You (developer) are BIGGER than your Tech Job!

while we're all up in arms these days about the developer Market hating on boot camp grads talking about AI taking our jobs and all the other Tech drama people with these same skill sets as you and I are raking in comfortable incomes from it more people are realizing that their programming skills do not exist solely for their employers instead it's a superpower that people actually pay a lot for and they take the superpower and they solve real world problems and create insanely profitable businesses from it not Silicon Valley startups but basement SAS products that they

run by themselves or with one or two others in this video I want to share with you nine of these and I want to do so to help you find encouragement in a really tough economy to help you think bigger about your career and your talents than getting another measly rejection after round four or living in the fear that you could get let go at any moment and help you realize that there are myriads of problems out there to solve and solving them or building them out will teach you invaluable lessons help you become a

better programmer give you real live projects to boast about and can potentially make you a nice monthly recurring income the worldwide web is as Tim Denning puts it a borderless global Marketplace that's open 24/7 you really live in an opportune time so let's take a look at nine examples of profitable apps that you or I could have built and I hope it will get you thinking about the possibilities we all have and be sure to stick around because I'm going to give a few tips on how to navigate all of this afterward here we go

actually before we kick things off if you're looking for a weekly summary of tech news programming news Ai and career insights be sure to check out our Weekly Newsletter it's handcrafted and it's everything that I would want in a perfect Weekly Newsletter go subscribe to that link below so number one here we have SVG collections a very simple app where they just sell svgs how do they get svgs well I heard a podcast the other day about this and how simple it was to get off the ground and it goes a little bit like this

you go to a mid Journey you generate a bunch of black and white images save them as PNG vectorize them as svgs and voila you have thousands of svgs for free that you can sell and then day by day you look and see what people are searching most for and then you go and you print those and you add them to the collection and this site was built with WordPress and woo Commerce very easy again to get off the ground and the kicker here is they didn't just stop at svgs they targeted this whole crafting

genre so here it says we provide thousands of free SVG designs for your Cricket silhouette and all other crafting projects so Cricut and silhouette that's these crafting like cutting machines so they have svgs for anyone who needs them and then it's the perfect solution for your Cricut if you look at the pricing it's $4 a month 1,000 users $4,000 a month 50,000 users $200,000 a month very easy you could have done it I could have done it number two boilerplate code bases so when anyone creates an app a developer or a team at a startup

there's always certain tasks that have to be done in addition to your app functionality with every app there needs to be a landing page a payment Gateway setup a database an email service authentication SEO and all of that can be timec consuming so these creators decided to boilerplate it all and sell access to the codebase and the problems it solves makes the price tag peanuts and you see here the time it saves 4 hours on an email 6 hours on a landing page 4 hours to handle stripe web Hooks and so forth 22 hours of

setup for 199 bucks and that's not just one project that's as many as you need once you buy the codebase and there are two notable options here so first there's ship fast which is created by Mark Lou that achieves this using nextjs and you literally get access to the codebase you download it and you have all this web page ready to go meaning the components are easily customizable payments SEO emails off database connection all of this is production ready in fact I have a video review on this if you want more detail about it link

below in the description actually I'll have links to all of these below and if next tojs isn't your thing and you prefer Lar there's Lara fast which is a solid and similar laravel alternative to this boiler plate which has all of the same preconfigured features to get you up and running in no time I actually have a blog post reviewing that so if laravel is your thing live wire or view inertia flavored and you're looking to create real production apps with it then check out that blog post as I go further in depth with it

link below so that's number two boilerplate code basis number three is headshot generator okay this one is massive bringing in 3.9 million per month what does it do well it uses AI to transform your selfies and everyday photos into professional headshots upload some photos and get back some really nice looking head shot it's built with nextjs I believe yes web Frameworks next tojs and it's like 30 bucks a month this is an example of an app that could have started as a small project to get people better head shot like on X or LinkedIn but

the potential can easily shift to Big corporations who live for great head shot of their Executives here it says we're trusted by numerous Fortune 500 companies for their professional head shot needs in their selling point is strong it's eight times cheaper than a photo shoot indistinguishable from real photos studio quality head shot at home and done in under an hour number four is AI Resume Builder look at this $371,000 a month everyone needs this everyone creates resumés and everyone has no clue where to begin and much less make it look good and read well well

why not use AI to write up a resume for us and why not use a little react to create a builder to build it for us or to make it easy for us to build it and then hire a cheapo designer off of Fiverr to give us 50 design templates to choose from I think we could do that and if we look at the technology I'm not exactly sure there's some JavaScript there's Amazon web services platform as a service but again great idea number five is note forms a beautiful form builder for notion which is

