00:00Hey guys, welcome back. So I had this funny moment the other day. I opened up my Stripe
00:05dashboard out of habit and I just stared at the numbers for a second. Then it hit me. This little
00:11project I barely touch anymore, something I wrote in a weekend, is now making me more money every
00:18single month than my actual 9 to 5. And I thought about how did I get here. In today's video I want
00:24to break it all down. How I turned writing code into a machine that runs in the background and
00:29pays me while I sleep. No fluff, no shady tactics, just a really smart use of skills I already had.
00:36This isn't a quit your job tomorrow video but it is about building something that will give you
00:41freedom, flexibility and real financial leverage over time. Most software developers think they
00:47are doing great because they make decent money. And yeah, compared to other fields we are paid well.
00:53But here is the problem. You are still trading your time for money. And there are only so many
00:59hours in a day. Worse, the job market is brutal right now. Hiring is low, juniors are struggling
01:05to land interviews, layoffs are still happening and even if you do have a secure job, chances are
01:12your salary isn't growing like it used to. I've seen it myself. 5, maybe 10% raises year to year
01:19and that is if you are lucky. Meanwhile, everything around you is getting more expensive. So what do you
01:24do? The answer I found, and I know this might sound cliche, is to decouple your income from your time.
01:31We are incredibly lucky as developers. The stuff we know how to build can be scaled infinitely.
01:37You write something once and a million people can use it. You don't need investors, you don't need
01:43employees, you don't even need to be a business genius. And out of all the ways you could monetize
01:48your coding skills, mobile apps, SaaS tools, browser extensions, there's one model that's making
01:54developers thousands of dollars in recurring income with not so much effort. APIs. Think about it.
02:01Most apps today don't work in isolation. They need data. Weather data, sports scores, product listings,
02:08stock prices, language translation, you name it. And the fastest, easiest way to get that data is through
02:14an API. Companies don't want to reinvent the wheel. If there's an existing API that gives them the data
02:20they need, they all gladly pay to use it. Especially if it saves them development time, that's much more
02:26expensive. You could be the person providing that API. Once you build one that solves a specific useful
02:32problem and host it properly, you can start earning money every time someone integrates with it. I've
02:38built up handful of these over the last year and some of them took me just a few days to put together.
02:43And now, well, they are generating me over 6000 a month in passive income. No marketing, no cold
02:49outreach, I just listed them on platforms like Rapid API and they basically sell themselves there to
02:55their pre-existing audience. Here's what most people get wrong. They think they need to build
03:00something revolutionary. You don't. In fact, the most profitable APIs I've seen and built are simple.
03:06They do one thing well, like returning calorie info for food items, or converting currencies,
03:12or analyzing headlines. You don't need to be original, you just need to be useful. The secret,
03:17in my opinion, is picking a niche with demand, keeping your endpoints clean, and also making
03:23them readable. That's it. Now, if this sounds interesting but you have no idea where to start,
03:28I totally get it. I had no clue what I was doing when I first got into APIs. I didn't even fully
03:34understand what REST meant. Obviously, there's a right way and a wrong way to go about this. You need to
03:40pick a good niche that's on a come up as I've said, structure the endpoints of your API correctly,
03:44and know how to price it in a way that maximizes revenue, but is still a good deal for companies.
03:50It's not just about writing the actual code, but about understanding how to position it so that
03:54people actually want to pay for it. That's exactly why I put together a full video guide on this where
04:00I break down everything, step by step, from picking the perfect API idea, to setting it up,
04:06and getting your first paying user. It covers everything from the start, including what exactly
04:11is an API, so don't worry if you are a beginner. It also has a lot of free lessons in it to see if
04:17it's a good fit for you, so if you're interested, I'll leave the link to it first thing in the
04:21description down below. The truth is, code becomes powerful when you stop thinking of it just as a
04:27job skill and start seeing it as a tool for leverage, a money making machine. You don't need to go full
04:33indie hacker or quit your job tomorrow, but even one well-built API could change your finances
04:39completely. Give it a few hours on a weekend, and a month later you could be waking up to
04:44stripe payouts without writing a single line of new code. I'd love to hear in the comments what
04:49you guys think about this. Have you tried monetizing your code before? Got an idea for an API you want
04:54to build? Drop it down below. Thanks again for watching and I'll catch you in the next one.
04:59Until then, happy coding.
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