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Ideas to make money as solo dev

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Re: Ideas to make money as solo dev

#11

Post by purple-leafy »

mettamage wrote: post #9
purple-leafy wrote: post #4

I think more solo developers should build chrome extensions. Why? Because as a full-time developer wanting to do a side-project, you need to build what you can in a short time frame, with minimal maintenance, and without worrying about hosting costs. And you actually want users and minimal marketing. These are the smallest true solo dev projects you can build I think. I’ve built 10 in the last year (mostly for fun) m…

Wanna grab a virtual coffee? I have built some chrome extensions as well since recently. It’s fun! It would be fun to spar about extensions. My email is in my profile.

Hey there id love to! I’ll send you an email today :) thanks for reaching out!

Re: Ideas to make money as solo dev

#13

Post by authorfly »

purple-leafy wrote: post #4

I think more solo developers should build chrome extensions. Why? Because as a full-time developer wanting to do a side-project, you need to build what you can in a short time frame, with minimal maintenance, and without worrying about hosting costs. And you actually want users and minimal marketing. These are the smallest true solo dev projects you can build I think. I’ve built 10 in the last year (mostly for fun) m…

I'm someone with a weakness for design (luckily, my other half is the opposite). I was so excited to try gpt-4-turbo and others in their vision mode to try and get design feedback.

Some was ok. But I soon realised, the key feed back, was about the content or amount of content/actions in relation to the rest of the app.

I have tried feeding in multiple steps as images. This hasn't really helped (maybe it's too complicated)

The overall journey of the user seems to be the most important part. If they slow down at one stage, it reduces their enthusiasm.. and a great later design only feels good

Is there any way your tool in the future could do that? More to the point, and very much an anti-thesis of your starting with an extension here, the use case I see is connecting this with screen recorders of users to analyze, which would be the opposite of an extension. But much more useful for me. I have thousands of sessions a day; tens of errors. I can't watch them all (and stay sane - I suppose I could watch moments before users purchase, but that's weird).

Any thoughts?

Re: Ideas to make money as solo dev

#14

Post by authorfly »

purple-leafy wrote: post #4

I think more solo developers should build chrome extensions. Why? Because as a full-time developer wanting to do a side-project, you need to build what you can in a short time frame, with minimal maintenance, and without worrying about hosting costs. And you actually want users and minimal marketing. These are the smallest true solo dev projects you can build I think. I’ve built 10 in the last year (mostly for fun) m…

A second question - must be your biggest newest fan sorry - how do you know which extensions will get approved?

I built 4 and applied with 3. 2 got rejected and at the time (3-6 years back) the rules and reasons were not very clear. One was rejected for "doing multiple things" which I understand is in the rules, but those things were e.g. to translate/save transcript for highlighted text, in my opinion, pretty related. The other rejection made sense when I reread the rules.

Have you had 10/10 accepted?

Re: Ideas to make money as solo dev

#15

Post by jsamqiu »

As far as I know, currently, independent developers are developing the most tool products.

Tool products have relatively simple functions, focusing on solving a problem, and the cost of building them will be lower.

For example, calendar software, color picker, sharing card, extracting HTML plug-ins, etc.

These may be websites, apps and Chrome plug-ins, most of which do not require high-cost servers and paid third-party services.

AI is very popular now. For example, I will focus on some applications in this field, and I hope to get some opportunities in this regard.

Back to your personal topic, there are many people who use similar ideas to solve similar problems. There are many manufacturers of the same type of function, and there are many interfaces. Then someone connects and implements these interfaces and provides a unified interface to the outside world. Then provide API services for others to use, so as to make profits.

Therefore, this path is definitely feasible. But you have to consider how big the market is, and the most difficult thing is, after you make it, how to get more and more people to use your product through promotion, marketing and other means.

Re: Ideas to make money as solo dev

#16

Post by leros »

Find a niche. Something small where you're not competing with larger companies. Like you said, you don't need to make much money as an individual so there are lots of areas that companies won't touch.

I personally steer away from developer oriented products. Developers are hard to market to and there is often lots of competition of other solo devs.

