---
title: 'How to get rich as a solo software developer - The Ultimate Guide'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=A4_TFHzqAAg'
video_id: 'A4_TFHzqAAg'
date: 2026-06-30
duration_sec: 531
---

# How to get rich as a solo software developer - The Ultimate Guide

> Source: [How to get rich as a solo software developer - The Ultimate Guide](https://youtube.com/watch?v=A4_TFHzqAAg)

## Summary

The video explores how a solo developer can build a highly profitable SaaS application, inspired by a developer who earns over $20 million a year from Chrome plugins. It covers mindset, idea validation, tech stack choices, and monetization strategies, demonstrating the process by creating a voice cloning platform called 'vocalized.cloud'.

### Key Points

- **Solo Developer Success Story** [00:00] — A solo developer running a one-man business making Chrome plugins earns over $20 million per year, exemplifying the potential of software side hustles.
- **Making Your Own Luck** [00:52] — Danny Postma built Headshot Pro (12k+ customers) by developing skills first, identifying a problem (expensive corporate photos), and seizing the AI opportunity.
- **Fail Fast, Fail Forward** [01:35] — Only customers can tell if an idea will fail; thus, get real user feedback ASAP. Avoid spending years building in secret only to find no demand.
- **Idea Generation: Voice Cloning** [02:15] — Inspired by a fake manosphere channel using his cloned voice, the speaker created 'vocalized.cloud' for legal celebrity voice cloning.
- **Validate Before Building** [03:08] — Validate the idea quickly (e.g., via YouTube promotion) before investing heavily. Ideas are cheap; execution (especially marketing) is everything.
- **Marketing First, Code Second** [03:47] — Have a marketing plan before writing code: find where users are, bait them with ads/calls-to-action, then deliver awesome service.
- **Choose Boring Tech That Works** [04:14] — Select tech stack that maximizes productivity—e.g., SvelteKit + Firebase (the 'f--- it stack'), plus Carbon design system. Avoid trendy tools unless essential.
- **Firebase Simplifies Backend** [05:43] — Firestore triggers background functions for voice cloning via Eleven Labs API, storing audio, generating secure URLs, and syncing UI in real-time with Svelte.
- **Monetization with Stripe** [07:24] — Use Stripe for payments: free trial with 100 tokens, then charge 69 cents per 1000 characters (vs Eleven Labs' 18 cents). Send transactional emails via SendGrid.

### Conclusion

The video shows that by focusing on validation, marketing, a productive tech stack (SvelteKit + Firebase), and simple monetization (Stripe + margin), a solo developer can build a money-printing SaaS in just two days.

