I was burnt out, totally fried, by late 2022. I mean, my old gig, the whole crypto trading thing, it was killing me slowly. The money was good, yeah, if you could stomach the volatility. Every day felt like rolling the dice. I remember staring at the charts at 3 AM, sweating over some coin I bought, thinking, “This ain’t riches, this is just high-paid stress.” I was a mess, honestly. I’d yell at the screen, get into fights with my partner over dumb stuff because my nerves were shot. I had the fast car, the fancy apartment, but I couldn’t enjoy any of it because I was always tethered to the ping of a market alert. I truly thought the whole point of making money was to just make more money, instantly. It was stupid.
The Real Financial Blackout
It all came crashing down right before Christmas. A huge chunk of the capital I was managing for a startup—gone, wiped out by some stupid regulation change nobody saw coming. My boss? He just shrugs, says, “That’s the game, man.” But I took the blame. They didn’t fire me, but they cut my bonus hard, like, really hard. I walked out right then, just told them to stick it. I didn’t have a plan, nothing lined up. That was the moment I realized all those “predictions” I’d been chasing were just noise designed to keep me hooked on anxiety.
I spent January 2023 totally lost. My savings were okay, but not for long. I looked at all the flashy “make money fast” guides online, all the gurus screaming about the next big thing. All garbage. I realized the only real prediction I could trust was mine: that stability was the new wealth. Zero stress, predictable income—that’s the real luxury, man. It took me a solid month to just decompress and rewire my brain away from the adrenaline high. I even tossed my trading rig into storage. I spent that time writing down everything I hated about the last three years. The one thing that stood out was the lack of control. I needed a business where I was the single point of failure and the single point of success. Something boring.
So, I ditched the fast money chase completely. I started digging into boring stuff. What did I actually know how to do? I was good with process, good at just setting things up and letting them run. I found this super niche market, doing back-end automation for local small businesses. Think like, just managing their inventory flow and appointment booking—the stuff they absolutely hate. It wasn’t sexy, but it was a solid need. My new career prediction for 2023 was simple: trade volatility for reliability.
Setting Up the Predictable Cash Flow
This whole thing was a total DIY operation, from start to finish. I just put my head down and built it. I had to stop thinking about percentages and start thinking about fixed monthly payments.
- I Ripped Apart My Old Scripts: First thing I did was dismantle my old trading scripts. I pulled out all the reliable logic for handling time-series data and sending alerts, and re-purposed it to track inventory levels instead of stock prices. The foundation was already there, I just pointed it at a different spreadsheet.
- I Defined the Offering: I hammered out a basic service offering, keeping it super simple: three pricing tiers, maybe Bronze, Silver, Gold. No exceptions, no custom work, no meetings that last more than fifteen minutes. The whole point was efficiency, for them and for me.
- The Cold Walk-In Test: I took my ugly but functional demo and walked into ten local shops—a bakery, a mechanic, a small gym, a dog groomer—and showed them the system. I didn’t sell them; I just showed them exactly how much time they were currently wasting filling out forms or manually tracking sales. It was a time-saving offer, not a software purchase.
- Client Lock-Down and Development: I locked down two clients fast. They paid the setup fee right away. I wrote the initial code base in like two weeks, super ugly, a mix of Python and basic cloud functions, but it worked flawlessly. I didn’t worry about clean code, I worried about features that made them money or saved them time right now.
- The Automation Anchor: Then I built the monitoring. This was the key. I spent a month just making sure I got alerts before they even knew something was going wrong. Total set-it-and-forget-it mode for them, and for me, it meant maybe an hour of work a week maintenance. That’s the real leverage, man.
It’s not 10 million dollars, okay? It’s not headline stuff that gets you on the financial news. But it’s five clients now, all on monthly retainers that pay automatically on the first, every time. I don’t check the income daily. I don’t even check it weekly. It just happens. I bought myself time. That’s the real financial richness I predicted was possible. The true 2023 guide for me was just exiting the panic zone.
My old crypto crew still calls me sometimes, raving about the 50% jump in whatever garbage coin they’re holding this week. They tell me I need to come back, that the market is hot again. I just laugh. They’re still checking their phones every five minutes. I’m sitting here, having coffee, waiting for the automated deposit. No stress. No drama. No 3 AM alarms. That was the guide I followed. The path to quiet, dependable money.
The job posting for my old role, the one that nearly killed me, is still up online. They’ve raised the salary twice since I left. Guess they still can’t find someone who’s willing to sacrifice their life for that kind of volatility. I’m not going back. I built my own quiet rich life instead.
