Selling Code Isn’t As Weird As It Seems
You go to work every day and you get paid either an hourly wage or an annual salary for producing bits for somebody else. That’s what you do, you sell code for a living, and that’s fine. The majority of software developers on earth do just that. But what a shame that those of us who actually build things don’t have other income streams from the same service we provide. A service driving massive, global changes.
The truth is, the nature of work is changing. I’m sure you’ve already witnessed the proliferation of artificial intelligence, the explosion of crypto and the baby steps of quantum computers echoing in the background. So why don’t we, the people who actually build stuff, change the way we monetize ourselves?
There’s nothing negative to say about open-source software. There is nothing negative to say about working for a company for a salary. The point I’m trying to drive home is that there is another way to make money doing what you already do in a slightly different way.
All companies are experiments and SugarKubes is no different. The concept of getting people to pay for code is foreign. It is not a normal behavior for companies to pay for code. They pay for the hours to build code, or for a finished product, but they generally do not pay for code itself. SugarKubes is an experiment for that place in between.
Think about the last time you built the side project. What happened to it? Did you turn it into a flourishing business and quit your job? I hope so, that would be awesome. If so, congratulations, but if you like me, most of my side projects launched, floundered, and then never saw the light of day again. Is code like that on GitHub? Is code like that open source? No, of course it’s not. If it was you wouldn’t have built it as a side project (learning exercises aside).
Every single talented developer I know has some kind of side projects they’ve built or have been wanting to build and from what I’ve gathered the main fear is what to do when it’s done. Either it can be an open-source project, a learning project, or “other”. This is what I built SugarKubes for. That awkward in-between place for side projects and bespoke components to flourish. To reject this idea that everything must either be already a product or must be built line by line.
I think it’s time we tried a new term out. Think of SugarKubes as SAAP, software as a product. We’re just getting started, and I’d like to invite you to become part of that journey by building something awesome and selling it on the platform. Hope to see you there.
