Hasty Treat - How to Make Money as a Creator

key. Oh, welcome to Syntax.

And this Monday, hasty treat, we're gonna be talking about money. It's Money Monday. We're gonna be talking about money on this podcast here. How to make money as a creator, how to make that sweet green, that cash flow of those bones, Any of that stuff, any of those other terms for money. My name is Scott Talinski. I'm a level up tutorials developer from Denver, Colorado.

And, yeah. That's who I am. And with me as always is the US boss.

Hey, everybody.

Hey.

Sup, Wes, how you doing on this Monday hasty treat? Doing pretty good. I'm excited to talk about making money. Making money.

Yeah. This episode is sponsored by 2 amazing companies, one of which is DQ, and one of which is LogRocket. Wes, would you like to talk about DQ and I'll talk about LogRocket?

Yeah. DQ, they are the makers of the Axe DevTools, which is a add on you can get For your browser that will point out any accessibility issues that you may have with your website. Things from not clickable, not Tab focusable, color contrast issues.

You name it. They will pop up all kinds of issues with your your website.

They also have This new thing called DQ Pro, which allows you to do automated testing, guided testing that's intelligent, testing just for parts of the web page, machine learning enhancements, all kinds of really nifty stuff.

So you should try it out. Even if you don't try out the pro version, at least At least run this on your website for the, sake of people visiting your website. Make sure you don't have any accessibility issues. But if you wanna try it out, you can try out DevTools Pro for 14 day free trial. Check it out at d q. That's deque f.comforward/ syntactics. So much to DQ for sponsoring.

Sake. This episode is all sponsored by LogRocket, Which is the perfect place to see all of your errors and exceptions happen in a scribble video replay along with neat things like The the network tab or if you use Redux, the Redux store, which, honestly, that'd be really cool to be able to see the whole Redux store at any given point when the user Causes an issue and be able to actually inter interact with it the same way that you you would in your development tools. It it's so cool. You get the network tab, the console log, and guess what? LogRocket actually launched a brand new website that looks gorgeous. So if you wanna check out that new website, Check out logrocket.comforward/syntax.

Check out their new site. There's a lot of neat new tools inside of LogRocket 2 of which we'll be talking about as these episodes go on. So give it a try if you're the type of person who loves a video, Scrubable instant replay along with the network requests and error logs, the things that you know and love when debugging. This is the place to be. It's used by a lot of fancy companies like Reddit, bill.com, Pinterest, IKEA, need I say more. So as always, Check it out. Logrocket.comforward/syntax.

Alright.

Let's get into making money.

We have this unique ability with our fingers inside of code. Right? We can craft things out of nothing and generate a product. We are modern craftspeople.

Right? We can create things and sell them. These things can be information. It can be an actual useful product.

It can be educational.

It can be tools to help other developers. It can be all sorts of things. But at the end of the day, we are people who are able to create things, And those things are potentially valuable.

So we have the unique ability to generate money out of nowhere. What say you, Wes?

What say you? What does that mean?

Like, it's just yeah. I don't know I don't know where what it's just like a thing that people say when they're like,

What do you think about that? Oh, yeah. I think it's amazing. There's so many people out there that are creating something, and That's something that doesn't necessarily make the money yet or at all, and you need to be able to support yourself. So what we're gonna it kinda goes through today is we're gonna rattle through some of the different ways that you as a creator can make money doing What it is that you love doing and hopefully not feel yucky about it is Yeah. Especially I find around developers, Like, making money, doing something that you're enjoying seems to be, like, frowned upon. I feel like I I feel like that. Like, I I don't think my stuff I I don't feel that all that often, but, you sort of get that vibe from developers where everything should be free and open source, and you can do it all yourself and and whatnot. And at the end of the day, we need we got bills to pay, and it would be nice to be able to do something that you love and get paid for it. Right, Scott? Yeah. And, I mean, along that same line, if you're trying to make money off of something that has genuine value, you are not a grifter.

K.

That, like, that term gets thrown off around for anybody who's trying to make money off of anything. They'll say, oh, you're front of you know, they're grifting.

