[Beldin]

If we here knew of a surefire way to convert a fun side project into a few hundred dollars, a lot of folks here would be doing nothing but side projects. And, around here, folks know at least how to arrive at a working, usable, somewhat finished side project.

I think a trap for software creators is to think that making the software is the hard part about making a successful product that generates income. The hard part of any business is the part you do not like doing, have little experience with and don't really know how to approach. For Marketing majors, the hard part is creating an actual product. For CS folks, the hardest parts include marketing, client acquisition, sales.

I would say: either you give your products / efforts away (possibly in some hobbled form for upselling like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39492618), or you treat the "other side" as actual work and put in the effort to make it profitable. The latter also includes educating yourself on how to go about it, also using professional sources where necessary.

[muzani]

I don't know if there is a hard part. Marketing is easy when the product is marketable. Development is easy when the required features are very clear.

The critical mistake many devs make is making something that just isn't very marketable. It might solve the problem, but say, the screenshots don't look very appealing. The marketer has to sit the customer down for 40 minutes to explain it. If it needs a video to explain, it's probably poorly designed.

Say, you're making a Pomodoro Technique app. It looks like a tomato. Color theme is tomato-like. It makes a ticking sound and a bell sound. There's an indicator of time left. You don't even need words on a page to market this to the target audience.

You can have a Pomodoro app that looks like a spreadsheet and plays some music instead of having a visual indicator. This is both harder to develop and harder to sell. It might do the same thing, maybe better! But it's hard mode.