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How I generated incomes as a web developer without working as a freelancer
- tarxvf 6y agoRequires an account to read.
- lucis 6y agoI think it works on an anonymous window
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- igeligel_dev 6y agoOutline: https://outline.com/UGtEcz https://outline.com/UGtEcz
- fogetti 6y agoOpen the article in incognito window
- mehdi-farsi 6y agoYou have access to 3 member stories per month as a non-member. Otherwise, you must subscribe to read them.
- C19is20 6y agoOr change up address?
- asymptotically3 6y agoYou can just clear your cookies for Medium (or just always block them).
- laurent123456 6y agoDo people make much of a revenue from posting their articles on Medium? I don't get the appeal if you want to "share" a story but actually a good part of your potential readership either can't read it, or hate Medium enough that they won't even open the link. Just seems simpler to post on a Gist or anywhere really. But maybe I'm missing something and people are actually earning some money from posting on Medium.
- jve 6y agoFrom article: > Two months later (and after generating ~$3000 with my paid blogposts), my publication was generating an estimated 30 000 views per months.
- Zenbit_UX 6y agoI understood that to mean his paid blog posts for that company that hired him, not medium.
- ulisesrmzroche 6y agoYou can. Especially from those already paying up for medium and don’t have the paywall. That’s the audience you use medium to reach. A good part of the potential audience does read the article and does not hate medium. Otherwise, their business would have crashed and burned long ago. This is market validation. This is the blind spot people are talking about. That’s why market validation with minimal effort pays off so much. Stop just assuming, start testing your assumptions.
- input_sh 6y agoPretty inspiring! Although I'd say the odds of succeeding are highly in favour of citizens in a country that is supported by Stripe.
- Aeolun 6y agoYou can do credit catd payments in pretty much any country. Just not via Stripe.
- input_sh 6y agoYou can, if the tool you're using happens to support non-Stripe monetization or you hack your own way into supporting something else. Stripe-exclusive integrations I can think of on top of my head: Medium, GitHub Sponsors, Substack, Ghost CMS.
- pbalau 6y agoI don't think the problem is getting paid, but producing quality content that people will want to pay you for.
- justiceforsaas 6y agoI've seen this pattern across hundreds of founder interviews I've analyzed. [1] First, they start building some kind of "media brand". Here, the OP started blogging on Medium & guest blogged for a ROR startup blog. He got to ~30k views/month across all of his articles (probably 99% of the came through them ranking in search). He then used that audience, linked to his new e-learning platform on some of them, and easily got to 1000 new signups. This reminds me of Ghost.org (they're currently making $250k+/mo [2]) and how John O'Nolan (the founder) got started: "My blog had a few thousand subscribers who were the first to be notified when I wrote the original idea post. That post had an email signup form which generated about 30k subscribers interested in finding out if it would ever become a reality, and those 30k people were the first to find out when the Kickstarter campaign launched." source: [2] Many devs who want to eventually start their own SaaS/mobile app overlook this. Build an audience via blogging/tweeting/writing and then use that audience to launch/test your "startup". This way you won't have to go and "beg" people to cover you (via emailing/spamming publications, journalists, other influencers and so on.) The other reason that this seems to work is because information can be (in many cases) easier to promote/get coverage for than some black-box, software-based tool you've made (the exception here is the so-called "engineering as marketing", where people make a small/useful/straightforward tool that people get an immediate value from.) [1] https://firstpayingusers.com https://firstpayingusers.com [2] https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/how-john-onolan-grew-his-publishing-platform-to-750-000-year-14e5bac2fa https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/how-john-onolan-grew-...
- mehdi-farsi 6y agoNeat!
- CraigJPerry 6y agoIt seems like a good idea for eventually exiting too. If you’re open about revenues and customer base, i mean it depends where the profit centre ends up but it’s no bad thing for finding possible buyers to be transparent on the journey.
- maverickJ 6y agoIt's what I like to call finding the audience for your work. The author of the post as you rightly pointed out built an audience from the Ruby world. This article https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/cracking-the-who-you-show-your-work https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/cracking-the-who-you... is one of the best on this topic.
