What Is The Next Big Thing in Tech?

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Transcript Of The Video

John Sonmez: How do you develop a vision for future trends? One of you emailed me and now you're making me do work and make damn videos. I would have just bought, I don't know, like a 100,000 Bitcoin for a dollar.

I'm John from SimpleProgrammer.com. On this channel, I teach you how to be an awesome developer, how to develop the soft skills that you need in order to succeed in life as a developer to be funny, not funny, but maybe charming a little bit, and to make more money. That's what we all want to do. We want to make more money. Want to impress our bosses. We don't want to be the stereotypical software development nerd. We want to be the fucking, awesome, kick ass, developer, rock star guy, that everyone wants to hire.

You probably know you have worldwide audience. I'm writing you from Moscow, Russia.

All right. Ilya.

Thank you for all the videos. They're interesting and useful. In some of your videos you mentioned shift to entrepreneur and some kind of vision, i.e. if you saw WordPress, appstore, or YouTube opportunities, you'd be able to make business with that vision. So my question is, how do you develop such a vision? Thank you very much.

I would have just bought, I don't know, 100,000 Bitcoin for a dollar. I remember buying Bitcoin for less than a dollar, when it first came out. So, that's what I would've done. That would've been the great vision. How do you have a vision for the future and how do you do this? Right? And you could have created WordPress plugins and become rich. The appstore, when the appstore first came out, right when YouTube first came out, there were all these opportunities. And Google AdWords. If you would've been on top of Google AdWords, you could have literally been selling, I don't know anything.

What you can do… there's actually a decent book. It's called Smartcuts. He talks about riding the waves and finding those waves. And so, you can't really know, you can take a bet, you can take a gamble, and hopefully you can ride one of those technology waves. But there's always a risk involved with that. I did a Pluralsight course, at one time, on the Linux phone operating system, the Ubuntu phone, or I forget what they even called it. All right. I also did one on the Firefox phone operating mobile operating system. I don't even remember what that shit was called. I wasted a lot of time on those courses. Okay. Because no one is watching those courses and I think both of those things failed. No one gives a fuck about that shit.

I could have gone all in on those things, and if I got lucky, and it was the right trend, and it did take off, I would've been the King of it, because I would've been the first one. You can't really predict those things. Instead, what you have to do is, you have to sort of just pick something and go with it, and not try and get in front of the latest and greatest technology. So that makes sense, right? Look at Leap Motion and VR stuff, right? There's still not a lot of people… you could have gotten on some of those things and rode the wave a little bit, but they still haven't really taken off. It's the wrong thing, when you're focusing on… Okay, I do think that you should be an entrepreneur and have some kind of vision, but don't focus so much on a specific technology.

Things like this. I call it hustle, right? They're not a business. Build a business, not a hustle. I should write a book called Build a Business, Not a Hustle, because the hustle is where you look for a temporary arbitrage situation. You make a bunch of apps for the app store. I'm not saying that's never a good strategy, but you sort of stumble upon it and then you double down on it. Right? So here's a good example. In my life, I created courses for Pluralsight when they first came out, all right? I created an Android course in there. It did well. I got paid like seven grand for making the course, or eight grand. I got a royalty check three months later for five grand. I was like to ch-ching, this is the shit, right? So I made another course and my royalty check went up. And I was like, all right, let's double down on this shit.

So I made courses, and courses, and courses. I made 55 courses. I made millions of dollars from doubling down on that. I did not predict the online learning or Pluralsight wave that was going to happen, and I didn't try and time it, or get in front of it. I just happened to be doing a lot of stuff and that thing started to gain momentum, was taking off, so I devoted all my energy into the thing that was working the best.

You want to kind of pick some things, have some things going on, have your finger in a few different pies and then, this one pie seems to be really good, then put everything into that one pie. But you don't want to try and predict it ahead of time. Let's say that you could, if I could give you some answer to how to have some kind of entrepreneurial vision where you could predict the technology trends, then you shouldn't actually be an entrepreneur and do anything. All you should do is just invest in the stock market and buy those companies. You see what I'm saying? Because that would be the least work and it would give you the value of it. So, if you're not going to do that, if you don't have the ability to do that, then you don't have the ability to do it and putting a bunch of work behind it.

Instead, if you want something to do as an entrepreneur, I'll tell you, this is what you do with your programming skills. You have some knowledge and some areas of expertise already. You can do it kind of two ways. One, look in the programming domain that you have, and look for problems that people have that you can solve for them. Or just look in the general domain and look how you can use your programming skills to solve someone's problem.

So look for problems, and get passionate about a problem that you want to solve, okay. Or an audience, a specific niche, that you want to serve. What's the problem that I'm solving here? What is this company supposed to solve to the problem? Now, we don't do it in the most perfect way. I'm always learning. I'm learning. It's a learning experience, right? As I've sort of done lots of different things, but primarily, simple programmer exists to solve the problem of teaching of developers not having soft skills. Maybe there'll be a big wave of personal development and enlightenment for software developers, and I'll ride that wave and it'll be great. But it doesn't matter because it's a solid business anyway, because it's solving a problem. Long story short, pick a problem, a good problem to solve, be passionate about that problem, focus on that problem, solve that problem for your people.

If you happen to catch one of the waves on the way, then double down on that shit. Go for it. But, with that said, can you still make money selling WordPress plugins today, if you're willing to put in the work? Yes. Can you still make money in the Apple and iOS app stores today? If you're willing to put in the work, or Kindle store, or any of that stuff, yes. It's going to be more work, but now you know that it will work. Okay. It's not a gamble, so you're kind of losing some risk for more work to make the money. Okay. Can you do it on YouTube? Of course. Right? You can create a new YouTube channel today, and in a year or two years, well, maybe three years, you can have 100,000 subscribers. You can build an entire business off of that, if you're willing to put in the work. Okay?

It's the people that are looking for the hacks and the shortcuts, those are the ones that they're just going from hustle to hustle. You never want to be doing the hustle. You always want to be building a business. Does that make sense? I feel like I should sell you something that would help you in this case. I do feel like that, something entrepreneurial thing that will help you to build something for an audience. How about, if you haven't bought it already, How To Market Yourself in the Software World? I'll put the link down below, in order to learn those skills that are going to be extremely valuable to you.

All right, guys. That's it. I'll talk to you next time. Take care.