I'm gonna be a little bit gauche and talk about money and success for a minute.
In the last year, I've had a number of people reach out to me to pitch their project, idea, or side hustle, or to ask for business advice. I assume this is because I'm relatively prolific in public spaces - LinkedIn, my website, and in the Write the Docs community.
I think there is a shared assumption among these folks about how successful I am. So I need to tell you a few things:
- I have 141 repositories under my name on GitHub, and have been a member there since 2012. (Some of them are forks and not my own original work, but a lot of them are original.)
- I have 29 repositories under
agent-ecosystemon GitHub, many of which are not public. - I have 3 published apps on the Apple App Store, and 8 that never made it past private beta.
- I have 2 published novels (under pen names), another 2 I have ghostwritten as works for hire which other people have published under their names, and another... 8 or 9 that I never published? I've lost count.
Across all of these endeavors, I have spent tens of thousands of dollars of my own money on tools, marketing, infrastructure, and subscriptions (I would guess upward of $30-40k, ~$20k of which has been this year on all the agent-related stuff). And thousands of hours of my time working on these projects.
Between apps and book sales (mostly just apps) I have made about $15k across the last decade.
Yup, I have spent far more in costs and time to create these things than I have ever made from them. Which is totally fine, because that's not why I do it.
I do it because I want these things to exist in the world. I want to use the tools and apps I publish. I want other people to be able to use the tools and apps if they would find them helpful. And I enjoy the acts of learning, thinking, and creating. These things are some of my favorite hobbies.
But given how prolific I am, how many hours I spend on this stuff, and the fact that you've never heard of the vast majority of it... I am probably not the person to advise you about your business idea.
I think these things have all made me better at what I do for a day job, because I have been polishing skills for 15+ years that form the core of what I do for work. You could say I have developed a personal brand related to this stuff, although arguably very few people cared about that until I started talking about agents.
But I have never really tried to monetize my hobbies beyond a few cursory and sporadic marketing efforts, mostly because I know how much work, luck, and money that really takes.
If you are someone who is out there grinding and building a business, mad respect. But you're probably better off talking to other people who are grinding and building a business if you're looking for advice, because I'm out here building tools at great personal expense to myself with no plan to make money from them.
I don't recommend that as a business strategy.