so ive been doing drone work on the side for about two years now, mostly real estate and some construction progress stuff, and im honestly starting to wonder if i could just... do this full time. right now im working a desk job that i hate and the drone stuff is the only thing that doesnt feel like a chore.

the money is inconsistent though and thats the part that scares me. some months i pull in decent enough that i think yeah okay this could work, and then other months its like crickets. i have my part 107 and ive been slowly building up clients but its slow going. just wondering if anyone here has made the jump and what that actually looked like in the early days. did you have savings built up first, did you have contracts lined up, or did you just kind of yolo into it and figure it out

i made the jump about three years ago and honestly the first six months were rough. not gonna sugarcoat it. i had maybe four months of savings which i thought was plenty and it really wasnt. the thing nobody tells you is how much time goes into the non-flying stuff - invoicing, following up on late payments, cold emailing, building out a portfolio site that doesnt look terrible. all of that eats into your actual billable hours way more than you'd expect.

what saved me was locking in one steady retainer client early on. a property management company that needed monthly inspection shots of their apartment complexes. wasnt glamorous work but it was predictable income and that predictability is worth so much when youre starting out. if i were doing it over again id spend the last few months of my day job just aggressively trying to land one or two clients like that before pulling the trigger on quitting.

not full time yet myself but following this thread because im in almost exactly the same spot lol. the real estate market in my area has been weird lately so im also trying to figure out if diversifying into other stuff like events or maybe getting into the inspection side would help stabilize things. curious what kind of rates you're charging for the construction stuff if you dont mind sharing