Re: Ideas to make money as solo dev

#17

Post by vineyardlabs »

purple-leafy wrote: post #4

I think more solo developers should build chrome extensions. Why? Because as a full-time developer wanting to do a side-project, you need to build what you can in a short time frame, with minimal maintenance, and without worrying about hosting costs. And you actually want users and minimal marketing. These are the smallest true solo dev projects you can build I think. I’ve built 10 in the last year (mostly for fun) m…

I've heard people voice the opinion that browser extensions are uniquely difficult to actually monetize. Moreso than SAAS/mobile apps, etc. because users are accustomed to extensions being simple and free with the exception of a very select few (Grammarly)

Thoughts?

Re: Ideas to make money as solo dev

#18

Post by purple-leafy »

authorfly wrote: post #13
purple-leafy wrote: post #4

I think more solo developers should build chrome extensions. Why? Because as a full-time developer wanting to do a side-project, you need to build what you can in a short time frame, with minimal maintenance, and without worrying about hosting costs. And you actually want users and minimal marketing. These are the smallest true solo dev projects you can build I think. I’ve built 10 in the last year (mostly for fun) m…

I'm someone with a weakness for design (luckily, my other half is the opposite). I was so excited to try gpt-4-turbo and others in their vision mode to try and get design feedback. Some was ok. But I soon realised, the key feed back, was about the content or amount of content/actions in relation to the rest of the app. I have tried feeding in multiple steps as images. This hasn't really helped (maybe it's too complic…

The way I get around these issues is atomic design feedback, so my tool allows you to select a rectangle area, and when I use my tool I basically select a component sized area and get feedback component-by-component

Re: Ideas to make money as solo dev

#19

Post by purple-leafy »

vineyardlabs wrote: post #17
purple-leafy wrote: post #4

I think more solo developers should build chrome extensions. Why? Because as a full-time developer wanting to do a side-project, you need to build what you can in a short time frame, with minimal maintenance, and without worrying about hosting costs. And you actually want users and minimal marketing. These are the smallest true solo dev projects you can build I think. I’ve built 10 in the last year (mostly for fun) m…

I've heard people voice the opinion that browser extensions are uniquely difficult to actually monetize. Moreso than SAAS/mobile apps, etc. because users are accustomed to extensions being simple and free with the exception of a very select few (Grammarly) Thoughts?

Yes they can be tough to monetise, but I also think they are an underserved niche.

Think about it - most extensions are crap, they look crap, and they are buggy. So if you can build something halfway decent you’re already in the top 10% of extension developers

Re: Ideas to make money as solo dev

#20

Post by purple-leafy »

authorfly wrote: post #14
purple-leafy wrote: post #4

I think more solo developers should build chrome extensions. Why? Because as a full-time developer wanting to do a side-project, you need to build what you can in a short time frame, with minimal maintenance, and without worrying about hosting costs. And you actually want users and minimal marketing. These are the smallest true solo dev projects you can build I think. I’ve built 10 in the last year (mostly for fun) m…

A second question - must be your biggest newest fan sorry - how do you know which extensions will get approved? I built 4 and applied with 3. 2 got rejected and at the time (3-6 years back) the rules and reasons were not very clear. One was rejected for "doing multiple things" which I understand is in the rules, but those things were e.g. to translate/save transcript for highlighted text, in my opinion, pretty relate…

That’s okay I love discussing extensions!

Most extensions get approved, I’ve had some quite complex extensions be approved as long as you can define their “single purpose”. I’ve even had YouTube ad blockers/Google ad-blockers approved. Honestly from what you’ve shared I’d expect your extension to be easily approved.

Extensions that request permissions they don’t need won’t get approved.

Lately though, extensions that modify the default search experience won’t get approved

So far I’m 10 for 10 in terms of acceptance, but one extension I made that had auth did not get approved initially as the auth library was calling remote code/doing remote code execution which isn’t allowed anymore. I ended up just removing the auth lol.

If you ever have an idea feel free to message me if you want to understand if it would be accepted or not, and how to plan. Free of course! My “business” email is hello “at” papillon software “dot” dev

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