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A thread on how a 26-year-old developer I know turned a weekend side project into couple £millions under 1 year without any marketing or prior business exprience.
This thread is for you if you want advice on how to monetise your developing/coding skills
This thread is for you if you want advice on how to monetise your developing/coding skills
Almost every day I get a DM from someone asking me what I think of their tech start up idea. 9 out 10 times, its a consumer facing product with lots of complexities and moving parts to make it a success.
The writing is on the wall and I'm the type to tell you what you need to hear instead want to hear so I tell them how complicated it will be and if their goal is to make money out of it they should go into the B2B market rather than consumer marker.
And here is why
And here is why
Large organisations often have parts in their internal processes that are slow and innefficient. Improving these parts of the procesess will literally either save them millions or make them millions so they are on the hunt or open to solutions ALL THE TIME.
One of my client is a national fashion retailer and you'd be suprised how long it takes to go from product/model photography in the studio to having that product available on the website ready to sell.
There is a whole visual merchandise department whoms job it is to MANUALLY write up the product attributes (colour, style, texture, fit, material etc ) so that it can be indexed in the search engine of the website.
Speeding up this phase of the "from photo studio to available and indexable on the site" would allow the company to get faster to the market = more £££ (millions).
One day, one of the visual merchansiders came to work and said her boyfriend (a developer) had build her a small web application after seeing how she wants still taking work home after work.
The application allows her to upload the raw photo studio pictures, the application uses image recognition and automatically writes up and gives her the product attributes on the plate for her.
Long story short, she gave him feedback that management would love if they could use this application commercially and would pay top dollar to license this.
He quoted 90K as an annual licence fee, they didn't even negotiate as a 90K investment = Millions of incremental improved revenue.
He never looked back, improved the product, left his 9-5 and started approaching other fashion retailers as he was sure they had the same innefficient processes. The greatest past?
Its an easy sell, he would allow them to use it as a free trial for 6 months and they would ALWAYS want to keep it.
The most amazing part?
The most amazing part?
He din't even build the application from scratch himself, he found 90% of the source code on Github open sources and his only intention was to free up his girlfriends time in the evening, not start a business.
Last time I spoke him he had about 15+ clients paying between 50 to 100K as a license fee for a product that hardly requires any maintenance.
Key lesson?
Key lesson?
Tech products are easy to sell if you can prove how your product can save or make a company millions by automating or imporving processes, let the product do its talking and give it out as a free trial for a few months.
For inspiration ask your friends/family members about painfull/long winded processess they go through at work and see if you could find some open sourced code that can get you kick started. Or something you know you could build quick quickly.
The riches are in B2B friends.
The riches are in B2B friends.
