Developers!! Do what you love and make money out of it!!!
Do what you love
The story begins when one of my friends' developers asks me about money-making strategies in the development domain.
That was a good question because a lot of designers, salespeople, product managers, and other employees except developers have found a way to make money apart from a full-time job.
Developers have ways to make money but that was the traditional way is to start freelancing and sell services as an SAAS by developing websites.
But backend developers still won’t find a way out to run their side hustle and make some extra income.
Most of the developers around the world won’t earn even more than $50k/year and that is also after experience.
In my last story, I discussed how developers are replaceable and our job is always in danger irrespective of how well we know programming.
To be replaceable candidates we need to bring some experience and other skillset to the basket.
Current Traditional ways of Earning
If I give you a list, here is the following ways to currently make some money:
- Writing online
- Content Creation on IG
- YouTuber
- Copy Writer
- Blog writer
- Website development (Freelance)
- Consultant
Most of these demand time to invest so I won’t even say that these are much of a side hustle.
I haven’t met any single developer in my lifetime yet who is freelancing along with a full-time job. And even if someone is doing then mostly because of an emergency.
But coming back to the current news ways you can try.
API development
You must have heard about it somewhere so API can be developed for others also.
3 types of API exist public and private, public are easily available and private need access or subscription.
API selling or subscription can be done using third-party platforms such as Rapid API.
Following are the platforms to sell API:
- Google Cloud Marketplace
- Rapid API
- AWS Marketplace
- Heroku
- Envato elements
- Gumroad
Ways to sell API
API can be sold in different formats, here is the article read in detail or 6 ways to sell API.
- Subscription-based API
- Selling API data
- Selling API access for a lifetime
- Selling API for other products
A lot can be done in this business and any missing element in the world of product and data, API can be developed to make things easy.
Jobs Data API
Recently, I’ve found this API called Jobs Data API, that can be used to automate our job-finding process.
This service provides 4 APIs to search, filter, and find the available jobs and they track the job from the ATS platform so the available jobs are updated.
But the point is they are selling the API at $90/month and that is too high a cost also without trying we can’t trust them.
One idea is to make something similar for us to track and fetch all available jobs in any domain from the ATS platform directly.
Once our API is ready, we can actually sell it on the above platform at much cheaper rates.
Yoga Postures API
If you go to Kaggle, GitHub repositories, rapid API and search for yoga postures not many of the APIs are available.
This API is required in AI and machine learning models to train the models used in most fitness startups.
Fitness domains have a huge demand will this kind of data which they can rely on to build products for the customers and to train the AI models.
Digital Transactions API
When I’ve searched on how to access my Google Pay API or bank online transactions not much of the third-party service I’ve found.
Basically, people paying online bills and UPI and credit cards won’t know much about their monthly bills and expenses and we need a dedicated place to view the transactions.
How you as a developer will fetch the user transactions will be the suspense and a lot of research and ways have to be found to fetch the transactions.
But banks, startups and multiple platforms need such kinds of APIs or services to ease the expense management process.
If you can develop API then sell it as a subscription or one-time payment.
But I would suggest creating a simple frontend website that takes the user's phone number along with google login credentials using Google OAuth and then display all the user transactions and total month expense on the website. Furthermore, you can start a subscription-based model on the website allowing people to see all transactions.
Notion APIs
The notion is quite a trending template on the Gumroad.
- API that can automate the notion template creation process
- API that can store data in Notion databases
- API for the integration of Chat GPT in Notion
- API integration of Instagram, and Youtube channel in Notion
All these services can be sold on Gumroad or other platforms. Helping big notion creators to automate their repetitive work.
You can see Easlo as the notion creator to understand his/her business requirement and then create the one for you.
Aggregation API
A lot of content is created on a daily basis on the internet in every domain, software, tech, sales and design.
We need a more solid and robust API to help in filtering the content according to the user requirements.
This website is built completely on this idea, app.daily.dev
daily.dev | Where developers grow together
Daily dev aggregates the data by either using data scraping or other ways to render the best articles in one place. Similar can be done for other domains such as design, news, politics fitness and finance helping top-notch readers to only read what is trending and good. Provide a 100-word summary of each article on your website using chat GPT to give an overview of the content before reading in advance.
By Product
I called this concept a by-product where we developers usually start developing the products or services but most of us won’t be able to generate revenue from it or scale it into a tangible business and in that case, these all efforts went into vain.
To avoid such time waste I’ve got a concept called by-product if nothing works we can still make something decent to showcase as the project in our resume or portfolio and that makes sense as well as beneficial.
Once we developed the mentioned APIs and still nothing works in your favour you can create one dedicated website or push each project into a repository as your portfolio projects to grab new freelance clients or new remote jobs or even increase your personal brand value on the internet.
By-product includes
- Creating a personal brand on the internet in the developer's community
- Get or Attract more job seekers in the domain
- Grabs the people's attention towards your work.
Now all your efforts are not in vain and there are people who can see your work and judge your skills too and who knows one day they can fund your project.
My friend did 150 projects straight in 150 days, 150 days of coding and he pushed all his projects on a website and still after 7 years he got freelance clients upfront through his projects.
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