No. You're not.

If if you are providing value, if you've created something with value, right, You can charge for that based on the value that that has, and that is not a problem.

And, again, we have the ability to to generate income because we can create things that have value out of nothing.

So I think what we wanna be talking a little bit about in this episode is how we can use our skills and abilities as developers To make things that will have value and what types of things have value in this industry, outside of this industry, as businesses, whatever, that you can charge for with your skills, and you can use your skills to make very real money outside of just a 9 to 5 paycheck.

Alright. So I've broken this down into 2 different sections here, kinda community supported and corporation supported. I I say community, but, basically, I just mean, like, I guess you meet customer supported. So at the very basic, you can sell licenses to the thing that you have. So Whether a a a lot of people listening, what happens is that they they create a plug in for something or a open source project, and It takes off, and it ends up taking up their evenings, their weekends, some of their work time.

And they're like, wow. This thing is I'm happy that people are making it are using it. I'm I'm very I love building this thing, but it's taking up a significant amount of my time. How do I get paid for that so So that I can justify spending this much time. So premium plug ins, you can pay.

I really like the ones that make you pay a set amount Once for the thing Mhmm. But, also, you could charge a monthly or a a yearly fee for something like that. I use one called SIP, s I p, and It's just a little color picker for OS X. Yeah. I do I use a simple color picker too. It's not that one, but it's a simple color picker. It's $5 a year, And every year it comes comes by, and I'm like, I'm glad that I'm glad that I'm paying for that again for a year because I really enjoy using that location. I'm glad that I can support the people that are building this thing. Totally.

Another thing you can do is self training. I mean, you do see a lot of people do this where, like, you're creating a course.

You're creating tutorials.

You can do so on your own platform. You can do so on YouTube or Twitch or Anyone except for you, Demi. I have strong words about that. But you can create your own platform, your own course. You can do anything. You could even do it on level up tutorials, and We will help you with that, but selling training is is something that you can do. You have a unique set of understanding and abilities, and You could potentially teach other people to do that. Now not everyone should sell courses. Many people see Some money that some people have made selling courses and say, oh, man. I gotta get into selling courses. But it's not that easy. You have to have all of the equipment. You have to have the ability to Speak clearly in a way that people can understand. You have to be able to produce the content well. You have to have a good understanding about what are the problems that people face, Knowing how to explain those problems, I know Wes and I both teach pretty heavily through the use of metaphor.

That's not a skill that everybody can just have or or conjure up. Right? I think both of us have had a lot of time practicing that skill, being able to utilize those things. So you will need a time investment of practice.

You will need a money investment of equipment, and you will need some place to actually get people to find this thing. Did you know my 1st big course that I ever released, I sold, like, Ten copies off because, I didn't have an audience. So there there's a a huge, huge, huge barrier to entry here, but it is definitely an option if you have The skills and and abilities to, you know, something that other people

need to know, you can teach it. Yeah. Tanner Lindsay, we had him on the show, and he sells, a course on how to use React Query. So, like, if you have a popular open source project, people obviously want to learn how to use those things. So making training content is Sometimes a good option. Not not everyone wants to do that because it takes away from their time actually working on the software, and they they're like, I don't want to be you, Wes, like, I don't want to be the the course person. I just wanna make some money for that type of thing. So that's one option. Definitely, All of I I guess we should say it. Not all of these will apply to every single person. Selling support is another good option if you Have a a popular project. I think one of the huge thing is people email you with their problems, and then You're on the hook for helping them out or or whatever.

So, like, a lot of people are gladly pay for either set amount of hours or access to a a forum or something like that or access to an email, a guaranteed response time. If you're if a company is using your tech To run their multimillion dollar business, they will often be willing to pay couple 100,000 a year To be able to access 1 on 1 training even. Yeah. To the best person, who can help solve your problems.

Yeah. And that might also even to help you out with some like, you know, not everybody's gonna love this because this is open source software. And open source software often means everything is Just free free. Right? But I don't know if you ever seen the GitHub issues for some open source software projects and just thought, this is a total nightmare For the creator, this person just made an issue. He said, ding don't work.

