During a gold rush, sell shovels a.k.a. Web3 apps

During a gold rush, sell shovels a.k.a. Web3 apps

Selling an NFT minting site as a product

Is Bitcoin a scam? Will it plummet? Deep state is behind it,... I heard all of these BS stories and ideas a thousand of times and still after 13 years Blockchain technology is stronger than ever.

Who cares if it plummets or disappears. If that happens I think we'll have bigger problems like a deep recession, inflation, job losses etc.

The main idea of Crypto markets and all other markets revolves around swings. Sometimes value moves up, sometimes it drops down, but the most significant part is that it never stays still. If asset prices were always the same, we would not have a market, meaning no one would trade or earn anything.

So swings are a positive thing.

For over 9 years I am developing all kinds of web apps, for many years main source of my clients were Elance and UpWork.

We could discuss how these freelance platforms are good or bad, but they are very good at showing trends in software development.

Rise of web3 projects on UpWork is insane. You can not compare it to any other stack there.

Also rates for those projects are multiples of normal rates for software development.

Some numbers

As of today there are over 4000 jobs on UpWork with keywords: Ethereum, smart contract, blockchain, web3 and Solana.

For Laravel there are only 2150 jobs. For Vue.js 1732 jobs.

But for React there are almost 8000 jobs.. How? Why?

React became total standard when it comes to crypto apps, mainly because ecosystem of tools was already using React. Number of tutorials and developers outnumbered other frontend frameworks, including Vue.js.

Most requested apps on UpWork

For months I've been tracking new crypto jobs there and majority of them is involving building some kind of NFT minting site with or without a marketplace.

Median budget is ~$3000.

I would say it's not bad if you can productize that service. And maybe sell maintenance as monthly subscription or implement premiums.

Blockchain part inside this app would be approximately under 10% of total code. Remaining 90% I can develop in any web technology based on my skills.

Main feature of this project should be customization options: unique design, additional widgets etc. No one wants some visible clone of the existing service.

And it should be easy to do all these modifications.

Ideally I should be able to add new widgets or options via npm packages, without updates of the core.

First things first

Maybe I went to far with all these complications and I have 0 clients.

First thing would be to actually find paying clients, that's the ultimate test for my idea.

Let me know should I make a series dedicated to this idea or drop it.