[fishcakes]

Here are a few ideas:

- Selling enterprise software (you can make 10%-20% of an 8 or 9 figure deal)

- Selling securities in some form or another (you make ~5% of deals worth potentially hundreds of millions of dollars)

- high leverage consulting (solving very hard tech problems for lots of people. for example: I have a friend who helps a whole bunch of computer vision companies and makes a ton. Another friend is an SEO expert.)

- Patenting core technologies and selling those patents (A buddy of mine sold his patent for $10M)

- "platform based land grabs". Think of the people who bought tons of domains early in the Web's history. Or the first guy to make an emoji app on iOS. These are different than "starting a company" as you really only need a product and can pull it all off on your own. I suspect there will be more of these in the future.

All of these require creatively navigating business as well as being an awesome dev.

[bgxvsp]

Would you mind sharing some more about how your friend monetized his patent? I'm in a somewhat similar situation (except it's a hardware patent, not software) and would love to learn from a success story. Alternatively I can reach you out-of-band (let me know what's your preferred contact method), or you can ping me at bgxvsp at hotmail. Thanks!

[catshirt]

forgive my lack of imagination / education, what kind of enterprise software could a sole developer create that would land 8/9 figure contracts?

[sosuke]

I took GP to mean as a technical sales person, sales engineers make a commission.

[catshirt]

thanks, i must not have read that too carefully. :)

[fishcakes]

Yeah :)

[JSeymourATL]

Just to add to this brilliant idea of selling--

Sales/Business Development executives are generally the best compensated in most companies. You may recoil at the thought of something smarmy like sales. However, there is an learned art to the process when done well. And leveraging your background on the software development side could prove a huge competitive advantage. Buyers will see you as the Real Deal.

[tomkazarian]

Can I get the contact info for your SEO expert friend?