How to get rich as a solo software developer - The Ultimate Guide

the dude you're looking at here runs a one-man business developing Chrome plugins that makes over 20 million dollars a year that's four times more than the average NFL quarterback man it's unfair it's my quarterback one of the best things about learning to code is that it gives you the ability to build money printing machines that regular people can't in my world the ultimate freedom in life is to be a solopreneur with a business that runs itself on autopilot no deadlines no bosses no Bugattis Just Pure Freedom but that's easier said than done you won't get there with a four hour work week and for most of us it takes a lot of hard work and some luck I've built a ton of side hustles over the years and almost all of them have failed miserably but a few of them have been moderately successful and that's given me enough wealth to move out of my mom's basement in today's video I'm going to show you exactly how I built and deployed my own real AI software as a service application with only two days of programming work but first we need to talk about the mindset of a side Hustler Danny postma recently created a project called headshot Pro that now has over 12 000 customers a lot of people might just say he got lucky by jumping on the recent AI hype train and those people would be absolutely right but the thing is he made his own luck he first developed the skills to build things then identify the problem of corporate photos being a huge waste of money then finally when AI got good enough to replace photographers he was able to seize the moment here's another anecdote movie director Quentin Tarantino wrote a screenplay where Salma Hayek pours tequila down her leg then some guy drinks it off of her toes then guess who he casts in that role himself that's what making your own luck is all about the problem is that most of us won't get this lucky very often and that's why you need to be prepared to fail early fail often but always fail forward the only person that can actually tell you whether or not you're going to fail is the customer and that means you want to try to get real users giving you feedback as soon as possible the last thing you want to do is spend two years building a project in secret only to release it and find out nobody actually wants it now that you're in the right mindset it's time to come up with an idea of something to build the other day I came across this trending new manosphere channel telling men how to live the Giga Chad lifestyle but weirdly I was the one narrating it for the body make sure you exercise so that you can keep your mental and physical health in check and I don't ever recall doing that that's because it's illegally using my clone voice I'm not the one behind this Channel and I could tell the FBI to find this guy and put him in jail but I actually like the idea of people replicating my voice for Mass distribution I like big bundles and I cannot lie a few other JS devs can't deny that when a site blows in so little Firebase 3DS interface you get sprung and that's how I can came up with the idea for vocalize.cloud a platform that allows you to use my voice legally and not just my voice but all kinds of different celebrities so far I've reached out to Morgan Freeman Tom Cruise Scarlett Johansson Michael Jackson and many others none have gotten back to me yet but I did get a green light from A-list Hollywood actor Dax lame you might know him from 21 Jump Street or his YouTube channel we actually collaborated to produce an AI cartoon recently that combines meta's new character animator along with mid-journey and the voice cloning technology that I'm going to show you today I was given executive printer credits on that project along with my first Oscar nomination for printer of the year you can watch the full short film on his channel in any case there's one big problem with my side hustle idea I have no idea if anybody actually wants to use it before you get two balls deep into an idea it's a good idea to validate the idea most of us don't want to admit that we're delusional and our ideas are actually garbage in this case I have a YouTube channel to promote my idea so in the next 24 hours I should know if I have a billion dollar idea or if I'm going to have to take this app behind the barn and shoot it but here's another thing you should know ideas are cheap execution is everything by execution I'm not talking about the technology itself but rather the business model because you could build the most awesome app in the world but if you don't have a good marketing plan nobody's ever going to use it if you're rich you can pay for advertisements or pay influencers to chill for you but assuming you're poor you'll likely have to do some form of organic marketing usually through social media like Twitter Youtube Tick Tock or whatever it's no different than fishing you want to First figure out where the fish are then put out some bait like an advertisement or call to action then once a user signs up you'll want to Club them to death and then Grill them for dinner and by that I mean provide them with an awesome service that they'll be happy to pay for now that you know not to write any code until you have a marketing plan let's talk about choosing the optimal Tech stack it doesn't matter if you use WordPress react or angular or build some kind of freak Show on kubernetes nobody cares except the tech Bros on Twitter the only thing that matters is that it works Peter levels another Indie maker who earns at least three million dollars a year from a variety of different side hustles uses boring old PHP and ignores all the trendy developer products tech companies try to sell you it's critical to find technologies that optimize your productivity and stick to them unless you have a really good reason