Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

Building and selling macOS apps is a pretty good niche to be in right now.

I escaped my stressful corporate job 1 year ago and I’ve been living comfortably since then from app revenue only.

I’m making between $3.5k and $9k per month with https://lunar.fyi/ and the smaller apps I create at https://lowtechguys.com/

It’s not much for some parts of the world. But I’m well enough from this that I even took the time to build a small calendar app (https://lowtechguys.com/grila) from which all the funds will go to my brother’s college costs so he can stop working 12h/day jobs.

Before this I tried creating paid web services but none took off. I realized I actually don’t use any indie web product after 8 years of professional coding. I’m only using web products from big companies like Google, fly.io, Amazon etc.

Desktop apps on the other hand, most that I use and love are made by single developers.

With the ascent of Apple Silicon, and the ease of SwiftUI, this has the potential of bringing a modest revenue while also being more fulfilling than a corporate job.

In case you’re curious how the code looks for something like that, here’s a small open-source app that I built in a single (long) day, which has proven to be useful enough that people want to pay for it: https://github.com/alin23/Clop

Coding pairs well and elevates many other side-hustles, I think.

Nearly every job can benefits from automation, and if it can't, then the logical thinking that coding requires will improve it in some way.

I paired coding with fiction writing and made a scifi podcast, which now represents 10% of my monthly income after two years!

I wrote up my experience and advice here, if you're interested in the details https://www.0atman.com/articles/21/make-fiction-podcast

> The thought of returning to corporate working kind of disgusts me. daily meetings, middle management bs, politics, bureaucracy... im sure your familiar with the typical complaints.

Have you considered working in a company that isn't like that?

Things to look for:

* Ownership: The owner should be the person running the business.

* Size: Fewer than 20 employees. Ideally two or three; consider being the first.

* Revenue: A reasonably stable revenue stream lets you take on mid-long term projects. Ad revenue from a niche content business is quite good here.

Programming can support almost any other domain. A programmer paired with another expert can create a lot of value.

These days I'm a webmaster. I don't get paid to write software, but writing software helps me get paid.

I help people with German bureaucracy, and occasionally, being able to create software helps me do my job better. I can build little calculators and widgets that support my content, for example.

If I didn't do that, I'd probably pair with other people to solve small problems that big tech doesn't cover. It's fun, it's effective, and it's often lucrative.

Non-profits are very different to corporate environments. Not without their own issues and bullshit, and less well-paid, but considerably more easy going and potentialy a lot more fun.

Some people like the idea of doing something meaningful, I've been in the sector too long to care about that. What I do find is that the sort of problems you're facing are far more interesting. For example, I spend all day trying to figure out how best to track how [ISSUE] is presented in the media.

Worth having a poke around non-profit job boards for interesting-looking problems. The good gigs are often solving very specific, weird and interesting challenges.

AI space is heating up with the release of Stable Diffusion models and OpenAI.

If you are interested you can start playing with these tech and make things useful for people.

I'm just getting started on this and released the MVP version of Picasa AI[1] and I'm excited about it.

I wanted to build something for a long time and I always postponed it for better time. With the AI trends I feel now is the correct time to jump in.

[1] - https://PicasaAI.com

Being good at making other people money is actually a skill you can monetise. That’s basically what B2B software is: making money for other people. It’s the very definition of value creation. So focus on how you can make money for other people, then scale that up in a way that allows you to charge less than the value created but more than the cost to produce.

Also don’t try to think of an idea, just start talking to business owners about problems that cost them money or constrain growth (opportunity cost) and fix those problems.

> monetizing hobbies

I find two issues with this (disclaimer, My "hobby" is coding, so I guess I've been monetizing it, all my adult life):

1) Once someone starts paying you, they get to exert their influence on your work, and it becomes a lot less "hobbyish."

One of the biggest joys in my life, these days, is not having managers destroying my work.

2) Delivering ship software requires a lot of "not fun" stuff.

In some cases, the majority of the project could be wrapped up in "unfun," like needing to use particular coding practices, languages, dependencies, techniques, etc. Also, there's all the "polishing the fenders" kind of thing, like documentation, UX finish, maintenance, fixing all those bugs that you don't think are "actually bugs," establishing CI/D, configuration management, presentations to the Board, etc.

These days, I write software for myself. I eat my own dog food. Every one of my projects is a complete ship product, with all the aforementioned stuff (without the CI/D, as I don't really need it, for my one-man shop).