Broke. Doesn't work. Hey. This doesn't work with this obscure set of other plug ins. Or very, very rude. Very rude. And by having a little bit of a, like, hey. If you would like support, you can, you know, Pay 30 you know, for a 30 hour 1 on 1 training session or whatever, and I will teach you how to use it, and it will be this price.

And, you know, that's usually gonna cut most of those things out. It's gonna be a little bit of a filter there for the people who are just looking to complain.

It's a tough call on any of that stuff. I actually do like this metal a lot because I'm the type of person who can, really, really Troubleshoot my way around things. So, like, if I get something for free and the caveat is that I don't get support for it you know, I paid for support on something AWS wise before. I was having an issue with it. I paid for support, and, I got my problem taken care of. I couldn't figure it out. And it worked out fine for me, and I was happy about it. So I I think that's certainly a good option.

Another popular way these days between open source authors, a lot of YouTubers do this, is donation supported. So Patreon is the big one out there. Open Collective is really big in open source software.

GitHub Sponsors. Twitter just rolled out, tips.

So, you can, like, give somebody even just a tip directly on on Twitter. There's a lot of, like, Kinda cool ways, and people often ask me, hey. Do you have a Patreon or a way I can donate and things like that? And I would say, like, no. I I have courses that I sell, and If none of those interest you, that's totally fine. Like, I have a I have a business plan in place for this type of stuff, but I always feel good when People say, like, I wanna donate to you, and I say, don't worry. Save it. Go buy a coffee instead.

Totally.

Yeah. And, there is a GitHub Sponsors thing. I don't know if you have that In Canada, I know I don't know if it is region locked or whatever, but GitHub sponsors, let me tell you. If I'm using a project, we talked about this when, Matt was on from Caddy.

I donate to a ton of projects that I use, whether it is like Babbel or, Caddy or any of these libraries. You just sign up for, you know, $5 a month or whatever. Yeah. Every once in a while, you're donating to all these projects. And If you do that for most of the projects you rely on, get this, not only are you helping support the people that create that project, but you're essentially putting a financial bet In terms of, like, helping that software continue to improve. Because believe it or not, when you fund the things that you use, Usually, that funding comes back to help you in the end because the creator who created or the community that's around it is then going to have more resources to update, improve, continue to grow that thing. And if you rely on it, I mean, you gotta support that stuff. And that's why often you'll see Some of these libraries that have a big big time companies, you'll see big time companies putting down real sponsorship money for these projects Yeah. Because they rely on them. Like, what is it? The,

Evan Yu dev behind Vue Yeah. And Veet? Like, he's full time on sponsorship money, Which is amazing that, like, it doesn't have to be a company that hires him, and he does this thing as, like, a side time thing. And he doesn't also have to create a master view amazing course .com to support himself. He can just go full go on these tools that are changing people's lives, and the community can support that, which is really, really cool. And the software is better for because of it. Totally. The last 1 would be to sell merch,

which is actually kind of a fun one. Merch, as Wes has found, is If you're doing it yourself, it can be a bit of a pain, but you can always set up with one of these whole shipping, service things where, like, companies like Gatsby or They have merch, and you can buy the merch and it will help support the company. It'll help support the software's development.

And you can make some really cool merch if you have an a project with a A cool logo? Hey. People might want that. And so I don't know if I'd recommend going out unless your project is big, big, big or whatever. I I don't know if I'd recommend going on making a 1000, 10,000 t shirts and having those sit in your house, but there's definitely a lot of options there as far as merch goes for Providing

projects with funding or even, you know, your side projects with funding. Teespring is a good one to go with in this case if you want people to be able to Support you, but you don't wanna put any money into into this type of thing, then Teespring is a pretty reputable one. There's a lot of shady businesses in that area, but Teespring seems to be a good one. Totally. Next ones we have here are corporation supported. So that's kinda community supported, though I guess we did sorta touch on corporation in the donation supported, but you can also if you have eyeballs on your thing, You can do things like ads. So, obviously, ads is probably the biggest way that a lot of YouTube only creators make their money.