- keyle 6y agoCan't read medium on mobile now?!
- vaccinator 6y agoWorks on my phone... but I do have a few addons and an older version of firefox mobile
- ochronus 6y agoNice! Congrats and thanks for sharing, really inspiring.
- mehdi-farsi 6y agothank you for the time you took to read my blogpost.
- fogetti 6y agoThank you for sharing. I wish you great success in the future too!
- mehdi-farsi 6y agoThanks a lot!
- semicolonandson 6y agoWeb developer's love of programming is what wins them (potentially) fantastic salaries in regular work; it's also what cripples their attempts to diversify their income. Time and time again, I see programmer friends investing 6+ months of their time getting an "MVP" out the door. Instead they should be applying their problem-solving skills to figuring out how to test their market hypothesis an order of magnitude more quickly. For my business, that meant a plain HTML website — no JS, no backend — and a PayPal button. (If you care to hear the full story, I have a video and transcript here: https://www.semicolonandsons.com/episode/MVP-&-Origin-Story https://www.semicolonandsons.com/episode/MVP-&-Origin-Story)
- halfmatthalfcat 6y agoI’ve heard this a couple times but it still makes no sense to me. How do you test your product hypothesis without a product? You’re essentially testing the viability of an idea with what you’re proposing, which is vastly different than having an actual product with features that you can iterate on when given feedback. I think for very niche categories, a landing page might be the only thing you need but I honestly believe that if you’re pitching a product with features, people want to see that product, not a page with text.
- rfrey 6y agoI believe you are entirely correct: it is testing an idea rather than testing and iterating on features. That's the point: people who love programming might skip directly to testing features without testing the idea. Testing the idea is essential and can be done 10x faster and cheaper than testing the first feature.
- AlchemistCamp 6y agoOkay, let's take Roblox as an example since they're about to IPO. They've clearly made an incredible product and built a developer ecosystem around it. When they were starting several years ago, how would have tested "the idea"?
- m0ck 6y agoProps to you, that's inspiring. On the other hand, if I have to be completely honest, I can't wrap my mind around why would anyone pay for what are you doing, let alone so many people. There is so much free resources on Internet on popular topics (such as Ruby/RoR in this case), that I simply don't understand how people can pay for something like this (I didn't read your articles, but if you churned out 30 articles in 50 days then I dare to make a bold claim they aren't world-changing, or presenting something that wasn't already there). Just as I will never comprehend how sane person can regulary read tabloids. But as I said, I admire you and would gladly be in your position, well done.
- mehdi-farsi 6y agoThank you for your honest feedback!
- capnorange 6y agoBuilding a community is sticky. It's the same reason people trust opinions from people rather than some anon on the internet. It's not world changing but it definitely is to his users.
- nickjj 6y ago> I can't wrap my mind around why would anyone pay for what are you doing, let alone so many people. Support is one thing. Let's say you have a $100 course where you build something real in the end. Not only do you get fully working code (which could easily save you 100+ hours of dev time) but you also get direct access to the author to ask questions. At least that's what I do in my own courses (I offer (24/7 - sleeping hours) support). Sure the fully working code that gets continuous updates is nice on its own but think how expensive it would be if you wanted to hire someone to do 1 on 1 help with you as you learn something new from various blog posts and scattered Youtube videos. You could easily spend $100-200 an hour for that and it would be less effective because the person you're paying likely didn't write the material you're learning from. For a lot of folks $100 is well worth saving an endless amount of nights of furiously Googling around on how to troubleshoot things. Especially if they have a family or are trying to ship whatever they want to build as soon as possible. With enough persistence you might be able to battle through that on your own, especially if it's a well explored technology that's been around for a long time but we all have limited time. If you value spending 50 hours of your own time instead of spending $100 then you're right, you're probably not the target audience for buying courses.