Depending on your country, freelancing next to the day-job may be an option to testing "the new job" without giving up the security/benefits of an employment (for instance an affordable employer's contributed health care if you are in western europe). Hourly rates for IT freelancing professionals are only increasing, there is a long standing and ongoing shortage for skilled people. It is not uncommon to earn a yearly sallary of an employee within a few month as a freelancer. This means: Even more time to checkout what you really want to do.

Edit, disclaimer: I co-founded a cooperative to help skilled IT people to work independently as freelancers, giving legal advices and a network.

Reading your post, I think for you - consider working only for a paycheck, rather than wanting to work for nebulous concepts such as 'good work', 'passion', 'fun', etc. Work a 9-5, go home and enjoy your time outside of work. Just be a solid, dependable person, and give no reason to be fired. Don't try to overachieve, because that can lead to additional responsibilities/stress/etc. This type of person is very much required in every single company.

Consider teaching on your own blog - it's not immediate money, but if you're patient, you'll start to get folks asking if you're available for consulting, or if you've considered writing a book on what you write about.

Source: I wrote a book about a single function in React, it did okay.

I've been working on Entrepreneurship for quite a while now and still feel like a noob!

I created an ebook a while back on how to make money with Airbnb (based on my experience as a superhost), but I did zero marketing and ended up making about 3 sales total...

A few years back I made a course on Udemy. I figured this would solve my marketing issue. It took me 6 months and was a real slog but managed to create a course about Neo4j. I don't make a tonne of money from that, but managed to make a best selling course, and on a good month it might bring in $1k USD.

A couple years ago I did Sam Ovens consulting accelerator which basically teaches you to reach out to ppl with problems and get them on a sales call then sell them a $2k solution to said problem. I followed this and managed to sell a handful of people on helping them land their first dev job. People's problems were varied, I realise in hindsight that I could have been more educated around coaching but I did help all those people land their first job. I played with pricing a bit, selling at various prices ($2.5k, $750, $1.5k). I feel like if you pushed long and hard enough on this niche perhaps it could be successful, but to me it always felt a bit off for various reasons.

Now, I'm creating a website builder. I'd say it's not a project for the light hearted - it pains me a bit to say that it's been a year so far. I actually have something that can build a website and did have it up online, but took it down to avoid server costs while building it out.

I've learnt a lot on my journey and I find it fun (in a massochistic sort of way), but still very much a work in progress.

Happy to share if anyone has questions :)

You sound like someone who can be a technical co-founder to someone who is good with sales and the schmoozing part. A lot of Startup founders are looking for such a person, who is the "Guy in the Chair".

You get paid to do what you like. And things goes well, get a big payday later on. If not, by then, you would know how to do another one but with a much better experience, connections, and still not do the "typical complaints."

In trading, I realize I always made loses when my emotions get involved. So I decided to implement a trading-bot in Python for fun. It took 1.5 years of development. The bot can open ~100 positions each day and closing all with 1 cent gain (in total ~1$ profit per day). At least its nice to see something I made can make some money even its amount pretty small.

Most web related indie dev has been killed by open source. Best alternative is to look into niche programming or pairing with a person that understands real life problems and needs. Game dev is an option along with programming plugins for various platforms. Dont be put off by nay sayers and do your own research.

You can always do your own course or book and put it on Gumroad. Here's my story: https://nts.strzibny.name/one-year-of-sales/

> I can code up my dream ideas with ease, what i don't know how to do is market anything or get users.

That is the key. If you learn marketing strategies, you will be able validate ideas, grow a customer base, test what works and doesn’t.

Reading your post it sounds like you dont really want to learn how to do something new. You just want to use your existing skill set to make money. That is fine but to start a business, and starting a side hustle is starting a business, you need to learn new things.

If you dont want to do that then maybe finding a smaller company or a company with a better culture will help. I didnt love my first two eng jobs. I like this one a lot. No middle management bs. No politics. Get to work on interesting stuff. Just took some time to find it. Ask friends where they want to work/the best place they have worked is.

I have tried, and failed, and tried, and failed, to maintain interest in full time office-based positions. I just can't. I've never held a FTE position longer than 3 years. I'm nearing 40, by the way.

I use my skills, such as they are, in contract positions. I've been working continuously since 15 or so and aside from a brief spell of 4 months, never been out of work. When I became experienced/qualified enough to use my programming/engineering skills, after another failed FTE position I went contracting and never looked back.

Once again, recently, I have failed to engage with my latest run at an FTE role. I can't be doing with the monumentally slow pace of my employer, the power structures, the bureaucracy, the 45-minute daily standups (yes, I know), the broken business processes. So I'm back to contracting.

