---
title: 'Passive Income Ideas For Programmers'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=wWySnxhZYsc'
video_id: 'wWySnxhZYsc'
date: 2026-07-01
duration_sec: 1302
---

# Passive Income Ideas For Programmers

> Source: [Passive Income Ideas For Programmers](https://youtube.com/watch?v=wWySnxhZYsc)

## Summary

This video presents five passive income strategies specifically for software developers, emphasizing a mindset shift from spending earned money to investing it and living off profits. The core idea is to leverage programming skills to create assets that generate ongoing income with minimal future effort.

### Key Points

- **The Wealth Mindset** [00:54] — The rich get rich by investing their money and only spending the profits, never the principal.
- **Investing Time vs. Money** [03:59] — Even with no money, you can invest your time to create assets that generate passive income.
- **Strategy 1: Build for Free, Get Paid for Life** [07:59] — Offer to build apps/websites for free in exchange for a revenue share, creating a lifetime income stream.
- **Strategy 2: Sell Templates** [13:06] — Create and sell code templates (e.g., JavaScript sliders) on marketplaces for passive income.
- **Strategy 3: Build Plugins** [14:43] — Build and sell WordPress plugins, leveraging the large market for website functionality.
- **Strategy 4: Teach Your Skills** [15:36] — Create a course on a skill and use Facebook/Google ads to automate sales, creating a self-sustaining income machine.
- **Strategy 5: Build and Publish Apps** [16:44] — Build apps that solve real-world problems (e.g., parking) and take a percentage of transactions.
- **Reinvesting Profits** [19:59] — Reinvest passive income into higher-risk investments like stocks to accelerate wealth growth.

