead to a fully location-independent lifestyle which allowed me to work from places where I feel at my best. Currently writing this from a tropical patio in Brazil :)