While growing up I was told that going to college and earning a degree in Computer Science is all I need to become wealthy one day. Then reality threw me with a brick.
I landed a really good job as a Computer Vision developer about three years ago. I absolutely love the job and the challenges that comes along with it, but the single most important thing about this career, is that you learn a skill set that can help you build an empire.
I’m sharing this bit of knowledge to make sure that all of you know what you are capable of. Being a software developer is awesome, but like any good, challenging career, there are still some stresses that come around.
My idea of being wealthy, is to wake up one day and choose how I will spend the next 10 hours. So I thought, why not do the things I enjoy doing to get me to help me achieve my wealth.
Reality check before we start. Obviously, this might take some time and effort, so the important thing to keep in mind here, is that you don’t have to quit your 9 to 5 to start off. It only takes a few hours a night to study and build a well established product. You don’t have to be an expert in software, but you have to be focused on the quality of your research and troubleshooting, as you have to be able to self study and implement solutions. I hope you’re still reading, you’ve already got the mindset.
Why You Should Become an Entrepreneur
Taking a step back and picturing my life a decade from now, I would like to be able to say that I have the time to travel somewhere for a few weeks. I would like to have the ability to spend my time doing the things that I love, with the people I love.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem as simple while working at least 40 hours a week for someone else to live your dream. Just keep picturing yourself on that yacht, take a breath and keep working.
To put it simple, the goal is to create something that will help you generate passive income in your sleep. This means that something has to be automated. This is where being a developer comes in. We’re good at creating things, and we’re good at automating things too.
The Possibilities are Endless
There are software and apps for anything that you can think of. This means that someone sitting behind a laptop wrote some code to make these applications. Why can’t you do the same? Sure, you don’t have a team of developers. But what’s the rush?
You Don’t Have to Reinvent the Wheel
There’s a global network of developers publishing their repositories and modules for other developers to use. There are people creating Medium blogs where they guide you through developing apps. You can use these as examples to build your own applications.
There are extremely useful tools out there that can help you kick off good mobile applications or software product. Use them.
Start Small, Scale Big
An affordable way to start developing, hosting, managing and deploying your app is to use the power of scalable cloud technologies. Let’s use AWS as an example. They allow you to use their services for free up to a certain point. After that you pay per request, so you never pay for more than you use.
Building that business from the ground up like a champ.
Most developers have played around on the AWS Console or GCP (Google Cloud Platform) by now. These cloud platforms have components that can be used to handle all or at least most the logic or data flowing through an app or even a machine learning startup.
Conclusion
As I’ve mentioned before, the goal is to have freedom. And software engineering skills are very powerful tools to help you achieve this freedom.
Some advice from me, do your research about every single step and component in your “product plan” first. This will help you understand the reality of where to start, and what to work towards. Be consistent.
Let’s talk about your plans in the comment section.