## Transcript

all right in this video i'm going to
show you five different passive income
ideas or strategies that i would use if
i was to start at zero money and try to
get to financial independence as
a software developer software engineer
programmer whatever you want to call it
doesn't really matter
and this is essentially the video that i
wish i would have had when i started out
and the aim of the video is to basically
teach you how to leverage
your programming skills to becoming rich
and when i say rich
i mean like actual wealth so enough
money so that you are set
for life and do not need to work again
so let's go
so the first thing that you need to
understand is how the rich actually get
rich
and i feel like i sound like a financial
like guru or a trickster or something
but
that's what you need to understand and
the concept that you need to understand
is actually fairly simple
but the hard thing is actually
internalizing this and actually using it
fully and this is the idea that the rich
get rich by
essentially using the money that they
earn to make them
the money that they spend so this means
that you should never
actually spend the money that you earn
you should instead
invest this money and then use the
profits from those investments to pay
for things
if you imagine what you make in a year
and then you imagine if you didn't have
to spend a
single dime of that money imagine how
much money you would have in 10 years
so like i said this is a pretty easy
concept to understand i think that most
of you guys will understand that
most people in general will be able to
grasp this as a concept
and the idea is basically just invest
the money that you make
and only spend the profits that your
investments make
which means that you never really spend
your own money you're only spending
the profits of what your money is making
and this is however a lot more difficult
to actually put into practice
it's not as difficult as most people
think but it is
a concept that i think that you really
need to internalize before you start
making a passive income
if you want to turn that passive income
into actual wealth
and the truth is that at the start maybe
you won't be able to invest everything
that you make
but i don't really recommend that you do
that either because
none of this of course is financial
advice or anything like that
but i do really recommend internalizing
the mindset that you
never ever want to be spending your own
money
you only want to spend the profits of
your investments
this means that if you want to buy new
shoes or a new phone you shouldn't just
pay for it mindlessly
first try to find an investment that can
make you the money that you need in
order to buy the thing that you want
so let's say that the phone costs a
hundred dollars what i would do then is
spend some time
trying to figure out how i can invest
some money to make
a hundred dollars for instance maybe i
read up on some stocks and i find
something that seems
likely to increase by 10 over the next
month
if i invest a thousand dollars into this
stock and i have done my research
properly
then this stock might actually make a
hundred dollars and i can then take that
money and buy the phone
while keeping my bank balance exactly
the same as it was before i invested the
money
so i know that i make this sound super
easy and it's not actually that easy
at the start you probably won't be
hitting home runs on every single
investment that you make
you may even lose all of your money that
you put into a certain investment
and that's why you don't ideally want to
be investing your own money that you've
worked hard for to make you ideally want
to be investing money that you didn't
work for
so this is where creating that passive
income comes into play
because most of us wouldn't really be
able to
handle or shouldn't take the risk of
putting all of our life savings into a
single
investments dogecoin so what you would
ideally want
is a situation where you get paid money
every month
for work that you did in the past and
this is a main idea that you should take
away from this video
you can build for free and get paid for
life
and now we get to something that's i
think is really interesting which is
that even if you have no money to invest
you can still be an investor
and you can think of yourself as an
angel investor but instead of your
currency being money so you invest money
instead of that being the case you
actually your currency's time you invest
time
now you want to be transitioning over to
investing money instead of time as soon
as you can
but most of us can't really start out as
an angel investor investing hundreds of
thousands of dollars
into super risky startups and hoping
that they
succeed because most of us don't
actually have that money just laying
around
so therefore my strategy at the start
would be to build up
passive income streams by doing some
work for free and in just a second i'll
explain how to actually do that
and then i would use the money that
those income streams are generating to
invest
into more assets that make more money
and this is a concept that a lot of
people are familiar with which is the
concept of
money making money basically you want to
get to a point where you're getting
money for money and not money for time
and that is what will allow you to
become financially free and that is also
the topic that i've been obsessed with
for
a long time now and the old adage time
is money it's actually
literally true because you spend your
time to make
money and money and time in that sense
is just interchangeable
and in the same sense money is basically
something it's just a testament to how
much time you've spent
in most cases so when you're spending
your money you're also by default
spending your time
since you put time into your job and in
return your boss gave you
some money this is not the investment
that you want to be making you want to
make the investment where you trade
money for money
which is what investing in assets allows
you to do if for instance you take ten
dollars and you invest them into a stock
of some kind that you've done some
research on and that you believe has the
potential to increase in value over the
next week or the next month or the next
year
and let's say that you did your proper
research and that that stock actually
doubles in value you now have twenty
dollars
and if you take out your original ten
dollars and leave the other ten
you've now basically invented new money
out of thin air
you used your money to make more money
and if we extrapolate processes like
this one
over like five years or ten years or
even a lifetime
then you have a very good chance of
becoming financially independent
and i would go as far as saying that
it's almost a guarantee
so now that you understand the mindset
that you need to have and how to
actually use the money that you make
once you start making that passive
income
it's time to figure out how to actually
make the passive income to begin with
and i have lots of different ideas and
lots of different strategies here and
i think that they're quite unique as
well because i've watched a lot of these
videos i haven't seen anyone else
recommend most of them
which means that they're probably quite
unique and especially the first one
which
i don't know why no one else is
recommending it because to me it seems
like the best strategy that i've come up
with
and the most obvious one in a sense
so i don't i'm not sure why no one else
is recommending it but that's also why i
think that this video will be super
valuable for you
but the first thing that i would do with
my money is take whatever money i do
have and i would invest it in some sort
of low risk investment like index funds
or precious metals
or anything else that i could find
that's low risk because of the fact that
having money in the bank basically means
that you'll lose money over time
due to inflation and inflation is about
two percent or 2.5 percent per year
which means that your money will
decrease by 2 to 2.5 percent
