When you apply for a job, you need to make sure, that the company is OK hiring an engineer from your country. Do it as early as possible. If you don't, you may be disappointed one day.

It happened to me once. I was in the recruitment process, got positive feedback and I was informed that I passed to the next step. Unfortunately before receiving the next task, the company let me know that they changed their mind. They decided to not hire anyone from Europe.

Alright, let's go back to the main point: where to look for your next remote job as a mobile engineer?

Job boards

Unfortunately, none of the job boards is perfect. Sometimes they make life easy and have basic filters like EMEA or Worldwide. But usually, you need to make your own research if the company is fine hiring remote software engineers within the EMEA timezones. Here are the recommended job boards:

• https://remotehunt.com
• https://angel.co/jobs
• https://startup.jobs
• https://justjoin.it
• https://nofluffjobs.com/
• https://pragmatic-engineer.pallet.xyz/jobs

Hacker News - Who is hiring

Every month on Hacker News there's Ask HN: Who is hiring? thread. A lot of companies all over the world put their current job openings. There are tools created to make searching easier like https://kennytilton.github.io/whoishiring/. You can filter job offers by including keywords like remote, iOS, Android, mobile and excluding US only

Here's a sample thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29067493

Twitter

Another good way of finding a job offer early is to search for it on Twitter. You can search for hiring iOS, hiring Android, remote iOS job, remote Android job or any other job-related keyword.  I recommend searching for it on Tweet Deck as it makes a job easier: https://tweetdeck.twitter.com.

LinkedIn

Here you got two options. First, you can search for the proper keywords. Another one is to reach out to recruiters directly. Try to find recruiters that specialize in mobile recruitment.

Use the curated list of companies

Searching for the current openings and filtering companies based on their openness for remote mobile engineers from EMEA/Europe is time-consuming. If you don't want to spend many hours on it, I got something for you.

I curated 90+ remote companies that hire mobile developers from Europe.  Get it below 👇

Planetoid (2015-2016)

It's all started with a game. Who doesn't love those, right? Imagine building one yourself! It would be so amazing!

Back in 2015, I paired with my friend and we decided to create a mobile game for iOS: Planetoid. In a nutshell, it was a graph-based strategy where you had to conquer all the planets by shooting bullets. Here's the video of how it looked:

We spent more than one year building it after work and over the weekends. Everything was done by us: design, music, level design, etc. We finally released it in November 2016 as a paid app. Unfortunately, people weren't interested in paying for it. 2 months resulted in no sales.

What's another way to monetize an app? Yes: ads. We decided to integrate ads and publish the game for free. After a few months, we got 300 installations. It was a cold bucket of water.

We spent so much time on the game and almost no one played it.

But hey, it was our first experience! We learned a lot, made good and bad decisions on the way.

• We gained experience in building an app from scratch and publishing it on the App Store. It was really valuable skills taking into account I had started my professional career as an iOS developer
• The game was written in Objective-C using SpriteKit. It was the time when Swift was changing dramatically every release and it was a great idea to code in Obj-C. We saved a ton of time on code migration to newer Swift versions.
• The marketing was almost non-existential. We posted about the game in common places like Reddit or Hacker News and we hoped that App Store would do the job. But it didn't. Planetoid simply drowned in the App Store.

Minfinity - a minimal time tracker (2017)

I was disappointed with the outcome from Planetoid and decided to tackle the next project in another way.

This time I planned to build a time tracking macOS app. I designed it first in Zeplin. Then created a landing page with a mailing list for my next app. I wanted to promote it and verify if the will be people willing to join the mailing list. I integrated Google Analytics to see if anyone visits the website. I also set up a small campaign in Google Ads.

After 3 months of a campaign and marketing, I got 5 people who subscribed to the mailing list. It was below my expectations and I abandoned the project.

Minimal Metronome (2017)

This time, I wanted to build something just for myself.

One of my hobbies is playing the guitar. I wanted to build a metronome app that was minimal and functional. The idea was to have the smallest amount of buttons and to control the app by swiping gestures and getting haptic feedback on every change.

Unfortunately, here the motivation didn't last too long. I was a bit tired after the last few projects. What's more, I found the app on the App Store that fulfilled my needs. So I abandoned this project as well.

A long, almost 2-year break

After these projects, I was exhausted. I couldn't enjoy working on side projects anymore.

Having a day job and working on side projects is tough. It can burn you down. And it hit me a bit as well. I needed a break.

It was time to recharge my batteries and return to indie hacking only when I'll be sure I'll enjoy it. And it took almost 2 years.

The return - September 2019

Here we go again. September 2019. It took some time to take a rest, but it was worth it. I was excited about side projects again.