Pre roll, post roll. I have ads on all of my YouTube videos. You turn them on as well, Scott? Only my older ones. I've stopped turning it on

recently because YouTube just doesn't pay out enough. Granted, if you if you're a a big time channel, you can make enough money. And, Certainly, at some points in my career, YouTube was paying my entire rent, which is great when you have another job. But, like, If it's just paying your rent and that's your only job, it's a little rough. But the ads are anybody who I know who spend time on YouTube has always said you have to pull.

If you wanna be sustainable, you have to find ways to earn money off of YouTube, but the ads are definitely a good baseline for at least getting you up there. And the way people really earn money on YouTube is through sponcon, sponsored content, whether that is like I get a lot of emails.

I wanna say, I'm not trying to brag here. I have a a YouTube channel that has, like, 300,000 followers. Right? So because of that, I get a Ton of emails from companies are like, hey. Would you like to hawk my crappy product on your YouTube channel, and we'll pay you x, y, and z? And if you notice level up tutorials, We don't do any of that really, I should say. But that's that's how people make money on YouTube. So so many times, you might see a conspicuously placed Object in somebody's video with the label just happened to be turned directly towards the camera. That is not an accident, and people have been doing that forever and ever and ever in movies and All sorts of things. Sponsored content is nothing new, but that's how people are making major money on YouTube if they are, making major money not through the YouTube ad specifically.

I get those emails all the time from these crappy companies. Usually, they're they're almost always they are not worth it. I got one from From Roomba the other day, and it's serious money too, what they're proposing.

And I could've said, absolutely, Take it. But I said, like, I'm not gonna do some sort of, like, what's cleans the house video that's, like, totally unrelated to programming.

I'm in the middle of this right now. It probably will flop, but I asked them if I could make a video, like Hacking the room. Like, coding it, hacking it. Yeah. We'll see what they say. Like, I honestly, I probably couldn't do anything that's, like, malicious, but I was like, there's open source libraries for it, and you can use If This and That. I was like, how about we do a coding video on how to code your Roomba? And they said, alright. We'll ask Roomba, so I haven't heard back. We'll ask Roomba.

Well, Roomba wants to give me money to do a Scott cleans the house video. No. I'm just, you'll do it. Oh, let's just get it under the table here.

Yeah. And the sponsored content thing is tough. I had I was I had one that was, like, A couple days ago, it's like, would you like to do a not even like an ad for this video. Would you like to do a video on this software as a service, And we will pay you 14 whole dollars per referral.

14? This is like or Usually, they say, like, or we'll give you 1% of all commissions. Like, oh, thanks. That's an affiliate deal. Yeah. It's

Just my dream. Thank you for that. $14 for that one off of a single commission. Oh my. Let me just sell out my entire 3,000 subscriber base and my entire integrity for a $14 commission. Thank you.

Oh, that's good. Does it help that we're both kind of like punk rocker history at heart? Yeah. And that, like, the concept of selling out was so like, I remember being so upset at the Suicide Machines, which is one of my favorite bands. They had some great punk style bombs out.

You know them from the song New Girl from Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 or Pro Skater 1. The Suicide Machines were from my hometown, and they released an album on their 1st major label, And it was, like, Columbia, and I remember being just, like, distraught at how crappy I was. This is like these guys took the cash and ran. Like, that's what they did. And I remember just feeling so upset by that. Maybe it's because of that that my mentality against selling out or, you know, essentially grifting your audience for money is,

very different. Yeah. It's amazing also how many people don't declare that they are clearly doing a sponsorship.

My god. It's illegal too. It's not allowed. It's not allowed. Yeah. And I just don't it blows my mind that these people can get get away with not posting that it is an ad or something like that. It's it's nuts. You can see it from a mile away too.