to move somewhere else for me personally that Tech stack is spelled kit and Firebase also known as the it stack I also use the carbon design system from IBM it helped me get the UI belt very quickly but in most of my projects I use tailwind and build something a little more custom from scratch ideally you should have a great design to go along with your app with a great landing page that immediately explains why anyone would want to pay for your product the design should be functional beautiful and unique in that order a great place to find inspiration is mobbin.com which curates designs from the top web and mobile apps with any technology Choice there are tons of trade-offs but I want to highlight a few reasons why this Tech stack in particular makes me feel so productive on the front end most developers choose react but the reason I choose felt is pretty simple I just like writing spelled code more so than react one thing that's extremely demoralizing is working with tools you don't like it's not that I hate react or anything I just like spelled more I even wrote my own Library called smelt fire it integrates spelled stores with Firebase data in the code it allows me to read data from my backend database by simply putting a dollar sign in front of the reference for that data this is quite literally all the code it takes to get an authenticated user then fetch the data owned by that user that's pretty cool but let's talk about Firebase you have some pretty negative trade-offs like vendor lock-in with Google cloud and it can be expensive in certain situations but here's how it simplifies things in my application when a user submits this form to get a voice clone sample it will write this text to the firestore database but on the back end a lot of things need to happen first we need to reach out to the 11 Labs API which is the service that handles voice cloning from there we have an audio file that we need to save in a storage bucket somewhere in the cloud we then need to generate a secure download URL that makes the file accessible only to that one user then back in the front end we need to show the user a loading State and update the UI when the job is done why the hell am I doing this when the initial document is saved in firestore it triggers a background function that does all the work securely in the background we don't need to expose any HTTP endpoints to the front end what's really awesome though is that the Firebase SDK on the front end will keep the database in sync in real time like initially the document has a status of processing then it goes to a status of complete once we have a download URL in the spell code this allows us to use an if statement with the real-time store that produces code that really can't get any more simple when it comes to full stack logic in addition we can secure this code by ensuring that the authenticated user only has access to its own data with just a single line of code in the security rules now the next huge component of any application is the database firestore is a document database that's fast and easy to use but is not always suitable for highly complex data relationships in my case I just have users and users can generate many audio clips it's a very simple relationship that's perfect for firestore but choosing the wrong database can be a disaster in general relational databases like MySQL and postgres are the safest bet for the majority of applications but that doesn't mean they're immune to their own problems the YouTube channel code Dam has a great eye-opening story about how they hit the limitations of Limitless scale with Prisma and Planet scale the bottom line is to do your research and be careful when choosing a database but that brings us to our final top dollar dollar bills y'all how do you actually get that money unless you're some kind of psychopath you'll want to use a payments API and in my projects I've always gone with stripe but there are many other providers out there in my application I give you 100 free tokens to get started in my opinion it's always a good idea to have some kind of free trial to allow users to try out the app in this case you can use my app for free but once you run out of tokens you'll need to buy more to handle that we have an authenticated Firebase Cloud function that generates a checkout session on stripe which redirects the user to a hosted checkout page so we don't have to code up any of the UI manually now once the user makes a payment stripe will send a web hook to our server which again is another Firebase Cloud function the web hook will contain data about the payment so we can look up the user in Firebase and then update firestore with the tokens they purchased in addition I'm also using another service called send Grid in this function you send a transactional email to the customer with their order confirmation but how much should I be charging the customer for these tokens well I'm going to use a technique they teach in business school called the versel strategy in my case 11 Labs charges 18 cents per 1000 characters generated with their voice cloning service so what I'm going to do is just jack up the price to 69 cents per 1000 characters and that my friends is how you build a money printing machine if you want to go into more detail I'm working on a new spell kit Firebase course for pro members that will teach you how to build an app just like this it should be ready by the end of June and here's a big discount on Pro memberships if you want to be the first to get access and that my friends is how you Market a side hustle within a video about side hustles thanks for watching and I will see you in the next one

Channel: Fireship

Views: 1,105,721

Keywords: webdev, app development, lesson, tutorial

Id: A4_TFHzqAAg

Length: 8min 51sec (531 seconds)

Published: Fri May 19 2023