in value every year which is why if you
ask your grandparents
how much they paid for their home you'll
see that
they paid pretty much nothing for their
home and if they would have just put
that into a bank account today they
would have not been able to buy the same
home
so i would say that's why you need to
spend you put your money into some sort
of low risk investment to start off with
to basically combat
this inflation but do your research
before you do this
and once you've done that you're ready
to start creating passive income streams
so strategy number one is to understand
that you can
build for free and get paid for life
here's how you can offer to build stuff
for free so basically you offer to build
apps or websites or whatever you know
how to build
for free and then you are basically
almost for free because you'll be asking
them for some sort of revenue share in
return
and this means that this can be a super
low percentage especially at the start
but it means that basically you build
once and then you get paid for life
startups often need an app or a site or
something built
and a lot of times early startups don't
really have any money
which means that they cannot really
afford to pay programmers to build stuff
for them
and this is where you come in you build
for free and
in return you get a part of their
revenue share for life
and this sort of thing has the potential
to make you infinite money
and the best way to start would be to
just learn how to make or set up
e-commerce sites
and because e-commerce is crazy popular
today and will probably just get more
and more popular with things like drop
shipping
this means that if you build the sites
for the people that want to start an
e-commerce site then you have the
potential to make a lot of money in the
future
by doing nothing essentially doing a
little bit of work for free right now
and getting paid
for life for doing basically nothing and
this can be super simple you can use
wordpress and shopify to set it all up
within just a day's worth of work
but if you do this please don't
advertise that you're actually coding
the site out from scratch because you're
not
and it won't really matter anyway just
advertise what you're actually doing
because
most people won't really care they just
want a site up
and running and they want it done really
fast and with wordpress and shopify your
customers might be able to actually
handle the sites themselves once they're
up
which means that they may not need to
pay another developer to maintain the
site
which will mean more revenue which again
will mean more passive income for you
and this is just like investing money
because sometimes you'll make
investments that won't pan out and you
won't make any money on those
investments you might even lose money
in this case you won't really lose money
you'll just lose the time that you spent
to build it so you might
end up building something for free that
never really ends up generating any sort
of revenue for you
which is the risk that you'll have to
take in order to be able to make
something like this work
and hopefully if you do this 10 times
a lot of those things will actually turn
out to generate some sort of passive
income for you
and over time you'll learn what to look
out for which means that over time
you'll probably hit
more and more home runs and this is
insanely valuable because you're
basically learning how to look out for
good investments
which will then serve you later on when
you start investing the money that you
make from these passive income streams
into more risky stocks and as an aside i
would also suggest learning a little bit
about the fundamentals of probability
because i believe that this is the most
valuable skill that you can have when it
comes to selecting investments
and this will really help you when it
comes to selecting the projects that
you're working on
for free that will have the highest
probability of then generating passive
income for you in the future
and so what i would look into
specifically is statistics
as it relates to finance usually because
probability usually goes under the name
of statistics
and so that's what i would look into i'm
currently going through a course on
brilliant.org
called statistics and finance that's
perfect for this
and brilliant actually also agreed very
kindly to sponsor this video
if you haven't heard about brilliant
then brilliant is a website and app
designed for learning about
math and science other than the class on
statistics
and finance they also have classes for
learning about computer science
which is perfect if you need to hone a
skill to be able to implement any of the
strategies that i'm going through in
this video
and the reason that you need to learn
about probability before going into
investing
is because most people me included are
bad at understanding how probability
actually works
and it's actually pretty simple so the
math is not super advanced but the
concepts are the ones that take more
time to actually grasp
and you'll want to understand this
because with good understanding of
probability you'll be able to make more
money in the stock market
or with any sort of investing because
you'll be able to figure out how likely
a deal is to be profitable for you
so therefore i highly recommend checking
out this course on brilliant.org
cal holden it's one of the best
investments that you can make in
increasing your future earning power
and the way that i would get started
with this strategy of generating passive
income would be to
either make a post on facebook or
message my friends and family neighbors
whoever
and ask them if they're starting
something and if they need my help
or if they know someone is starting
something then who would need my help
there are even other ways that you could
advertise your skills for free and
simultaneously have the potential to
make you some more money
for instance by creating a youtube
channel where you talk about something
related to what you do
or show your own previous projects in
some creative way
this has the added benefit or the side
benefit that if your channel takes off
then the channel could be a source of
income
although it wouldn't be very passive so
that is the number one strategy that i
would use to be able to create some sort
of passive income for myself
and the second strategy that i would use
would be to
create my own templates it's actually a
really good way of creating some sort of
passive income a template is a piece of
pre-written code that does a specific
task
and this is very common in javascript
which is the language most used on the
web
it's often said that javascript runs the
web so what some developers do
is create templates for certain features
and then sell these templates for
instance you can create your own
implementation of a slider that can be
used on a website to showcase images or
text or whatever
and the reason that i'm bringing that up
is because that's one of the successful
examples that i found as i was
researching this video
and you can basically just create
whatever else that you can come up with
and there's basically a slew of things
out there to create
since pretty much every website runs
javascript and pretty much every
business has a website these days it
means that a lot of people are building
websites
and a lot of people would rather pay for
a template than build it themselves
which actually makes economic sense
especially for companies
since their programmer might actually
cost a hundred dollars per hour
and the template might cost two dollars
and would take their programmer
one hour to build it means that they
basically get a hundred dollars of value
from paying two dollars
and you then make two dollars every time
someone buys your template that you only
spent an hour creating 10 years ago
if you build a lot of these then
basically over time you can generate a
fair amount of passive income
and for some of those templates you can
also charge a lot more than just two
dollars
and this is something that is not
