Recently, I've had two separate conversations with other developers that made realize I need to think bigger.

The first was a conversation with James Perkins. We were talking about his next project, Am I In A Meeting, a service that will change the color of a Hue light based on your calendar availability. I told him that I was impressed that he was already diving into another SaaS project so quickly after Roll Your Tweet. In his response, he contrasted his projects with my open source library releases, and it got me thinking.

The second conversation took place with Corbin Crutchley, better known as crutchorn online. He is wrapping up a Gatsby to Next.js conversion and was walking me through some of the tough parts. Corbin shared that he dove deep into the code on this project, and created a bunch of small libraries to help himself out, and he pointed out how that was similar to the packages I've been publishing.

Now, the purpose of me pointing out these conversations is not to throw shade at any of these guys, James and Corbin are my buds!

But their comments made me realize that I'm focusing too much on the meta. I tend to create free and open source libraries that solve relatively minor problems. While these libraries make developers' lives a little bit easier, it's incredibly difficult to generate income from open source projects.

If I want to begin making money online, I need to think bigger. I need to create SaaS products that solve larger problems, or at least problems large enough that people are willing to pay for solutions.

I'll be including this newfound resolve to think bigger in my New Year's Resolutions. Stay tuned for that post, along with my 2021 in review.