Saas PMM, $115k. No college degree. I spent my twenties researching and writing books on music theory and mysticism while working $14/hr jobs at bakeries and whatnot. By my late twenties I got tired of struggling as an artist. Went to code school for six months and the internship led nowhere. After a year I got my foot in at a small software shop with three employees and did $15/hr account management for a small portfolio of clients. While there I asked the owners for any tips, they suggested I familiarize myself with googles flutter framework. Wrote some ranking tutorial articles on relevant topics that were republished by Google on Medium. First moment I realized that I could combine my junior tech knowledge with my senior technical writing skill set.
Then I did some networking. Flutter was a small team and they had a local chapter in my city - I found out a separate software company in town had spoken at the flutter conference a year prior. So I reached out, asked if they would be interested in hosting a flutter meetup. Then I invited the google flutter team to speak.
Around the same time I got a random job interview at the company I now work for. I had all of these random fortunate coincidences and hard work to show for myself so they hired me. Then I worked religiously with almost no vacations for about four years.
My position was a customer success manager with a $65k base, doing customer support on intercom, writing knowledge base articles, blogs, etc. instead of settling there I studied SaaS marketing to see if I could carve out a place for myself there. Turn out a little technical knowledge, charm, writing skills, entrepreneurial spirit, hard work, and the desire to win go a long way. Four years later, after a series of promotions I’ve made it where I am. Also started a B2C music software company to bring in additional income.
I’ll say this. Familiarize yourself with the SaaS landscape. It’s a grassroots culture that’s flush with cash. If you’re a strong writer, persuasive speaker, and know how to help people you’ll get somewhere. Or at least, I did.