limited to javascript this is something
that you can do for
any sort of programming language for any
sort of thing that you can come up with
some sort of template that someone else
could use
to basically kick start their whatever
they're working on
the third strategy that i would use is
pretty similar to the previous one which
is to build
plugins and so since it's pretty similar
i won't spend too much time on it
but this is something you can do with
wordpress and it's actually a pretty big
market for that as well
and a lot of people pay for different
nice looking templates
so that's a really good way to generate
another passive income stream and i want
to stress something here which is that
you always want to look for ways to
leverage the time that you're putting
into something so everything that you do
you want to find a way to
leverage that thing that you're doing
and plugins and templates are actually a
really great way to do this
if you're building your own personal
website then why not use that to your
advantage by creating some templates for
the feature that you need to build and
maybe a wordpress theme of the
layout once you're done and that way
you're leveraging what you were already
going to do which is building your site
to make you more money strategy number
four is to teach your skills
and this is where i would basically just
take any skill that i have and i would
try to figure
out a way to create a course around that
skill and then i would film that as a
course
and then i would sell it on facebook ads
basically create facebook ads google ads
and i would keep tweaking those ads
until i get to
an equilibrium or not an equilibrium but
a surplus where i'm making just a little
bit more than i'm spending on the ads
and that way you basically created a
course or the course has basically
become a self-sustaining machine
of passive income generation and then
the more courses that you create
the more this passive income stream
grows another way to approach this would
be to also create a youtube channel
where you talk about tips and tricks
related to the topics of those courses
and then link those courses or promote
them somewhere in those videos
if you do a good job you might actually
build a following and then your courses
will pretty much be selling themselves
now the last strategy that i have is the
most exploited one and which is why i
saved it to last and
i also cannot really skip it because
it's also the one that has
i think the most potential to just make
you rich literally overnight
and this is to build and publish apps
instagram
facebook tick tock snapchat angry birds
the list just goes on and there are so
many apps that have been built and
turned into
hundred million dollar companies if not
billion dollar companies
that it definitely is a valid route to
attempt especially when looking at
something like flappy bird
for instance the roi for the person who
built flappy bird must be insane because
it's dead simple to create yet it can be
turned into like a million dollar
business
and that's also why this market is
completely
saturated everyone basically wants to
build the next flappy bird
and so the reality is that what you
actually want to be doing or where the
actual opportunity is
is to find something that people are
already doing but in the real world
and then basically finding a way to make
an app that makes that a lot easier
so the more often people do this thing
in the real world and the more of a
hassle that process actually is
the greater the potential for your app
for instance parking today it used to be
that you had to park and then get out of
your car
walk over to a parking meter find coins
in your wallet estimate how long you
were actually going to stay there
and then get the ticket walk back to
your car put the ticket in the window
and that's what the process used to look
like here in sweden at least
but now you just download an app put in
your registration number and credit card
info and hit start
it will remind you when it's about to
expire and you can easily refill
and that's actually what the most common
million dollar app ideas look like
and with an app like that you can again
just offer revenue share to the parking
lot owner and
anytime someone pays for parking you
just make a small percentage
on that payment and this is the main
type of opportunity that i would be and
that i also
am on the lookout for basically find
something that people pay for that's
recurring or that's very frequent
that could then be simplified with an
app the other option when it comes to
app development is to build game apps
and then put ads in them
if your game gets downloaded a lot and
used a lot then you make some money
and the money that you make from this is
in general not that much
unless it goes viral so this is an okay
strategy and i really wouldn't shy away
from it but i would again try to
consider how can i leverage my time when
doing this
so for instance building and publishing
apps is actually really good to add to
your portfolio
and that can really help you accomplish
strategy number one which is the one
that i think most people should be
focusing on
so in order to achieve strategy number
one which is to
basically build apps for free and get a
revenue share from those apps
basically the people that you build
those apps for they probably need to see
that you actually know how to do what
they want
so in that case a couple of published
apps can really help so you might as
well create some apps with ads in them
that you would already need to do
and then has the side benefit of
potentially generating more passive
income for you
plus you'll learn skills that can help
you understand which apps do well and
which
don't and why so that you then be able
to actually help the people that you
build apps for
to create more successful apps which
means more money for you
again always thinking about how you can
get as many things
out of the things that you're doing as
possible so basically
you want to try to figure out a way to
increase the interest
on your time all right those are my best
tips for creating passive income as a
programmer and once one of these
strategies has started working for you
make sure to put your money to work and
this is where you can start to spend a
lot more time
researching stocks and investment
opportunities to find things that you
can invest in that have a little bit
higher risk but also higher potential
reward
it's money that you make for doing
nothing so you really can't afford to
risk it
but again if you do your research
properly and learn from your mistakes
these investments should become less and
less risky
and since your starting passive income
may only be a few dollars it means that
you'll have time to learn
and to understand how to actually invest
money in the proper way so that once you
start making a substantial amount of
money from that passive income
you will have learned and you'll know
how to invest that money
so yeah i hope you enjoyed this video
and i really tried to put together a
list of
strategies and ideas that i haven't
heard and haven't seen people talk about
as much
and that i think are actually super
valuable especially like i said the
first strategy i think that's something
that's
immensely valuable and i think that i'm
not sure again why most people don't
talk about it
so uh again i wanted to try to put
something together that was
quite unique so that i wasn't just
repeating what other people are saying
about this stuff
so yeah let me know in the comments how
i did or if there's something that you
think that i missed or
something that we can add to this i
think that would be super helpful for a
lot of people
and yeah that's it for this one i hope
you enjoyed it
and i hope that you start making some
passive income from these ideas and if
you do please let me know in the
comments
or in an email or whatever you however
you can find me
all right that's it for this one i hope
you enjoyed it and i hope i'll see you
in the next one