In late 2019 I was investigating the real estate market. The problem is that there are a lot of places where you can search for an apartment. What's more, the market was so hot, it was impossible to buy an apartment from the secondary market. Great deals were gone literally in hours.

I wanted to develop a tool to monitor new offers and notify me if there is an interesting one. The plan was to provide parameters like price, space, district, keywords, etc, and based on them send a notification.

Another project just for me with some potential for monetization.

I started developing scrapers gathering data. I spent maybe 2 weeks on it when I realized the level of complexity. This was too much work for just one person.

After a quick search on the Internet, I decided to purchase one of the existing tools and I abandoned the project. I didn’t want to burn out again.

Next time: choose something simple that can be accomplished by one person.

Get a Product Job (May 2020 - May 2021)

This time the main objective was to learn something new by doing. I chose Ruby on Rails. It's a great framework to build websites quickly. What’s more, I wanted to improve my web development skills. After this project, I wanted to have another tool under my belt for any future ideas.

I started building yet another job board. This time I planned to create a website with job offers only from product-based IT companies.  I spent 6 months building it in my free time after work. I launched it in October 2020.

I did some basic marketing. I was reaching out to companies on LinkedIn. I was posting in regular places like Reddit or Hacker News. After few weeks I managed to get one job posting from one of the companies. The rest of the offers I scraped and curated from different sources.

It’s worth mentioning that posting a job post was for free. I found out how dealing with taxes might be troublesome and I decided to make a website for free until I get a significant number of job postings.

Unfortunately, the website didn’t get any traction and I killed it in May 2021. But the goal of the project was accomplished:

• I learned the basics of Ruby on Rails, Renderer and improved my skills in front-end development.
• I learned about different ways of accepting payments.
• I learned how to handle taxes for side projects when you’re an EU citizen.

Takeaways

After all these projects I learned a lot about myself and what motivates me (or not).
I still got many ideas in my head but right now I’m more cautious about choosing my next project.

First of all, when deciding about the next project, I need to choose the smallest idea possible that can be developed by one person. Cut the scope as much as possible.

Estimate the time needed for the MVP. It shouldn’t take more than 3 weeks, assuming having a day job and working on the project only in my free time. If the estimation is higher, try to find out the quickest way to develop the MVP. There are many no-code tools that might speed up the development. Just looks what Samuel Thompson was able to create in one day!

Having an increasing number of users is super motivating. Try to release the project as fast as possible to get first feedback and an early dose of fresh motivation.

And that’s all. These were all my failed projects. Keep fingers crossed for the next one.

If you want to follow my journey on earning first $ from side projects, follow me on Twitter:

I've been in that place. That's why I abandoned one of the recent projects. If I had known about handling taxes in the EU a bit earlier, probably I would have chosen a different idea.

Defining a monetization strategy is a crucial step when you plan your next side business. Being able to earn money while not spending a ton of time on taxes and bureaucracy is invaluable. Dealing with all the paperwork can kill your inspiration.

That's why I wanted to list out the payment providers that can help you with taxes so you can focus on your product.

Merchants of Records

A merchant of record is an entity that sells goods or services on your behalf. It handles all the various taxes for you. You don't need to worry about different VAT taxes, rates, and so on. If you earn money, it pays you out on regular basis (i.e. once per week) and you only need to handle income tax on your own.

Here's a nice explanation https://paddle.com/blog/what-is-merchant-of-record/

⚠️ If you decide to use a Merchant of Records, remember to check if the type of your business is supported! For example, various human services (like consultations) are not welcomed.

Gumroad

Gumroad | Sell Digital Products & Memberships

Gumroad makes it easy for you to sell digital products, memberships and more. Join the creator economy and escape your 9-5 desk job.

Gumroad Logo

• What you can sell on Gumroad https://help.gumroad.com/category/232-what-you-can-sell-on-gumroad
• Dealing with VAT https://help.gumroad.com/article/10-dealing-with-vat

Paddle

Paddle - Revenue Delivery Platform for SaaS

Helping B2B & B2C SaaS increase global conversions, reduce churn, stay compliant, and scale up fast

Revenue Delivery Platform for SaaSicon-angelicon-emailicon-facebookicon-linkedinicon-slackicon-twitterGroup 4Page 1Page 1

• Not supported types of businesses https://paddle.com/support/aup/
• How Paddle handles VAT on your behalf https://paddle.com/support/how-does-paddle-handle-vat-on-my-behalf/

Lemon Squeezy

Lemon Squeezy: Sell digital products the easy-peasy way

Selling digital downloads, subscriptions, and software licenses has never been easier, faster, or more secure.

Lemon Squeezy: Sell digital products the easy-peasy way

• A brand new solution on the market.
• Sales Tax & VAT https://docs.lemonsqueezy.com/article/57-sales-tax-vat

Payment Service Provider

Payment Service Provider offers services for accepting payments by various methods. In comparison to Merchant of Records, it handles only the whole transaction process.

