Last week I posted an article about Side Projects and Small Bets as a Developer.
In this article, I want to expand on this concept of Small Bets and how you can have a Portfolio of Small Bets by giving you my own experience as an example.
First Small Bet
My first Small Bet is my regular day job.
Might not make much sense to you, but a day job gives you a solid basis for your other activities since it provides a constant stream of income.
A regular job can come in various ways, my advice here is to have a job that doesn’t suck the life out of you in order for you to have some energy left to try other bets.
Remember, small bets work nicely precisely because you can have many of them in parallel, if you have a single bet taking up all of your resources, it is not worth it, you need some resources left to take chances.
Second Small Bet
My second Small Bet is my blog.
I write articles about programming, machine learning, and career in tech.
This article for instance is about career.
I also have a newsletter with over 5,000 subscribers at the moment of writing this article.
Third Small Bet
My third Small Bet are my books and courses.
They are products I sell and are another stream of income.
At the moment I have only written books, but I have plans to create video courses.
Fourth Small Bet
My fourth Small Bet is freelancing.
These are basically extra projects I work on here and there when I have the time and energy.
Freelancing has many benefits like choosing the projects you want to work on, try new skills you will never have any opportunity to make use of in your regular job, and develop non-technical skills like project management and negotiation.
As a newbie or as an experienced developer, freelancing is definitely something you should try as a professional.
Fifth Small Bet
My fifth Small Bet is investing.
I am far from being rich.
But I make enough money with all of my income streams to have some extra each month to invest.
By investments, you can think of anything: stock market, crypto, real state, angel investing.
What to invest in is a more personal matter and you have to think for yourself about what makes sense to you as an investor.
The only advice here is to save enough money and invest to make the money work for you instead of the other way around.
It takes time and work, but so does anything worth it in life.
Sixth Small Bet
My sixth Small Bet will be a SaaS or something like it.
I have a few failed ideas already and they taught me a lot.
But I expect to build a profitable SaaS sometime in the near future.
Notice I said profitable.
I am not aiming for a multi-million dollar company or anything like that.
Just something that solves a real need, for real customers, who are willing to pay real money.
Following my idea of small bets, I’d rather have a nice SaaS making a few thousand dollars per month with no employees and minimal support to customers instead of a crazy complex service with dozens of people.
Small Wins
The whole idea is to have multiple small wins with varied returns until they add up to something relevant.
All of this while keeping optionality (both personally and professionally), and a healthy body and mind, since it doesn’t matter if you make a lot of money if you can’t enjoy it.