- BeatLeJuce 6y ago> So I decided to create Fun Facts about Ruby — volume 1. This volume contains 30 cards.[...] My goal is now to release a new volume per trimester. I can't help but wonder how sustainable this is. How many truly "fun" facts can you list before you run out of steam?
- mehdi-farsi 6y agoA lot, I guess! As I discover new things everyday in Ruby. And with Ruby 3 that'll be released at the end of the year.. But I agree that I won't go to the volume 20 hehe,
- bluedino 6y agoEven worse, who’s buying them for $4 each?
- tomerbd 6y agodo you timeblock or use pomodoro or task list?
- mehdi-farsi 6y agoThe good old way: notepad and pen.
- cybice 6y agoShitty medium links!!! What I see every time I click. "How to read this story — and everything else on Medium. Not every story on Medium is free, like this one. Become a member to get unlimited access and support the voices you want to hear more from."
- PUSH_AX 6y agoI had that, then I opened the same link in incognito and it displayed the post, failing that I'd just rotate my VPN IP and incognito again.
- ghaff 6y agoFor a time I was using Medium to mirror some of my more general interest posts because I had the impression that some readers took things on Medium as being somehow more authoritative than on a personal blog. But even given a somewhat porous paywall, I don't want to expose people to get more of this sort of thing than I need to.
- j1elo 6y agoWell, blog writing is clearly an income source for the author, so no surprises there. Although we could argue about how much of a good or bad idea is to publish something behind a paywall on HN which clearly has the intention of reaching as much people as possible...
- cblconfederate 6y agojavascript:void(open('http://archive.today/?run=1&url='+encodeURIComponent(document.location)))
- NiceWayToDoIT 6y ago1000 thank you dear stranger this is most useful tip I have seen today :)
- aww_dang 6y agoI see the Cloudflare captcha page.
- mooreds 6y agoIt is posts like this that make me feel a bit mediocre. I have labored for two years on my blog (https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/ https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/), written guest posts, given talks, and written a book. But I have nowhere near 1000 subscribers and my book announcement list was far under 100 folks. I wonder whether I am not focused enough, don't deliver enough value, targetted the wrong audience, or picked the wrong marketing platform (blog instead of medium, traditionally published book instead of ebook). Maybe I'm not committed enough--the idea of recording 5 screencasts a weekend for 7 weeks feels like a gargantuan effort. Anyway, thanks to the OP for sharing his journey. It is interesting to see how often people move toward teaching as a higher leverage income stream. That is the foundation of Amy Hoy's philosophy (more here: https://stackingthebricks.com/why-you-should-do-a-tiny-product-first/ https://stackingthebricks.com/why-you-should-do-a-tiny-produ... )
- OmarShehata 6y agoHow often do you publish? I was also a bit surprised that the blog just skimmed over what I think is the most important part: how to build an audience. It sounds like "I wasn't a good writer, but I just wrote 50 articles and improved and now I had tens of thousands of readers a month" I am skeptical that it was all about quality. If his first article had been the best article ever it's still unlikely he'd have found an audience/get noticed. So maybe it's about the frequency of posting? I think it'd be worth reflecting on this more, how did his readership grow in that early period? Were there any inflection points? Etc
- mooreds 6y agoFor the first 1.5 years, twice a week. Lately it's once a week (on Monday). Some of my posts, esp the early ones, were short (1 minute reads). I think that leveraging a platform like medium or dev.to can really help. I republish some content there and especially if you get picked up by one of the "magazines" it can put you in front of a different audience. This belief is based on a large part on research rather than firsthand experience, though.
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- k__ 6y agoI'm a freelance developer and make all of my money via blogging. 80% ghostwriting and 20% with my real name. It's an okay income, not as much as consulting. I'm also working on some courses to generate passive income, but I don't like that kind of work. It's so much up front before you can relase the stuff. Still looking for something that pays as much as consulting but doesn't take much more work than blogging.
- Ayesh 6y agoIf you wouldn't mind, I'd love to see some numbers, as in how many organic visitors a month would convert into a meaningful sum at the end of the month.
- k__ 6y agoOh, I don't make any money with ads.
