The Tagcrumbs time is over and I had to decide what to do next. I am still very interested in founding my own company but was kind of burned out after working day and night for Tagcrumbs, so I wanted to take a step back for some time and not work my ass off for a similar project, even if I am having many good ideas.
An option I considered was going back to university to get a master’s degree. But when I look back at my time at university while studying Business Computer Science I have mixed feelings. It was very good to have a formal education on accounting, economics and the like, but many classes were just a waste of my time. The lecturers were often boring and didn’t enjoy their job, so sometimes I could listen the whole day and not learn anything new.
Except for extraordinary good lecturers I felt that I could have learned much more if I would have taken the same time and studied books myself. And this is how I already taught myself most things. Only a very minor part of the knowledge and skills that were required to do the work for Tagcrumbs came from university.
I feel that I don’t need any more formal education on computer science, up to today I was able to solve every problem I had myself and my next venture will most definitely not be a pipe flow analysis in a CAD/CAM system. Additionally, many startup veterans speak against MBAs at startups, as they teach you almost exclusively skills that are needed in large companies, so this was not an option either.
I basically faced the same decision before founding Tagcrumbs, as I was also thinking of going to university after quitting my job at HP. I don’t regret doing Tagcrumbs at all, as it was an immense learning experience and I probably spent way less money for much more education than if I would have gone back to university. So again, I decided against university, but what should I do next? Go work at a big company? Currently, this is not an option either.
There was a friendly freelancer in my local Cocoaheads group (a Mac and iPhone developer meetup) so I asked him questions about freelance work… and it all sounded very interesting. I would still be independent, work on many different projects and finally earn some money again to cover my expenses. This was the way to go, so I am now working as a freelance software engineer for iPhone and Ruby on Rails projects. In the future, I might extend those services and also offer general consulting for web and mobile projects. Working as a freelancer gives me the advantage that I can still work on my own projects if I want to and that I can slowly shift from selling my time to selling a product. And while freelancing, I can still self-study many topics in my spare time.
I am currently quite busy with current and follow-up projects, but if you want to hire me you can take a look at my recent work. Maybe we can find a way to work together in the future.