Stripe

Stripe Tax

Calculate and collect sales tax, VAT, and GST with one line of code or the click of a button.

• Released recently Stripe Tax https://stripe.com/docs/tax. Now it's possible to calculate and collect sales taxes, VAT, GST automatically. Previously as an EU citizen, you had to calculate it on your own which made Stripe not the best choice for EU-based indie hackers.
• You still need an accountant to help with any tax payments.
• Supports a lot more business types than Merchants of Records. A list of restricted businesses https://stripe.com/en-pl/restricted-businesses

Marketplaces

Apple App Store

App Store - Apple Developer

Attract and engage over a billion App Store customers from around the world. Our useful tools and strategies are designed to make your app business successful.

Apple Developer

• Handles all the taxes for you (similar to Merchant of Records) in return for the 30% commission rate.
• There is a Small Business Program with a 15% commission rate https://developer.apple.com/app-store/small-business-program/

Google Play

Google Play Store | Android Developers

<!-- hide description -->

Android Developers

Final words

I hope that helps a bit. If you know about any other solution, please let me know. You can find me on Twitter https://twitter.com/kwcodes.

The most common tool for background jobs in Ruby on Rails is Sidekiq. Unfortunately, it's not standalone and it has Redis as a dependency. In this post, I will present an alternative approach for scheduling tasks in Rails.

Oh come on! What's the problem with Sidekiq? It's well tested and widely used in many production apps!

Please remember that I focus on product bootstrapping. Time to market is crucial. I'm also a one-man army and I try to minimize any unneeded maintenance.

To be able to use Sidekiq you need to set up and maintain a new service with Redis. It takes time and effort. I was looking for a solution to quickly implement scheduled jobs without any overhead for my Rails app: Get a Product Job.

Fine, why cannot you just use cron?

I'm using Render and its services don't have cron out of the box.

Solution

I decided to use Integromat. It's a tool for automating processes and it has an attractive free tier (1000 operations/month). Just enough for small side projects.

How to glue it with the Ruby on Rails app?

1. Create a new controller with an action containing your task in app/controllers/background_jobs_controller.rb:

class BackgroundJobsController < ApplicationController
  def cleanup
    async_rake "background:cleanup"
	# you can also pass environment variables as follows:
    # async_rake "background:cleanup", :dry_run => "false"
    head :ok
  end
end

2. Define a method to execute rake tasks asynchronously in app/controllers/application_controller.rb.

def async_rake(task, options = {})
  options[:rails_env] ||= Rails.env

  env_vars = options.map { |key, value| "#{key.to_s.upcase}='#{value.to_s}'" }
  env_vars_string = env_vars.join(' ')

  log_file = File.join(Rails.root, "log/async_rake.#{Rails.env}.log")

  Process.fork {
    exec("#{env_vars_string} bin/rake #{task} --trace 2>&1 >> #{log_file}")
  }
end

Implementation from https://gist.github.com/tompave/ae53fbab32ebebf1072e

3. Create a rake task lib/tasks/background.rake to perform any background logic you need:

namespace :background do
  task :cleanup => :environment do
    puts "👋 from the background task!"
  end
end

4. Add a new route in config/routes.rb

post '/task/cleanup', to: 'background_jobs#cleanup'

5. Go to Integromat and create a new scenario.
   

6. Select HTTP and click click Continue.
   

7. Click on HTTP and select Make a request.
   
   

8. Configure Integromat to make a request to /task/cleanup endpoint you just set up in the Rails app.
   

9. After saving a request click on a clock icon to configure when to send a request.
   

10. Set up when to fire your background task.
    

11. Save the scenario and that's all! You can run it once to test the whole setup.

Summary

What are the pros and cons of this approach?
✅ Quick implementation.
✅ No new layers to maintain (Redis + Sidekiq).
✅ Money saved on new services (quite important when you're just starting out and validating ideas).

🚨 Not the safest solution. You might consider adding authorization or at least server-side checks to make sure that the task is not run too often.
🚨 For some of you, Integromat free tier might not be enough.
🚨 If not careful, you can easily exceed Integromat's free tier.

• Rails 5.1 introduced secrets https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/28038
• Rails 5.2 replaced secrets with credentials https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/30067
• Rails 6. added support for multi environment credentials https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/33521

export EDITOR="code --wait" # or export EDITOR=vim
# Create global credentials at config/credentials.yml.enc and config/master.key
rails credentials:edit
 
# Create credentials for a given environment at config/credentials/<environment>.yml.enc
# It takes precedence over global credentials
rails credentials:edit --environment production
rails credentials:edit --environment development