## Transcript

The dude you're looking at here runs a one-man business developing Chrome plugins that makes over $20 million a year. That's four times more than the average NFL quarterback. One of the best things about learning to code is that it gives you the ability to build
money printing machines that regular people can't. In my world, the ultimate freedom in life is to be a solo per newer with a business that runs itself on autopilot. No deadlines, no bosses, no budgotties, just pure freedom, but that's easier said than done.
You won't get there with a four hour work week, and for most of us it takes a lot of hard work and some luck. I've built a ton of side hustles over the years, and almost all of them have failed miserably, but a few of them have been moderately successful, and that's given me enough wealth to move out
of my mom's basement. In today's video, I'm going to show you exactly how I built and deployed my own real AI software as a service application with only two days of programming work, but first we need to talk about the mindset of a side hustler.
Danny Postma recently created a project called Headshot Pro that now has over 12,000 customers. A lot of people might just say he got lucky by jumping on the recent AI hype train, and those people would be absolutely right, but the thing is he made his own luck.
He first developed the skills to build things, then identified the problem of corporate photos being a huge waste of money. Then finally, when AI got good enough to replace photographers, he was able to seize the moment. Here's another anecdote. Movie director Quentin Tarantino wrote a screenplay where Selma Hayek pours tequila down her leg, then
some guy drinks it off of her toes, then guess who he casts in that role. That's what making your own luck is all about. The problem is that most of us won't get this lucky very often, and that's why you need to be prepared to fail early, fail often, but always fail forward.
The only person that can actually tell you whether or not you're going to fail is the customer, and that means you want to try to get real users giving you feedback as soon as possible. The last thing you want to do is spend two years building a project in secret, only to release it and find out nobody actually wants it.
Now that you're in the right mindset, it's time to come up with an idea of something to build. The other day, I came across this trendy new manosphere channel, telling men how to live the gigachat lifestyle, but weirdly, I was the one narrating it, or the body, make
sure you exercise so that you can keep your mental and physical health in check. And I don't ever recall doing that, that's because it's illegally using my cloned voice. I'm not the one behind this channel, and I could tell the FBI to find this guy and put him in jail, but I actually like the idea of people replicating my voice for mass distribution.
I like big bundles and I cannot lie, you other JSTFs can't deny, that went a side blow which in low five is kind of a previous interface, you get sprung. And that's how I came up with the idea for vocalized.cloud, a platform that allows you to use my voice
legally, and not just my voice, but all kinds of different celebrities. So far, I've reached out to Morgan Freeman, Tom Cruise, Scarlett Johansson, Michael Jackson, and many others. None have gotten back to me yet, but I did get a green light from A-list Hollywood actor,
Dax Lane. You might know him from 21 Jump Street, or his YouTube channel, we actually collaborated to produce an AI cartoon recently, that combines Meta's new character animator, along with mid-journey and the voice cloning technology that I'm going to show you today.
I was given executive proof-to-credits on that project, along with my first Oscar nomination for Proopter of the Year. You can watch the full short film on his channel. In any case, there's one big problem with my side hustle idea. I have no idea if anybody actually wants to use it.
Before you get two balls deep into an idea, it's a good idea to validate the idea. Most of us don't want to admit that we're delusional, and our ideas are actually garbage. In this case, I have a YouTube channel to promote my idea, so in the next 24 hours, I should
know if I have a billion dollar idea, or if I'm going to have to take this app behind the barn and shoot it. But here's another thing you should know. Ideas are cheap, execution is everything. By execution, I'm not talking about the technology itself, but rather the business model, because you could build the most awesome app in the world.
But if you don't have a good marketing plan, nobody's ever going to use it. If you're rich, you can pay for advertisements, or pay influencers to chill for you, but assuming you're poor, you'll likely have to do some form of organic marketing, usually through social media like Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, or whatever.
It's no different than fishing. You want to first figure out where the fish are, then put out some bait like an advertisement or call to action, then once a user signs up, you'll want to club them to death and then grill them for dinner. And by that, I mean provide them with an awesome service that they'll be happy to pay for.
Now that you know not to write any code until you have a marketing plan, let's talk about choosing the optimal tech stack. It doesn't matter if you use WordPress, React, or Angular, or build some kind of freak show on Kubernetes, nobody cares except the tech bros on Twitter. The only thing that matters is that it works.
Peter levels another indie maker who earns at least $3 million a year from a variety of different side hustles, uses boring old PHP, and ignores all the trendy developer products tech companies try to sell you. It's critical to find technologies that optimize your productivity, and stick to them unless you
have a really good reason to move somewhere else. For me personally, that tech stack is spelt kit and fire base. Also known as the f*** it stack, I also use the carbon design system from IBM. It helped me get the UI built very quickly, but in most of my projects I use tailwind and
build something a little more custom from scratch. Ideally, you should have a great design to go along with your app with a great landing page that immediately explains why anyone would want to pay for your product. The design should be functional, beautiful, and unique in that order.
A great place to find inspiration is mobin.com, which curates designs from the top web and mobile apps. With any technology choice, there are tons of trade-offs, but I want to highlight a few reasons why this tech stack in particular makes me feel so productive.
On the front end, most developers choose React, but the reason I choose spelt is pretty simple. I just like writing spelt code more so than React. One thing that's extremely demoralizing is working with tools you don't like. It's not that I hate React or anything, I just like spelt more.
I even wrote my own library called speltfire. It integrates spelt stores with fire base data. In the code, it allows me to read data from my back end database by simply putting a dollar sign in front of the reference for that data.
This is quite literally all the code it takes to get an authenticated user, then fetch the data owned by that user. That's pretty cool, but let's talk about fire base. You have some pretty negative trade-offs like vendor lock-in with Google Cloud, and it can be expensive in certain situations.
But here's how it simplifies things in my application. When a user submits this form to get a voice clone sample, it will write this text to the fire store database. But on the back end, a lot of things need to happen. First, we need to reach out to the 11 Labs API, which is the service that handles voice
cloning. From there, we have an audio file that we need to save in a storage bucket somewhere in the cloud. We then need to generate a secure download URL that makes the file accessible only to that one user. And back in the front end, we need to show the user a loading state and update the UI when
the job is done. Why the hell am I doing this? When the initial document is saved in fire store, it triggers a background function that does all the work securely in the background. We don't need to expose any HTTP endpoints to the front end. What's really awesome, though, is that the firebase SDK on the front end will keep the database
in sync in real time. Like initially, the document has a status of processing, and then it goes to a status of complete once we have a download URL. In this felt code, this allows us to use an if statement with the real-time store that produces code that really can't get any more simple when it comes to full-stack logic.
In addition, we can secure this code by ensuring that the authenticated user only has access to its own data, with just a single line of code in the security rules. Now the next huge component of any application is the database. Firestore is a document database that's fast and easy to use, but is not always suitable
for highly complex data relationships. In my case, I just have users, and users can generate many audio clips. It's a very simple relationship that's perfect for firestore. But choosing the wrong database can be a disaster. In general, relational databases like MySQL and Postgres are the safest bet for the majority
of applications, but that doesn't mean they're immune to their own problems. The YouTube channel CodeDamn has a great eye-opening story about how they hit the limitations of limitless scale, with Prisma and PlanetScale. The bottom line is to do your research and be careful when choosing a database, but that
brings us to our final topic. How do you actually get that money? Unless you're some kind of psychopath, you'll want to use a payments API. In my projects, I've always gone with Stripe, but there are many other providers out there.
In my application, I give you 100 free tokens to get started. In my opinion, it's always a good idea to have some kind of free trial to allow users to try out the app. In this case, you can use my app for free, but once you run out of tokens, you'll need to buy more. To handle that, we have an authenticated Firebase Cloud function that generates a checkout
session on Stripe, which redirects the user to a hosted checkout page, so we don't have to code up any of the UI manually. Now, once the user makes a payment, Stripe will send a web hook to our server, which again is another Firebase Cloud function. The web hook will contain data about the payment, so we can look up the user and Firebase,
and then update Firestore with the tokens they purchased. In addition, I'm also using another service called SendGrid in this function. You send a transactional email to the customer with their order confirmation. But how much should I be charging the customer for these tokens? Well, I'm going to use a technique they teach in business school called the Versel strategy.
In my case, 11 labs charges 18 cents per 1,000 characters generated with their voice cloning service. What I'm going to do is just jack up the price to 69 cents per 1,000 characters. And that, my friends, is how you build a money printing machine.
If you want to go into more detail, I'm working on a new, spelt kit Firebase course for pro members that will teach you how to build an app just like this. It should be ready by the end of June, and here's a big discount on pro memberships if you want to be the first to get access. And that, my friends, is how you market a side hustle within a video about side hustles.
Thanks for watching, and I will see you in the next one.