Makes more sense to wagie it for a few years and then strike out IMHO. You'll make decent cash even as a Jr and you'll have the industry vets to get templates/scripts/support from and they might even toss you side jobs jobs or do sub contract work for you in their specialties in the future. You'll have recognizable stuff in your portfolio with professional designs, you'll know all the lingo and how to white paper stuff properly, etc. If you dive in headlong with no process or understanding of stuff like code repositories, integration, security... you're going to have a hard time. If you must dive in full indy then you had best eat sleep and breath youtube/O'Reilly books or whatever for the stack/niche you plan to work with. Makes even more sense to steal business from the largest of your old clients and then sell your new company to an IT conglomerate 3 years after you start it... but I was never a people person.