About: Husband; Father; Software Engineer; Gamer; Tinkerer; Writing about code on DEV.
Cover photo by Michal Matlon on Unsplash
How do you make money with your side hustle? Whether that's writing articles (like here on DEV) or freelancing or making your own game: what's the worst way to make money with it?
Comment your wrong answer!
Oh open source it for sure. I mean, open source is a great business model for a developer of one, the massive enterprises who need your software will tell you how great it is, they won't pay you anything but them telling you it is great and essential to their multi million pound operations really gives you the boost you need to keep doing 80 hour weeks just to make a living and still be able to work on your side hustle!
Oh and the other great tip - be arrogant enough to think that if you build the best software people will just use it, we all know that marketing is a weak and zero skilled profession, we are developers, we are better than mere marketing professionals and have nothing to learn from them!
Build it and they will come (and also pay me for some reason, even though I gave it away for free).
- Every Developer
I feel like we have been brainwashed, I can't think of many professions where you would put 500 hours into something for free and only ask for a coffee.
As for the build it and they will come, I learned a long time ago - you can make the best product out there, but if nobody knows and believes it is the best product you will soon disappear.
But if you filled a company's Acknowledgements with your NPM packages like this, they might sponsor you
Oh I take it all back, just look at that massive sponsorship for babel, $40k a month (at absolute max, probably more like $20k), I mean, it is only a tiny 175kb library (I could write that in a weekend, no bother) with 118 MILLION downloads a week, why are they making so much money, why can't they just have a $1000 a month and be happy! 😋🤣
I found that no matter where I went it either turned into a dead end or a boiler room. I'm retired now. But there is a lot of truth to this.
I found that a lot of issues I had trying to launch was that I didn't know how to speak to the audience.
I initially got into devwork because everyone just wanted to build cool stuff. Now it's a huge gimmicky slowburn to sell coding challenges to corporations and fund more empowerment non-profits.
Past that, theres no real cool projects. Even after doing the 60 hour review stints and cramming to be prepared to expected to know floor to ceiling something people make whole careers out of without hesitation and getting the job, it always turned out to be just another copypasta grind.
At the end of the day I'd rather have less money to keep doing something fulfilling than to make that dosh and realize how miserable I am.
brb while I make leftpadapi.com ... only $1 per character padded, get your first 300 free for testing!
I'll start.
Posting links like this at the bottom of my articles: buymeacoff.ee/kallmanation
I've actually made $5 from it.... because someone else signed up and got a supporter and buymeacoffee.com gave me a referral bonus...