Some people aren't cut out for office life. Contracting is office life, sure, but you dictate the terms, you (generally) dictate the pay, you stay when you find a good team and walk when you want to. The problems are harder, you're generally solving issues the client can't solve themselves and bureaucratic blockers magically disappear when the client remembers you're costing them three figures a day.

LinkedIn jobs (HEAVILY filtered) tends to be my go-to when I go shopping for a new client, but there's plenty of contract-specific talent networks and bodyshop consultancies who you can find work from.

i use Toptal to find projects i want to work upon with my preferred tech stack, timezone, working hrs (I prefer 20 hrs) and hourly rate. There's so much freedom for me that I could never get from a corporate . Toptal clients are nice too!

hmm

Not good enough to teach?

You are thinking about this wrong!

Passion about something and communicating that to others is the invite for them to take that journey to mastery.

You just need the garyVee social media money tricks on top to make it fundable.

I am in the process of re-vamping that stuff to do exactly that and I am probably older than you at db of 1965...follow me to see it happen

https://fredgrott.medium.coom

Side note garyvee content stack for devs is the reels get expanded in to code and screenshot visual slides in the medium articles while at the same time making mp4 animation reels for instagram, linkedin, Fb posting. On top of that you break the programming into smaller foundation units that get the same expanded reels treatment. In my case I finalizing 8 months of sm postings in a few weekends at over 2,000 artifacts for 20k in social media postings. Yes! Really that much damn efficiency!

Come on take the damn plunge! the hard swim will do you some good to chase away all those wrong assumptions and mind fog!

BT FB, Linked, Instagram , Youtube all have 1 billion users to make this strategy work.

This is a great post! I have very similar thoughts! I haven't escaped the corporate job yet, but the pandemic and subsequent layoff scares have convinced me that bootstrapping a business is a good way to take back some economic control.

I'm working on DiffLens to improve how developers see diffs of their code changes. DiffLens uses abstract syntax trees to make diffs more focused and understandable. It's free at the moment while we iterate on it and get the word out. I think it's the best way to view source code changes. If someone is interested in checking it out, see https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=DiffLens... . It works within VS Code and supports JS, TS, CSS and text diffs. JSON support is coming soon!

More of an observation than a suggestion, but literally every single organisation (businesses, educational institutions, community groups) that I've been involved with, has had technical stuff that could be improved to help with the core mission. Often, those technical issues aren't front of mind for other people in the org, but someone with your technical skills and an understanding of the organisation will see the issues and be able to improve things. A successful technical fix will quickly have people bringing you new things to work on.

At this stage, I've got a full time job (and I'm pretty burned out, frankly) so don't take on those technical things as I come across them. But, it sure feels like just engaging with them (or not saying "no") could quickly turn in to a sort of technical odd-job-fixer/consultant role.

learn sales, it fixes everything.

It used to be easier to start an internet business before the Great Monopolization of the '10s happened. For us it was simply the WWW. Now you have to look for a platform that still has a window of opportunity open before the monopoly in charge of it decides to choke everyone out. A kind soul mentioned the iOS app store.

Perhaps there is a window of opportunity in content, video content. For youtube, start with making shorts or just copy popular shorts from tiktok. Youtube promotes them so you can get subscribers (but no money), that you can then use to upload longer, money-making videos.

Gaming is also a possible niche. If you can create something that complements a popular game, you have a dedicated community to monetize.

Find a coding partner to share everything 50/50. Keep one another accountable to get MVPs out. Gage feedback, if you don't think it will work sell it on a saas reseller service and move on to the next idea.

Having a solid partner is key, I've struggled find solid coding partners because they lose interest. They like their 9 - 5 programming job and don't care about coding after work.

Easy way to get started is to look at products and find complaints, major issues, or ideas they haven't implemented and build it. All you have to do is market to the users of the other app directly on the forums or help chats.

Please contact me as I have lots of SaaS products built for my company and fun ideas.

Reading through this list, your main problem seems to be a lack of motivation to do anything. Perhaps addressing that would be helpful.

I am amazing at shell scripting, in particular bash. It has generated thousands of dollars in side quest style work at large $orporations.

Knowing a thing or two about Python and Pandas and Sqlite has also been very profitable.

I'm also very much interested in finding solutions to the stated problem, but have not had much luck so far

> freelance - compared to just working rates seem low and its hard to find work from what ive seen

Freelancing money can be very, very good. It does take work to find jobs initially, but often at a certain point your referrals start kicking in, and you've got to increase your rate because you've got too much work. Not that it's easy, but it's a good racket, and during economies in which companies may not have budget approval to hire salaried employees, it's probably not a bad option to consider.

