As an engineer I'm afraid in the age of AI all the easy ideas have been found / lots of companies are working on. It's the hard ones we all know that seem to be intangible. I am still struggling to make things on the side and not feel the weight of my inner thoughts self doubting essentially on "is this juice worth the squeeze if anyone can do it?" but I keep doing it out of the supposed fun I get out of making something. Novel ideas do seem hard to come by though.
On the contrary, AI has sucked all the air out of the room. There are still a hundred thousand normal consumer apps waiting to be built, but nobody's building (or funding) them anymore, they're all off chasing this new thing.
Won't Anthropic or whoever wins just press a button and create the app though?
There's more than one guy selling hot dogs on the beach. Not joking. This is the most important realization I ever had.
Anyway, on AI, lots of people just don't want to do all the QA and interaction to build the software. And those people are willing to pay to not have to.
Design custom hot dogs (software). That's my advice. It's working very well for me. People hire me for my in depth experience in certain fields (logistics, manufacturing, database stuff generally, chemistry). That they can spend time to learn and discuss it with an LLM doesn't change that one bit. I'm earning more than ever.
People use my software because it's a little cheaper or a little better than some other similar software.
There's room for everyone. You don't need to be the only one in your industry.
Expand the breadth of expertise you can offer. Just as has always been the case, people will rather pay you for it than learn it themselves.
Do you mind if I ask how you find customers?
I've freelanced before and always ended going back to a "real job" because I either couldn't find clients, or when I did, they didn't know what they wanted and weren't prepared to pay what it would actually cost.
If you can stomach it, nothing brings new customers like personally knocking doors. Business parks, law firms, local events. A hand shake and a smile are the hardest thing to motivate yourself to do but I think it's the best way to get that initial batch of customers to kick off word of mouth and other marketing channels.