Going enterpreneur after Fcc?

I’d like to know if anyone has been successful in publishing a webapp after self teaching to code? I’ve been in a coupple of working environments by now but I can’t quite stand the office hours tho I like coding. I’ve started some projects but I have many doubts with thinks like database designs and all the devops things.

So I’m looking for some inspiration, has anyone made it as a solo developer here?

You mean you’ve worked in a couple of working environments as a developer, right?

Have you done any freelancing or worked at a startup? I think these things make a good bridge to entrepreneurship. They’re a good chance to work with others that can offer your advice or create an obligation to consistently work on one idea from conception to the maintenance stage.

Other than that, you can focus on web apps which have lower stakes when it comes to security. Rather than collecting a lot of your users’ information, try making an app that needs limited user input. This will still teach you a lot about securing a web app, deploying it on a linux box, things like that that will be relevant in later projects too.

Honestly, I think some of the projects right here on FCC would make good personal/commercial projects with a little twist. You could also look into React Native to make the jump to developing a few small apps.

solo developer is pretty difficult to achieve unless you are very proficient with front end and backend.

There’s really a lot going on with this question. Can someone who completes FCC create their own applications from the ground-up? Yes. They should be able to. Has anyone successfully been able to support themselves in a self-employed capacity after learning to program primarily from FCC? Yes, there are some people who have moved into freelancing. But if you’re talking about creating your own applications and selling them, that gets into a whole world beyond the ability to code them into starting, building, and promoting a business.

That’s exactly what I’m thinking, I know it’s a whole crazy idea but Quincy was able to do it and I’ve seen many people that craft videogames start things that look like the same amount of work, same with mobile apps that habe been done by a single person. I’ve thought of using serverless from aws to avoid high costs at first and having to administrate load balancing and servers at all. The idea is exciting and the amount of work overwhelming, the marketing looks tricky but even if it got a few users having a (web) app of my own is what got me into programming since I started.

I have worked on 2 startups, both of them were well funded, my problem was I felt there was a lot of time wasted, people kept playing ping pong and treated it like a social center, I know this is the dream for many people but I wanted to improve my skills so I felt I was wasting my time.

I’ve thought about starting with mobile dev but I’d like to push a webapp to the world first. I also think it might be better on the long run having self projects that generate a few buckets and have potential to get an investor or sky rocket with the community that can be built around it.

The data collection is a good point, I’ll consider it for what I’m building, thanks!

So, I can completely empathize with your idea and I’m not trying to dissuade you from it.

But, like someone else sort of mentioned, building the app is really only a small part of the question you are asking. Almost nothing.

Getting and retaining users, and then getting those users to pay you or attracting a sufficient number of users that makes Adsense/etc worth it… That’s really hard. And it’s a totally different ball game than simply coding an app, even if it’s good and beautiful and useful.

I think a good resource for you might be www.indiehackers.com or maybe searching out a community of other developers doing this.

I’d also say that rather than thinking about having this huge webapp that tons of people use and investors care about, start small and use staggered goals. Cover the site’s hosting by getting it to $10/month, say. Then $50, $100, and so on. Practice ‘just in time’ development (i.e. worry about load balancing when you have enough traffic to care about it; make something people are already asking for; etc).

I’m sure you can get something simple earning at least a few bucks. That’s an interesting project in its own but to hit on and execute an idea that would replace your job would be quite difficult (but not impossible!)

At the same time, realize there are people out there making $1000s a month from having the most popular word counter/egg timer/crossword maker/etc online. It can be done and it doesn’t require a huge messy app to get there. Good luck!

2 Likes