Dear JavaScript Aficionado,

If you want to make real money without busting your "rear end" out of work, then you need to find a way to stop just trading your time for a monthly wage.

Not that there is something wrong with doing it…

Not at all.

It's perfectly normal to have a job and work from 9 to 5.

But this area is super competitive. And as I wrote about in my newsletter, if you aren't kind of a genius developer in a famous company, then you probably never will get to a point when you have a seven-figure income.

It's because we all have 40-50-60 hours a week to offer, which is not enough at the current hourly rates in our industry.

You know…

I've been doing corporate job stuff or freelance gigs for more than four years. I've netted more than $60,000. It's not a fortune, especially for US readers of this article. But if I calculate the substantially lower cost of living in Bulgaria, I can certainly claim that I've earned more than some US or German peers at the same level of skills.

Guess what happened with that money?

Guess how much of it is still in my bank account?

Yeah, I had a good time, but…

If I were to stop getting freelance gigs and didn't have another income stream, I could live on my savings for just a couple of months before I started experiencing financial troubles.

So yeah, it's nothing wrong with having a job. It's nothing wrong with doing freelance gigs. But if you or I do only this, we're forever exchanging our time for a buck in a proportional way, and that's not really "scalable."

So we need at least one more income stream…

An income stream that doesn't require much manual work but offers a significant opportunity to create wealth for us.

One of the best such streams is created by licensing software.

It means you create a piece of software, and instead of transferring its ownership to your employer or customers, you grant them a license to use it. That way, you can offer this piece to many people and sell it to them multiple times by requesting license renewals regularly.

Selling software is not easy by any means, but it can be super profitable.

Why?

• You effectively decouple your time and your method of getting money;
• You can sell licenses to an unlimited number of people (and for the full price);
• Once created, a successful piece of software can bring thousands or tens of thousands of dollars;
• It's hard to create the software, but nowadays, it's super easy to start selling it;
• It's hard to market a piece of software, but the reward, if you succeed, is too big to be simply ignored;
• At some point, you can sell your successful software for a life-changing amount of money.

That's just a tiny part of the benefits.

The worst thing we as web developers do…

Is selling the rights to all of our code.

Unfortunately, that's the conventional wisdom in our industry - we get a job and transfer ownership of the code we write to our employer. They just own it.

It's their intellectual property…

But we aren't forbidden (in most cases) to create some intellectual property for ourselves in our leisure time. We can build and leverage our stuff the same way our employers leverage theirs - by granting licenses.

So you create it once and then sell it multiple times.

And what's best?

The Creator Economy

We live in a new era…

The internet is changing everything, especially how we work and do business. Nowadays, it's a child's game to develop your own "digital product" and start receiving money.

It's not about "Can I make money online?" It's about "How exactly do I want to make them?"

With the help of "no-code platforms" like Gumroad, you can start selling immediately just about anything that can be put in the form of a "file."

We are talking about ebooks, apps, access to a website, online courses, newsletter, templates, UI kits, photos, code snippets, scripts… You name it…

If it's "information," you can get dollars for it.

And whatever you choose to offer, you keep the rights to it.

That way, your website or Gumroad shop works for you 24/7. It can generate sales even while you sleep. And you don't always need to be present or do anything to get a buck.

Let me be clear…

It's not a 100% passive income. You still need to put in some effort. To create this additional income stream, you have to come up with a piece of software, you have to spend time marketing it, and from time to time, you have to make updates.

But once you establish yourself as a reliable and known vendor, it will take you several hours a week to keep the wheel going.

So there is work…

But the key difference with your day job is that it becomes easier as time passes, and you have a chance for disproportional, even life-changing, rewards for your struggles.

And do you need to be a genius?

Do you need to be the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs?

I don't think so…

You can go for creating something complex and ground-shaking, but you can also go for something simple that you can make for a couple of days.

Like the case of Adam Wathan and their Tailwind CSS…

"The story of how a couple of failed SaaS ideas and a bunch of ugly Less stylesheets turned into my life's work."

~ Adam Wathan

Click here to read "Tailwind CSS: From Side-Project Byproduct to Multi-Million Dollar Business."

Or this one here:

"In 2014, my friends and I set out to build the best possible web design tools. We built UI kits , Admin Dashboards. We've always tried to create products that are helpful in the development process, and that we ourselves would use for"

~Alexandru Paduraru

Click here to read "How my friends and I grew our side project into a $17,000/month business."

Of course, these examples don't represent the typical "side project." They illustrate what happens if your stuff really gets traction.

But there are countless other examples of template and plugin creators, browser and VS Code extension authors, micro-SAAS owners, and many others who have found a way to create an additional income stream for themselves.

So why not you, too?

Key Takeaways

• Our employers are successful because they don't sell their software but grant licenses to an untold number of customers.
• In our day job, we transfer the rights of our code to our employer. It's their intellectual property.
• In most cases, nothing stops us from creating our own intellectual property that we can offer easily for sale with the help of platforms like Gumroad.
• We don't need to transfer the ownership of our code but grant licenses to many other people and organizations.
• Some developers already do it in their spare time or even full-time.