I have mild success at $500/month by selling my $5 Video Hub App (though I donate $3.50 of every purchase to a cost-effective charity). This is averaging 100 sales per month for several years now.

https://videohubapp.com/ - though I also have it open source: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App

I think you'll find there is more work in freelancing than you think. The trick is to charge a market rate for your time (which is usually higher than most people think) and work a lot when there is work so when work slows down, you can survive financially. You can do very well if you build a good reputation for yourself. I'd be happy to offer more advice if you're interested. You can reach me at buink.com.

If this thread has life after 5 days, I'll offer some general perspective and my individual angle on the subjects discussed here.

People's tech experience has earning potential but untold thousands of people have similar experience and are trying to get a footing working for themselves using that experience. Absent some remarkable idea, the world probably isn't willing to pay (much) for yet-another person doing the same thing. Money should not be the only determining factor for the path we take, of course, but meeting our basic needs is pretty important, especially if you have kids like I do.

Thus, identifying an un(der)served niche can be a key differentiator.

I took an unconventional approach, after being (directly) in tech for 14 years, and started my own consulting business. This business works with law firms to analyze and describe software (and some hardware) to give them insights on intellectual property litigations. Most of my day is spent learning how other people implemented specific solutions and advising clients on what those solutions mean for their IP cases. I love helping smart, grateful clients through learning and then explaining their tech stack.

I have a handful of people on my team that are former developers that wanted to use their experience in a different way. We enjoy working together and like the work we do. People are key. We make reasonable incomes but not outlandish $.

This business is a relationship business, as any professional services business is, so we focus on meeting client goals and anticipating their needs. This approach does not need to be grueling (I've experienced a grueling form of this before going on my own) but this approach, and the business generally, requires some effort. Those that have gone out on their own will usually find that they put more effort into the business, than they did working on their own, but that the new approach is more gratifying and is thus an overall win for them.

This post is about sharing my experience and a different take the topic discussed in this thread, rather than looking for new colleagues, but I would be open to hearing from people who find what I say intriguing. DM me if so.

For the most part, if you can make money for other people, you can use that skill set for yourself.

Also, if you're somewhere where it's legal or at least accessible, it's not actually 100% true that at a casino the house always wins. It will take a little bit of effort to get started and you do need a small bit of infrastructure (but a cheap VPS or a SoC would actually do, depending on what you focus on), but it's not only possible, but can be fairly profitable to bet on sports. You do need some money in the bank to start, but there's a fair bit of resources on Github that can help you with data collection, analytics, etc. And places like the sportsbook subreddit or one of many forums out there where you can get a lay of the land.

I have no CS degree, hell, I haven't taken math since I failed AP Stats in 11th grade (tbf my teacher had a stroke in class 3 weeks before the test and died before he got to the hospital and it screwed up everyone and nobody in the class passed since this was just before we could bring cell phones to school, but still, that year was a wash). I haven't taken a formal math class since and I went to 8 more years of school after that. 3.5 years later I'm up 161 units which is just about viable (5%+ ROI is generally considered viable).

It's nice to work from home, hang out with likeminded fans in groupchats and reddit, and watch sports and make money. Now, it is still gambling. I've lost 32 straight picks in a row once - then Brentford beat City and made half of that back. It's not for the faint of heart, but it is a viable option if you are into sports, or statistics, or just hate making front ends as I do. Just don't buy anyone else's picks, they wouldn't be selling picks if they're actually making money.

I have come up with 3 ideas in the past that worked out well for me.

I wrote a popular MP3 search engine pre-Napster, a site dedicated to price tracking in the game EverQuest, and even a technical analysis website for predicting price movement in Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs).

Each one of these worked out well enough to live off at the time.

The first two of those projects worked just because the underlying "thing" was huge at the time (MP3s, EverQuest).

That last one required actual marketing, buying ads in magazines related to the field ("Technical Analysis of Stocks and Commodities", etc). But I knew the audience for the ETF idea likely had a lot more disposable income, so the monthly charge was high.

Unfortunately, as I've gotten older and have a "real" job, I no longer have that desire to write more code after work, so these sorts of ideas and projects have stalled out.

The point being if you can find a niche that's popular, or even something you are just very interested in (in my case, at the time, technical analysis), you can likely make money off of it as a software engineer.

I've been a successful dev for a decade now but I was a mech E / CS dropout.

I loathe CS for many reasons and saw the writing on the wall for my degree-less ass, so I went back for industrial engineering. 3 semesters to go and loving every second of it!!! Well, maybe not the materials science and beam analysis but the rest is great.

