Transcript of I Ranked All 8 Ways Developers Make Money

Are you the kind of developer who wants to do good work while also maintaining some control and independence in their life? Well, the purists like to say that all developers should ever do is sit down all day and write code. But if you want to achieve your ideal lifestyle, that's not really realistic. And over the last few years, I've been trying out all these different methods of earning an income as a developer beyond a job. And now I'm going to rank them. Starting with number eight, freelancing. Now, despite its name, freelancing gives you anything but freedom. You have to constantly look for clients. And when you do find one, the kind of clients that I found so far are looking for someone to do work extremely quickly. They don't want to pay much money and they've got incredibly unrealistic expectations because a lot of these clients, well, they're not technically minded. They've used chat GPT to come up with some sort of business plan and now they want you to implement it as quickly as possible. To be honest, if you want to focus on delivering projects for other people, freelancing isn't the best way to do it. Instead, I would do number seven on the list here, which is get a job. Now, I spent many years working a software development job. And the benefits are that you get a monthly paycheck. You don't want have to worry about finding clients because there's a whole team dedicated to do that and all you're doing is delivering features. Of course, in exchange for that, you give up quite a lot. You have to work where you're told. You have to work the hours that are set and basically you have to answer to your boss and you don't get much choice in how things pan out. Ultimately, that's what pushed me to pursue a life of more freedom. But before we get into that, we have to mention number six here, which is contracting. Now, contracting is doing the same work as you would do in a job, but getting paid not on a yearly salary, but on a day rate. The way it works is that companies that want to build software that don't necessarily want to bring on employees on a long-term basis, they'll get contractors in to do these shorter term projects. The benefit of contracting is that normally the rates are a lot more. The downsides are that you're still told what to do like you are in a job and you don't get any of the other benefits you get in a job like pension and bonuses and stuff like that. Now, I spent about half of my so-called professional career as a contractor for companies like the BBC and eventually I realized that I could probably use some of the skills I picked up to earn an income without giving away so much control. That's when I did number five here, building a course. Now, a course is just a series of videos where you package up some of the skills you've learned over the years around frameworks, tools, or languages, and you create a resource that's going to help people learn those same skills. I built a course for Java developers to learn a specific build tool, and this was my first experience of making money online without trading my time for money. The main downsides with courses is that it takes a lot of upfront work and they're pretty difficult to keep updated when technology inevitably changes because you're dealing with video. The purists will tell you that you're wasting your time creating a course. You should instead use that same knowledge to build software. Well, I say that developers learning the skills that you already have have to learn them from someone. And if you can help them do that quicker, then why not help them? The fourth best method here is something I've only tried in the last few months. I really like how it's turning out. It is coaching. I first came across this when I was in Lisbon and I was in a cafe and I overheard a developer teaching somebody Java. This was the first time I'd seen coaching and it's basically helping people learn a skill or make some sort of transformation working with them directly on a one-to-one or group basis. And the great thing about coaching is that it can be quite rewarding because you're working with people directly and you can see them improve over time. The downside is that a bit like freelancing, you have to constantly look for clients so that you can keep work coming in. But on the other hand, because people are working with you directly, you can charge a lot more. And the clients you do find tend to be much higher quality. And I've really enjoyed working with all the clients I've worked with so far. I have to say this cuz they might be watching. Now, number three on my list is similar to the courses we talked about earlier. It's packaging up information, but as an ebook. So, whatever knowledge you've learned over the years by building software, you can create an ebook with code examples, exercises, and all that good stuff, and upload it either to Amazon or your own website. I actually made an ebook based on the course that I created. And the thing that I really like ebooks is that they're a lot easier to update. And even after you submit it to Amazon, you can make changes. If you get this right and you can create an ebook on a topic that's actually in demand, that can create some kind of passive income for you. But of course, writing a book is a lot of upfront work. And that's how it is with these last few items on my list is you make a big upfront investment and hope it's going to pay off in the long term. Now, number two here is for the purists. It is building your own software products or in other words SAS or indie hacking. The way this works is that you figure out a problem that you can automate away with software, build a solution, put it on the internet and ideally get people paying on a monthly basis. I built several SAS products over the last few years and although I loved using my development skills to build something in the world, the challenge I had was finding customers. And if you ever want to earn money outside of a job or contracting, that's just the reality. You're going to have to learn additional skills like marketing to find customers for your products or find clients for your services. Which brings us to number one on my list, which to be honest even surprised me when I ranked all these. And the purists are going to kill me for this, but this is earning advertising revenue. The way this works is that you build up some website, social media channel, or YouTube channel or in other words, a personal brand and you sell space on that channel to advertisers. It might sound strange why you would want to do this as a software developer, but hear me out. The fact is that a lot of software developers enjoy talking about their skills and experience, mostly with their colleagues. Well, over the last few years, I decided to start doing that online. And I'm starting to attract other developers that see things in the same way I do and are interested in the same stuff. The fact is that if you can create useful content that developers actually want to watch, not only can you have fun by attracting like-minded individuals, but you can also earn money through advertising revenue, but to be honest, if you did any of these top three items on my list, you would have a lot of independence to choose the kind of work you do, where, and when you do it. Obviously, the order in which I've ranked these work methods depends on my own personality and interest. So, I invite you to check out my worksheet where you can look at the criteria I've used and score these methods yourself so you can figure out which ones are most likely to help you reach your goals. My final question to you is to ask, are you going to be a purist and think all you ever need to do is sit down and write software, or is your ideal lifestyle important enough to you that you're going to learn the extra skills you need to turn it into reality? Thanks a lot for watching, and I'll see you in the next one.