Okay, I'm starting to feel your message much more. I've been wondering for the last few hours whether I've ever helped people with programming .. and yes, I told them how to start and how to choose programming languages and what are the possibilities in an IT career. Maybe should I build SaaS which helps beginners to feel less lost in this new world and shows them some roadmap? But on the other hand, wouldn't be an e-book the better form in this case? ;p
There's another way of approaching this that might help if you're thinking of things for programmers.
Think of some utilities that help programmers. Given your experience, what would help you? I'm thinking of things like postman. That might have been programmed as a personal use project to help the user create and inspect API's (I don't know or care what the origin story is, it's just for example). Now probably thousands of people use it daily. Check out the plans available on at postman.com.
I wrote a tool once to dump database table structures, graphically formatting them, and showing key fields and types - something that could help me. That was back in the stone ages, but I probably could have sold it back then because we didn't have the database browsing tools we have today and the dev cycle was slow looking up all that info.
I, with two others, once wrote what was essentially Crystal Reports for Unix - a graphical report layout and generation engine powered by custom computer languages that we created to intercommunicate and describe data, sorts, layouts, etc. I was an employee of the company at the time. They sold it to other similar companies with similar issues. Old example, but still pertinent. You can even turn your competitors into clients if you develop in a niche you're already serving in another capacity. Actually, one of my former co-workers on that project is working on delivering a similar solution to a different company in a different niche that still has reporting needs that aren't being met.
There's a huge market of tools that are available for Azure in the marketplace. If you know Azure and the needs of Azure programmers or companies that are using Azure, you would know to produce something and you'd have a marketplace that's already been built. Check the marketplace out for ideas - Azure Marketplace | Microsoft Azure
Similarly, there's an AWS marketplace - Start selling in AWS Marketplace today
You might check it out for ideas of the types of things that sell there.
Business markets are real and potentially extremely profitable. To me that beats the heck out of trying to learn and sell into a hobby.
The idea of helping someone still applies to any of this. For example, going back to the postman example above, if you've helped explain API's or validate them or help someone create them, then you have some knowledge that could have gone into creating something like postman. Then finding your audience and building it is much more approachable and it's easier to comprehend, design, build, maintain, and improve.
A friend came up with the idea of using machine learning in a particular niche. I will not discuss this except for the following. He will make millions with it. It's mainstream enough to be profitable but offbeat enough that people have not thought of approaching this particular problem. He has no competitors that I know of. He helped people get some machine learning resources then I think their needs were revealed and he went from there. The pockets are deep. Again, I won't say anything about this business.
I'm not saying to duplicate any of these ideas as products, but if you want to target programmers or companies that develop software, you might consider that type of approach to thinking of them.
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