Totally. Totally. Like, it's and And it doesn't make me feel good about you. Like, if you're gonna take money from companies like Scott and I do, then at least be very clear and upfront about it and be like, this is how we make money. You know? Yep. Or, like, reviews of products that were sent Yeah. To somebody, but that are just, like, nothing but, like, let's go down the features of this product here that was sent. Like, No. This is not a review. You're just you know, you're reading the the marketing packet for this thing. That that's actually something that when I was a A kid, I used to watch all these, like, tech shows on TV where they'd review, like, cameras and stuff like that. And some even now, if you watch, like, a morning show And somebody's on with, like, the 10 best gifts for techies. Oh, it's all a spawn con. Yeah. And it's always just like, no. Nobody wants your SimpliSafe At home monitoring why is this way better? You know?

I mean, any segment on the news Or any of those shows that features a product is an absolute scam, and people really need to be pay attention to that.

What else can we do here? Talking about sponsored content, I've done things in the past. Like, if you go to my CSS Grid dot I o course, I was paid by Mozilla to let them sponsor it, which is a pretty good deal because all I had to do in exchange for it was use Firefox dev tools, which is the dev tools I also already use.

And I also did something with century way, way back on my Redux course where I showed how to install it and track errors in one of the videos, which is really cool, And it's, like, very, very clear and upfront about it, and that that worked out well for them as well. So it's not to say that these, like, actual sponsored content were, Like, I'm literally showing you how to use Sentry because they paid me to do so. It's not necessarily always a gross thing because it can work out really well.

Yeah. And you could also do sponsored content that's not owned by you. That's like a whole other thing. Where, like, I did videos for Figma. I did videos for Sketch Oh, yeah. That lived on both Figma's website and Sketch's website, they still do actually, as well as AG Grid. I've done actually for a bunch of product media even.

Companies will hear my, lovely voice, and they'll say, gosh. We gotta get that voice on our product here.

I mean, reach out. And, usually, if it's something that I'm into, it's a, you know, it's a good deal. Or sometimes it can be a little tedious because they want you make different artistic and stylistic choices than is your means of doing things typically, and that takes a little bit of an onboarding. But it's an option. Right?

Totally. Totally. I had, Mozilla asked me not to use the poop emoji after I completed all my videos, And I was like Oh, that's funny. That's gonna be a deal breaker for me, dawg. And, I was like, half because I was like, I'm not gonna rerecord it, and half is like, Poo poo emoji is kinda my style. Come on. Yeah.

Poop just hits a little bit differently after you become a parent. It's not The same thing.

It's true. My kids love the poop emoji.

It's hilarious. Yeah. We have a poop emoji dog toy.

Dogs and the kids love

it. Other things, you can just think of interesting collabs.

I've done it in the past, and I'm about to do it again with my stickers where The cost of the sticker pack can be reduced because I bring on a a sponsor. In the past, I did, WP forms sponsored one of the packs. They paid for the entire printing of the packs, and then I paid for the shipping and whatnot. And, that just made it a little bit cheaper, and then they also got a Sticker in the pack. They got a a note in the welcome email, things like that, and they're able to get themselves in front of, a whole bunch of new devs in kind of a cool way. Word.

Well, that's all I have for this unless you have more here. There's a lot of options, besides just creating, like, a SaaS.

Like, some people are very, like, well, I guess I gotta create a whole company now. No. There's a whole lot of different people sometimes call them side hustles or even, like, little things like that. But many of the times, it's just, How can I support the work that I'm trying to do? And there's a lot of different options.

If you wanna do open source work, you can. It's gonna be called to do so full time. There's a lot of people who have gotten who've gone out and and made it work. A lot of people have made freelancing work full time. Time a lot of people made YouTube working full time, all of these things, but it's not gonna be easy no matter what you choose. But you do have the skills and abilities to get it done. Alright. That's it for today. If you have any, things that we did not cover, make sure you tweet us at syntax f m. We'd love to hear how you are making money

As a creator, either especially, like, if you're, like, selling something or or you are supporting your passion project some way, we'd love to hear how you do it. Specifically with code and code teaching stuff. Alright. That's it for today. Thanks so much for tuning in. Catch you on Wednesday. Peace. Peace.

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