How Smart Developers Will Become Rich in 2023

Nowadays, there are a few 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 more stocks, sell them, and get cash. Pretty cool but also a big gamble.

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 about 7 years and 999 pounds of stress 😅 Throw in the fact that 99% of new ventures fail and you get one hell of a ride! Enjoy!

There is another huge downside that makes those 2 fail by design. Once you get a ton of cash you’ve got to learn what to do with it.

And if you’re no financial expert, chances are with the recession and inflation, your money will decrease in value pretty soon. You may lose all your capital in 5-10-20 years.

Thus, you need to build streams of revenue, not a pile of cash.

You can create a plugin for a platform such as WordPress, or Shopify. Cool, but according to Shopify, the average monthly app revenue is $2,138.

Count on the risk of a platform going away and you will understand that this way will never give you financial freedom.

Creating a SaaS to 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.

Another alternative might be creating a Youtube channel where you share your invaluable knowledge of whatever language you’re working on, specific projects, etc. Easy enough?

Yes, but pretty time-consuming, and requires a ton of creativity and a good setup. You didn’t expect to just upload a video from your built-in camera, did you?

An average vlogger setup cost is $4000 and that’s just your camera, lighting, and a mic. Then throw in the time for filming (how much do you make an hour as a developer?) and post-production, a couple of thousand (at least) for promotion and you’re easily looking at 10$k just to start.

You’re going to need to constantly update your content, stay on top of the trends, and keep up with the demand. This might eventually become a good revenue stream but it’s definitely not a passive one. 

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.

So, how does a smart developer become rich in the not-so-distant future? By creating micro-apps 🤓

This is what the core Mars team is working on: building a platform where micro-app creators (creative developers) meet micro-app users (creators of end products).

Have you ever had a pet project? Had a couple of attempts to build something bigger but eventually set it aside and threw all the code away?

This is the story that we hear more and more from exceptional developers who feel like it’d be better to even give it away for free than just send it into the garbage. Imagine you wouldn’t have to do any of that!

In any new project, you’re working on 80% of the code is repeating itself, and a modern developer has thousands of lines of code that they reuse internally.

Those lines can be wrapped up into a microapp 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 micro-SaaS products but with less hustle. And with no need to market them besides publishing them on the marketplace.

When a new startup comes to Mars it will have to find the micro-apps that work for them. Imagine just how many micro-SaaS solutions are out there!

All of them can be rebuilt on Mars and become micro-apps for others to integrate into their projects. 

Some of the 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.

Do you think you’re a smart developer? Tell us what works for you as a side hustle! And join Mars discord to see how we are changing the development. 

Written by: Alexander Isora

Edited by: Anna Nadeina

Also published here