I have been doing consulting on the side, around 15-20 hours per day. Also into niche website development; building search engine optimized websites that are monetized through display and affiliate ads. Both side gigs usually generate more than the full time job.

From other threads like this I’ve heard “sales engineer” might be a good option.

Less BS because sales comes down to the money you bring in. You still get to code and your peers will be impressed with anything you do. And you could earn a lot with commissions.

> I can code up my dream ideas with ease, what i don't know how to do is market anything or get users

If that's true, you should be doing it. Worry about marketing once you have something to market.

I wish there was a platform where I can earn money by doing code reviews. Many people may want to earn money this way. but I don't know who would want to pay for it

I feel like there's heaps of opportunity to make small apps to help streamline processes at boring regular mom n' pop small businesses.

The trick is uh, how do you find out about their problems to even know that you have an ability to help?

It's a tough problem here and I'm not sure how to solve it other than just already knowing people at those small businesses and talking with them about their problems.

It's not quick money, but writing books can generate an ongoing royalty stream. And, they're good resume builders if you want to do freelance work. It worked for me.

You can do worse than O'Reilly Media. https://www.oreilly.com/work-with-us.html

And there are other publishers.

Who feels bots are the best way to make money by gathering unless information and sell it to companies with way too much money...

Since I’m quite experienced in the field, I opened a substack called The Web Scraping Club as a side gig. It is mostly free but has some paid articles and have already hundreds of $ in MRR after 2 months.

It is a niche where tutorials and info are pretty sparse around the web and having a centralized blog is useful for operators.

Hope this helps find your way

Find a partner that can do all the things you can't (marketing etc). Make sure you trust each other.

I don't know anything abut coding I'm a medical student I Found out my interest is in software engineering ect and I would love it if I get a guide on it I'm from Nigeria my country dose not have good reputation and I'm hoping to change it

I'm a YC founder working on tools that make it easier to create and sell programming classes. Would love to chat more if you're interested - david [at] mirio.org

Private tutoring.

I know a guy who does it and while he don't doesn't have an actual teaching degree he has a degree in CS and experience to boot.

It is a decent side gig for him.

Here are some ideas:

* Code quality audits / security audits

* Due diligence for code-related lawsuits

Go full remote and hire someone to attend your meetings.

Academia is an option. I was in a similar situation to you early on in my career and decided I wasn't happy in industry, and decided to enroll in grad school. I ended up teaching for a couple of years and found that I really enjoyed it. And the kind of work you do on research projects is very different from that of the corporate world - you can focus on longer-term things with less immediate results, the work itself can be super interesting, and there are always lots of interesting people around in a university environment.

Academia has its downsides however - the job market is brutally competitive, it can be very hard to get research funding, and you can spend a lot of your time writing grant applications. There's also admin duties to take on which can eat up more time. It also has bureaucracy and since it's an institution comprised of people, is not immune from many of the interpersonal conflicts that occur in the corporate world.

I'm speaking from the Australian perspective here, but in my country the universities also decided to sell out and take in lots of international students who have $$$ but lack sufficient background knowledge and motivation, and lecturers are forced by the universities to let students pass who haven't demonstrated sufficient competency. I was asked to change marks on a course to reflect the number of students who the university wanted to pass, not how many were actually worthy of it, which I felt was unethical. Because of all these issues I decided academia wasn't for me so as soon as I had my PhD I got out. I still miss the actual core teaching part though, as it's one of the most enjoyable things I've done.

So I ended back in industry where I'm back to building software, but in a role that lets me use what I learnt in grad school and is thus more interesting than just building basic web/CRUD apps. Not all companies are bad, and I've been lucky enough to find an employer where the bureaucracy is minimal and my manager makes sure I'm pretty well isolated from the things which get in the way of actual work. There are good companies out there, but it takes a certain amount of luck to end up in one with a healthy culture.

One other piece of advice I have is that if you're from a rich western country, move to somewhere with a lower cost of living and work remotely. I relocated from Australia to Thailand and it approximately quadrupled my spending power. This gave me the freedom to be able to take time off from my job more often to do other things like work on hobby projects, and while I don't currently take advantage of this freedom much it's nice to know its there. Depending on who you're working for, you might be able to negotiate a part time gig, or if contracting do six months on, six months off or something like that.

Oh, and on going it alone and trying to be an indie dev: this can be super tough if you don't have good business and marketing skills. I tried this and failed. Others have made it work, but it's definitely not easy.

email me