making 37,000 per month so here the best form builder for no notion create beautiful forms and surveys without writing code receive submissions straight into notion easy a bunch of you guys are big notion users people are making lots of money off of notion templates why not a notion form Builder and this is built with njs another idea missed by us number six is founder pal making 11k per month so what is this this is like one of those Chad gbt rappers actually I think it says here building I can do it in chat gbt for

free rapper now a lot of people are already in this space creating blog posts and creating social media posts and all of that so if you look here blog post generator marketing strategy generator uh user Persona generator slogans generator it's just like chat GPT personalities like you go in you tell it who you want it to be and it'll generate ideas based on that persona but like I said this is a tough space to get into I don't know if I would venture here but hey this guy is making 11k per month you or I

could build this it's not that hard number seven is AI directories so we can help you submit your AI product to 100 plus directories this guy is making 9k per month so directories are a big deal now pages that list all of these things categorized all of these new startups that a person can go to and search and find what they need are a big deal they provide you backlinks they get a lot of traffic and people are making good money just from the directories themselves like I saw this yesterday a thousand do tools an

exclusive list of the Thousand best tools carefully vetted and maintained by humans so here it is a list of the Thousand best tools it's a directory there are six spots left if you want to submit your business click on submit tool and hey it's 60 bucks a year what an idea but anyway this AI directories what it does is they'll actually submit your AI idea or startup to 100 plus directories so we'll manually submit your startup we'll build back links from high drr sites to boost SEO attract early adopters increase your startup traffic so anybody

with a new application wants to get off the ground can come here and pay let's see what it is 100 bucks for the starter list the pro list and the premium list so they just get you in into more directories again 9k a month pretty neat idea number eight is one that's not making a lot of money but did get acquired I don't know for how much but it's called Landing AI create your Landing with AI it's actually called make landing and what it does is it generates you a landing page in seconds so you

just say give me a surf School in Bali called surf stack or a weight list page for a marketing webinar a weight list page to get leads for your business and it will generate you the page I'm assuming it generates the HTML CSS I don't know let's see how it works describe your project or AI builds your landing page so AI generates copy that sells unique logo and illustrations takes less than 1 minute so it's actually building you the page it's writing the copy it's giving you a unique logo and illustrations and then you can

customize the content upload pictures of your business change the copy edit button then just share your site so I'm assuming they host your site for you or maybe they give you a custom domain I don't know how it works but basically it generates landing pages based on how you describe your outcome and this if I click get started this is built with says verell and vue.js so something of that nature and number nine is an app called CAP time now this is a CrossFit timer it may have been built by people in the CrossFit space

or people that found that opportunity out and created this for cross CrossFit people but essentially it's just six timers and these are timers that CrossFit people use so here's the timer try it for free you go and you download the app and you have this timer for your Crossfit workouts and then as always there's inapp purchases very simple app again I'm not a mobile developer but I could build this with react native easily so those are nine ideas that you or I could have built so where do you even begin in building apps and actually

making some money from them how do you validate that you have a good idea and that people are looking for your solu solution how do you not fail as many do well there are many great videos out there tackling these subjects but I just want to give you two simple overarching tips to end this video number one the very first thing is you have to reset your mindset from one of a developer servant where you're always working directly for someone or looking to work directly for someone to more of a developer Creator a developer business

a developer that has an awesome skill set but that doesn't limit them or keep them in that box like I always say you are the business and you need to make it a habit to always be looking for opportunities and this really has nothing to do with building SAS apps but more of how you view your career overall and yourself overall when you're talking to someone about their work say like an auto mechanic or a pilot or salesman somebody like that don't just engage in small talk to pass the time but instead be interested in

what the person is saying ask what their struggles are and what they wish was better in their industry you never know when a light bulb idea may go off to serve that industry by way of a soft solution or you never know how important that person could be as a connection in your network in addition when you're reading social media Reddit or watching videos look for recurring problems out there even if they're small and your new app only does one small thing that's okay you can add more features down the road and then number two

what tasks do you find repetitive during the day what processes do you hate to do over and over or does your company have to do over and over a lot of big apps grow out of small Solutions I remember watching a video from James Pelton one day and he was talking about him starting out as a software engineer there was this problem in their company so he coded up a solution for it I can't remember exactly what it was but his company started using it and then word got out and other companies started using it

and eventually he ended up selling the whole solution to a major corporation for $8 million and it all started as a small problem that he coded up to solve it many open source apps have paid tear go and create something that people will use and see where it can go from there no more to do apps no more tutorial follow alongs start building real things that solve real problems and see where it goes if it goes nowhere then you're still the better developer for the lessons learned and you have a solid real project for your

portfolio so what do you think have you built anything that people use do you have any advice for us I'd love to hear all about it down in the comments if you found this video helpful give it a thumbs up if you haven't subscribed to the channel consider doing so and I'll see you in the next video [Music]