Is this how smart developers will become rich in 2025?
Nowadays, There are 2 ways to become rich for a developer.
First, you can sell your hours to a company as an employee and earn its stocks. Eventually, you can get a lot of stocks, sell them, and become rich. This can work, but it is gambling. Why? Because you will only earn a significant amount of money if you join the right company at the beginning. No one will give you many Twitter-like company stocks today.
The second option is to build your own company and make an exit. Only 6% of companies make it to an exit. So if you are ready to play the big game, you can try. A try costs 7 years and 999 pounds of stress Enjoy!
There is a big downside that makes those 2 ways to become rich fail by design. They offer you to earn a pile of money. Then you will need to become a financial expert ASAP because your money will start to melt. Chances are, you will lose all your capital in 5-10-20 years.
Thus, you need to build streams of revenue, not a pile of cash.
Fine. You can create a plugin for a platform such as WordPress, or Shopify. Cool, but according to Shopify, the average app revenue is $2,138 monthly per app. Count on the risk of a platform going away and you will understand that this way will never give you financial freedom.
Making SaaS get recurring revenue from subscriptions sounds like an option. But eventually, 90% of all products fail. Does not sound like a bulletproof way to become rich either.
The ideas above may sound demotivating. This is because they are. The world does not have an acceptable way for developers to build their own financial freedom yet. A developer must be a strong person with great motivation to go through the stress and become rich.
So how will a smart developer do that in the nearest years? By creating micro-apps
Any modern developer has thousands of lines of code that they reuse. Those lines can be wrapped up into a full-stack module aka micro-app and sold to people who create apps for clients or for themselves for a monthly fee. For a developer, it will look like building 100 SaaS products but with less hustle. And with no need to market besides publishing them on the marketplace.
Some of your micro-apps will die unnoticed, some will be used by others and bring you cash. As years pass and you as a developer create more code and wrap it into micro-apps, your revenue stream grows. You will be paid not by a single employer, but by thousands of them. Which is way more sustainable.
Thoughts??? >...So how will a smart developer do that in the nearest years? By creating micro-apps example? Like micro-services for single users or small teams. Sorry, I still don't understand. Can you give an example or two? For example a programmer can create a full-stack micro-app for accepting payments. The programmer will make it super flexible, configurable and secure. It will be win-win for both programmer (because they will earn money on the micro-app) and the users of the payments micro-app (because it will be pluggable and well-designed since a dedicated person has been working on the one functionality for year). This is already happening for small useful smart contracts / dapps like https://tokentool.app/ I think this model exists in app development. once you make a sudoku game or running app, why not just reskin it and list it as many times as you can? > And with no need to market besides publishing them on the marketplace. What marketplace? We (the developers) can create a marketplace of micro-apps. It would be a separate business by itself. A marketplace of apps works when those apps fulfill a specific need (ie Shopify or Atlassian apps) or are specific to a platform (ie Chrome/IPhone). Why would anyone be interested in surfing a marketplace of random apps? Why wouldnt they just use Google to find the app they need? Second, even if you are in a marketplace, you still need to promote it. Tons of apps are on the apple appstore. And they will get no downloads if you do zero marketing. App stores arent a substitute for marketing Creating a marketplace is a big challenge. (Not building it, but getting people to care about it and use it.) Who are the existing marketplaces that you can start with? (e.g. I don't know, but does Amazon have a "marketplace" for tried-and-tested Lambdas? And this just makes me think of Zapier anyway.) I can name https://bit.cloud/components as an existing marketplace.
It is a big challenge, yes, but also a big profit.