- agumonkey 6y ago> courses to generate passive income, pardon me but it sounds like a potential for future ponzi schemes :)
- k__ 6y agoProbably? I don't know. I did a course on React and React-Native and some people told me they got a dev job with these courses. So I guess they weren't a ponzi scheme, haha.
- marktangotango 6y agoThe ruby community always seemed to be unusually gregarious and extroverted. This is of course my impression over the years, and anecdotal but I really doubt a similar effort directed at (any) other community would be as successful. That’s all IMO, I could not imagine java developers being as supportive for example!
- tomcooks 6y agoHaving to download an app or having to login to read a post is a waste of time, will gladly read on a self hosted blog or anything more user friendly.
- danellis 6y agoWorse—it wants $5/month from me now. I don't know why people bother with Medium. They can't be making much money from it. Is it really worth the cost of people not being able to read your content?
- montezume 6y agoI guess that depends on many factors. It's not that difficult to earn a few hundred dollars a month by writing on Medium. For engineers living in SF, probably not worth the time. For software engineers living in Portugal earning ~1200$ a month, probably worth the time.
- SimianLogic2 6y agoThe author seems to enjoy his structure, but organizing my day into 30-minute chunks would drive me insane. I have a hard time getting anything done if I have a meeting on my calendar that I know is going to stop me in 2 hours.
- XCSme 6y agoI'm the same. If I know there's something I have to do at a specific hour, I can rarely start working on a new task knowing that I will stop soon. When I work on something I prefer it to be deep work that can last as long as it needs.
- georgex7 6y agoAre you into deep work? I made a website where you can track your sessions + data, would love to get your feedback. trywinston.com
- mehdi-farsi 6y agoI share with you my structure. This doesn't mean that it's the recipe to success. I feel comfortable with this. If I have a 1-hour meeting, then I make two more 30mn sessions during the night. Anyway, You must find a structure that fit to your personality to maintain your level of commitment in the long-term.
- pknerd 6y agoOffTopic: How come HN did not print medium.com only and prints medium.com/the-developers-journey?
- snazz 6y agoThis is a fairly recent change on “platform” sites like Medium, Twitter, and GitHub. It’s quite nice for browsing the history, in my opinion. I like how HN keeps getting minor improvements like these without a big redesign.
- jfk13 6y agoIt makes sense, as it identifies the specific (medium-hosted) blog as the source, rather than just the hosting platform. I think this is a new feature (at least, I haven't noticed it before), and seems to apply to some other domains as well, such as twitter.com and github.com.
- bluedino 6y ago“How to make money writing low quality blog spam”
- revskill 6y agoI spent almost 3 months just to configure webpack for my frontend projects, next is 1/2 week just to get authentication done. So, to me, it's not what's the "best" way to do thing, it's the what you used to do matter. As soon as i accomplised boring tasks, my next projects go smoothly, and more importantly, i feel more productive for my own work, too.
- angrais 6y agoWhy on earth did you spend 3 MONTHS configuring webpack? Could you not have forked an existing project that achieved similar to what you needed? Same with authentication to be honest ... I would be curious to know more about what was required of your webpack configuration that justifies this timeframe.
- pushcx 6y agoThe author is a spammer. I banned this guy from Lobste.rs for endlessly posting terrible, thin retreads of Ruby docs and idiotically vague motivation porn. He had zero interaction with any other post and nothing mattered to him except that posting a link got him a few clicks: https://lobste.rs/threads/mehdi-farsi#c_attzu3 https://lobste.rs/threads/mehdi-farsi#c_attzu3 When asked to participate normally he posted some comments randomly like "very interesting topic." (no longer visible on this page)
- retox 6y agoVery interesting insight, thank you for throwing back the curtain. Edit: Check the authors submissions here as well. Non-stop spam, though little traction in terms of upboats.
- pknerd 6y agoI myself is a developer and been running a blog for four years so what you are doing is not a rocket science. I earned via guest posts, affiliates and Ads. I could not write an ebook yet as I am not so focused atm.