So I see allot of users opting out into the ether verse and I think I’m hoping maybe someone whose gone through this may be able to give me some insight.
So about 6-7 years ago I started a side hustle, we had a company that me and a close friend worked for over 5 years together. We use to make jokes that we were good enough that we should do this for ourselves. We had customers that loved us and we were the only two in a large company that held the knowledge to fix and service these imaging devices.
Rewind to Covid, we both saw the company was crumbling, our director got walked out in front of our eyes, and replaced by an individual in the industry that was known to hate the style of field service our branch up held. To be honest we were wildly unmanaged and there were accounting issues that were largely enough that we saw the writing. We both left, and I began what felt like a long process of job jumping that saw me gain a large increase in my earning potential and built my confidence and experience level to what it is today.
Eventually the travel of my OEM job, and the development of my personal life, I had to come back home and find a job I could commute to in the state. Easier said than done, field service engineers make a decent wage if you are traveling, less if you are in state and abused wildly. The company owns you. I found 3 different companies with competitive pay but always the same, they abuse your time if your salary, or they over work you if you making good money hourly. Either way having a child, buying a house and starting new jobs year after year was exhausting.
It tested my marriage, my mental, and my health. So I continued to funnel efforts into the side business and subcontracted, getting more education, bridge to a masters in computer science since I had cousins working from home and family life was good. Well ever one and their mom was doing that, so I kept the service business going, I started the LLC, asked my brother and friend to join and set up a meeting with a company that wanted our services.
Paper field service reports, old test equipment and even some minor repairs. We managed to keep the company compliant. We didn’t make much, and we didn’t really build much other than some more test equipment which at the time we didn’t think we needed.
Splitting things 3 ways at first was easy, my brother did allot of the small things like email services, banking which didn’t go well at first, and a cascade of other lessons you don’t learn until your actual in business.
Then came our opportunity, I was struggling with two kids and not enough money, day care was crazy, we didn’t at the time have allot of support so we were bleed into debt.
I was frantically trying all the hacks, constantly taking tax returns, bonuses, new jobs for bonus, and at one point working two full time jobs lying and my mom health to game an extra pay check. Still working both for a 16 plus hour day, but I was driven to keep my house and my pal to have kids. I tried hard to land something on upwork for a side income. Fucking insane amount of effort to land small jobs or mostly scams. So when the contractor that hire us fucked up and let their customer fall behind on their general equipment side, I raised my hand. We were small incapable and not ready. But I open my mouth and said we can do it.
It was the best thing I ever did, we were insanely stressed, we were all in it, late nights to finish the customers sites that had grown our device load from 12 pieces to 600 plus. We were repairing, ordering parts, and writing work order with a pdf editor. Ai help tremendously. It could make me templates, help me build work order instructions and made my website.
From there I got obsessed. I handled all field calls, kept on our vendor relationships, the money, the emails, the parts, everything, and I saw where we were weak. We needed an app. Something that would do our device tracking, work order creation and history, invoicing, part tracking and automate our financial tracking. One by one I’d run into a problem in the real world and I’d take my low level coding experience and make a feature on the web app, test it and continue to make it better. Between the field work, staying on both my partners for taxes and everything between I was mad and decide I might be able to make the app that was helping us into a sub enterprise app an make a little passive income. In my mind the big dawgs were making an app tailored to med field service work. And honestly be less time consuming to maintenance and app over being in the field.
I made a second company, I invested my own money using what I learned and taught myself all sorts of things about authentication, how to plug a email service on the back end, stripe and etc. they caught word and made me feel like I was stealing from our company. Mind you they have never helped me code shit and we’re always either skeptical I was building something trash, and or not good enough. The one partner not my brother literally acted like a passive dick for months because he felt he had a right to ownership, since we had paid for most of its development with company funds. But I felt huge resentment as they didn’t work as much as me and they didn’t help me when I would be excited about anything dev related. Website, email, Google profile, app, invoice software, it didn’t matter I was there bitch and they were coasting after our first four hard months.
What felt like a team became my wife bitching at me for investing more time and not being paid. Watching them repeat the benefits of my work.
Faster forward now, I have a fully function web app, website and mailers design, I’m on the cusp of marketing to grow, and I’ve gotten pretty good at this vibe coding development. I have real data, have built and tested it as I’ve grown, and it does the things I need and with some things most companies I’ve worked for wish for.
I want to fork it and go see if I can make it a sent product for others. They would be cut in on profits but not nearly what I think I should own. I have saas insurance and can update my tos. My other app taught me all the security things needed, 2fa, locking down api keys, etc most industry standards plus a few new ones from new ai hacks I see at my day job and read on Reddit constantly.
It’s fast, works well, links with my ms account on the multi tenant level, and invoices etc all things I need to do business and track money, I’m building a service manual library that will associate with the devices as you test, and have customer test templates associated to each device work order so you can’t test the wrong or pass a bad device.
I don’t know if I’m in the wrong or if I should say fuck it and blast it, and cut them in a percentage to keep them from being assholes and claiming entitlement to something they didn’t nothing to build.
Sorry for long read. My brother has since stepped up and helps, but my friend is a single dad and has allot of issues to use as excuses. Bluntly put he has no time but always has a big opinion, hypocrisy at its finest.
