My revenue streams as a developer
An honest return of experience on how I generated income as a web developer without working as a freelancer.
CHILL AS HARD AS YOU HUSTLE...
— Master Yoda
In 2017, I started to be bored with only generating revenues through my freelance work. So I decided to try as hard as possible to generate $10,000/month without freelance work and with a minimum of time spent on this task.
I’m a good Ruby on Rails developer with a real passion for knowledge sharing. So my strategy was to articulate the different revenue streams around my specificities. I thought about 3 possible revenue streams:
- tech blogging
- creating an e-learning platform
- creating ebooks
I achieved my financial goal in 18 months of dedication to... tech blogging. So here, I’ll share with you this journey as a solopreneur.
Also, in 2023 I finally decided to go full-time on a unique platform to learn Ruby on Rails:
At the end, I’ll share with you an overview of how I manage my time to handle these 2 revenue streams.
2017: Generating revenues as a blogger
As a Ruby developer, I quickly decided to dedicate my blog to the Ruby programming language. Also, I decided to use Medium to host my blog. Indeed, I liked the idea of being part of the Medium Partner Program. I also liked the concept of publications. So, after creating my account I had to choose a publication name. After a while, I decided to use RubyCademy. It was related to both Ruby and the notion of teaching.
After setting up my publication, it took me a couple of days to finish my first blog post. I was so apprehensive to release it that it took me almost a week to do so. Three days after the release, I barely passed 100 views... At this time, I wanted my fellow developers to criticize (or troll) my post. This would mean that they’d care about it. But nothing happened. This made me understand that my writing skills weren’t enough sharp to make people curious about my blog.
At that time, I only had 2 choices: Go hard or go home. So I decided to write and release articles non-stop until the thirtieth one. It took me 50 days to achieve this milestone. This level of commitment paid off as at the end of these 50 days I found my writing style, I had a good amount of articles about various topics and I started to grow a significant audience that liked and shared my blog posts. A month later, I received my first opportunity to generate income from my blog. Ok, not exactly from my blog...
One day, I received an email that asked me if I was willing to write a post for the blog of a startup that used Ruby on Rails as a web framework for their application. I obviously said YES. A week later I sent my first invoice and had been remunerated a couple hundred bucks for this task. It was the first time that I earned money in another way than coding for a given company.
Two months later (and after generating ~$3000 with my paid blog posts), my publication was generating an estimated 30,000 views per month.
Another type of opportunity popped up when developers started contacting me for mentoring about either Ruby or... how to become a tech blogger.
This opportunity was surprising as I never thought about mentoring people on how to become tech bloggers.
This opportunity was time-consuming but it helped me get closer to my $10k/month goal.
After 6 years (and after covering 99% of the core concepts of Ruby), the blog is still generating a decent amount of views (500k views/year). I wrote 2 articles in 2023...
2020: The Micro-Blogging Era
In 2020, in order to be more impactful (helping a wider audience), I decided to jump into micro-blogging via my Twitter account.
I shared code examples applicable in real coding contexts.
It doesn't generate money but I feel way closer to the people who follow my work than when I used to only write articles on my blog.
As a former programming teacher, it feels so much better this way! 😊
2023: The birth of RubyCademy.com
After 6 years of knowledge sharing on different platforms and formats, I felt ready to propose a tailored E-learning pleatform to help developers continuously improve as Ruby and Ruby on Rails developers.
I'll talk about this secret sauce in another blog post.
I finally launched the platform this month and I feel so happy since then!
My community responded so positively that it gave me extra energy to do even more!
2024: Embrace the journey
I decided to sacrifice all of my existing revenue streams to focus on RubyCademy and on sharing everything I've learned and will learn as a solopreneur.
Bonus: Time management
2017-2020
I used to work 4 days a week from 9 am to 5 pm. To do so, I split my day into 14 slots of 30 minutes — from 9 am to 12 pm and 1 pm to 5 pm. The first morning and afternoon slots were dedicated to social networks and emails.
The last one in the afternoon was dedicated to preparing the work for the next day. In the other slots, I used to code, record, or write a blog post. After 5 pm, my time was allocated to my family.
The fact of splitting my day into multiple slots of 30 minutes forced me to achieve something at the end of a slot:
- fixing a bug
- coding a subtask of a new feature
- browsing the source code of Ruby and Rails
- writing a section of my next blog post
- adding an update to an existing blog post
- reviewing my current blog post
- etc...
Having this level of granularity is very comfortable as a solopreneur. Indeed, I only invested my time in small tasks that produced a great ROI at the end of the week.
2020-2022
The notoriety of my blog allowed me to access the world of Merge-And-Acquisition with high remunerations as a contractor.
So pragmatically, I dedicated these 2 years to save a comfortable amount of money to fully focus while still micro-blogging.
2023
As I genuinely enjoy what I do, I moved back to the "slots-of-30-minutes" system.
But now It's way more than 14 slots... 😉
Links
If you're a Ruby on Rails developer, feel free to visit: RubyCademy
If you want to jump in and learn along the way with me, you can: follow me on X
Voilà! 💚
RubyCademy ©