https://harshal-patil.com/ I started writing 3 years ago. I'm not sure if Wix has a RSS feed, but I rate limit my posts to once a week at https://harshalpatil.substack.com/ I write about business, entrepreneurship, and tech. Nowadays also about the journey in writing.

Those thoughts resonate a lot with me, thats how I thought of writing this article. 1) the drive towards a common goal 2) a group accomplishes more 3) ideally would want a job (time you are compensated for) that intersects with your interests. Building solo products appeals to me apart from consulting. But the "solo" in it is a bit tricky haha.

If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together, something, something :)

That's an amazing perspective from 2 years in. A few weeks before writing this article, I tried joining a co-working space. I was there to work around people. I went and chatted with people. I went to their weekly breakfast social event. But I realized a lot of the people were in 2 or larger size companies there, so they came with their group, had lunch together, had "happy hour" time together, and went back. I also realized that although I'm there once a week to chit chat, others are there any day to work with their colleagues. How was your experience in going to co-working space when self-employed over the last 2 years?

Funny enough, I rarely go to a coworking space. I do not miss the confines of an office, or having relationships with colleagues. That’s probably because my bf is an hobby dev and some neighbourhood friends are devs too.

I have been to coworking enough to know what you’re talking about with company groups just doing their thing though. Gotta seek out the solopreneurs. If you have an indie hackers/beers meetup in your city, maybe befriend some folks there and cowork somewhere together. I know some of my indie friends have had coworking meetups together before.

makes sense to find the right coworking space(s) or group up with indie hackers. I recently found an indie hackers group and there was at least one person there who also missed in-person time. So maybe thats a possibility! I found one very entrepreneurial coworking space but since I'm running a (product) consultancy and not building a product, they did not take me in.

At one point, my indie friends even threw themselves a holiday party! The sky is the limit (until you become a billionaire and fly to space ;).

I hope it works out for you.

Some spaces have rules about who can join. Try out some for freelancers.

The admin side of things really pain me and I reflected on those as I wrote this article. Glad it resonates with your experiences and interesting that after a while you went back full time. Every week I'm doing new admin stuff and I would rationalize it saying "This is a starting pain" or "This is only the first time". But the stream of first-time pains never end, haha!

Ah didn't realize the heading misled you. When I wrote this article, these were surprises for me too. Missing meetings? missing feedback? missing physical offices? I still don't wanna think about going to full time work again, but I still miss those aspects of full-time work vs self-employment. I would rather try lot lot harder to build a successful startup than submit resume and interview for FTE jobs.

I didn't realize my article got shared on HN. Glad it resonated with you. Completely agreed with the improvements you are thinking of: 1> dedicated time. I love the flexibility of taking up projects that I'm interested in, anytime. vs a narrow scope of work as a FTE. 2> A lot more satisfaction and self-fulfillment.