If no one will pay for the solution, the problem might not be that important.
This does not mean that journalism isn't valuable enough to some people. It just means that the market for journalism shrank.
High-quality, investigative journalism is an essential institution for a functioning democracy, yet it's not valued by the people it is most important to: average citizens.
https://theworld.org/stories/2024/08/27/a-rise-in-water-rela...
Money often comes as a side effect but not the motivation that drives you to build in the first place.
The thing that keeps you in the door and makes usage grow is the quality of life. Especially in the business world, most software is terrible. If people like using your software, they will tell others about it and they will be more accepting when things inevitably go wrong. The ease of use of our software and the immediate service we provide when customers ask for help are time and again the things they say keep them using our tools. With good support, even a frustrated bug report can turn into a happy experience.
But in most cases you don't see quality of life improvements unless you also get users.
In other words building it is not enough. Lives need to use it to be improved.
Monetizing an app forces you to concentrate on articulating that value. It frees up resources (ie money) to spend on spreading the word. It offers you feedback on whether this is a meaningful use of your time or not.
Dont get me wrong. An app can add value to a single person. You can give it away for free. There's nothing wrong with that.
Meaning that if you solve valuable problems you will [probably] make money. So spend all your time solving valuable problems not posting about $$
But posting about all the money you are making is just silly unless you want a pat on the back. If you really are making bank and you want to get someone to buy you out, then start talking directly to the big players in your market. Then again, you won't have to, because they won't want to talk to you until you are a real threat to their business, at which point they'll be coming to you. Bragging to your early adopter community about your success just keeps them hyped for a bit.
Just make sure that you understand the the valuable problems are marketing and sales, not code.
Writing code is not hard. (Even an AI can do that.) Building a product is harder, but that's the easy part.
The harder part is reaching people who would benefit from consuming your value. Facebook and Google offer value to you in this space, and because this space is hard they make the big bucks.
Once you've reached the market convincing them to part with money is the next hard problem.
So yes, by all means solve a problem. Build the app, write the code. That is necessary but not sufficient.
>> not posting about $$
Honestly it doesn't really matter what you're posting about. Posting is marketing. Building an audience. It's one way, and yes feel free to do what works for you. Try and be different, don't just follow the herd.
Coding is easy. Marketing is hard.
The ONLY reason I have any interest in someone's output is if it is something they themselves actually care about, what they actually think, etc. I want to know what they have to say. There is absolutely no value in them trying to say what they think I want to hear, worse, what they think most people want to hear.
The second someone says "tell me what you want" I'm out. If I have to tell them that I'm interested in x, and then they go investigate x, what value is that to anyone? What insight can they bring to me about the topic of x? Why should I care what they have to say about x when 2 seconds ago they had no knowledge of it? No one's mere personality is so awesome that just having them do the same exact google search I can do and read the same exact intro material I can read and blatting out their initial reactions based on just that, results in something worthwhile.
Whether your numbers (or your sales) are good or bad, it is a factor to consider, but it can't be the fundamental point of your existence. You have to have some legitimate point that stands on it's own, and only then, maybe, you can live off of it somehow.
If you only care that you somehow get money, and don't care how, what value is that to me? Why would I as a customer give you money for anything? Even if you were trying to pander to exactly what I said I wanted, if I don't perceive that you are deeply knowldgeable and insightful and experienced in that topic, or at least maybe new but genuinely interested in working in that field or on that problem, but just trying to say yes to anything, no way in the world am I choosing you to supply that need.
MrBeast's leaked production document is pretty much exactly this: trying to anticipate what people will click on, what will go viral, and throwing all their weight behind it.
Now it's fair to say that you, personally, place no value in viral content such as that. On the other hand, it's clearly not the case that this content is of no value to anyone. Very broad-based entertainment like this is about providing a small amount of value to a very large number of people.
Whether this is good or bad for society is a different question. Markets have never been able to solve that problem.
I labor in this industry because I enjoy the work and it pays better than anything else I could do, and I try to work for companies doing good things, but I have some misgivings about seeing unpaid open source work in the same light as volunteering. To be clear, as an engineer who benefits I'm grateful, but I'd rather developers were compensated fairly.
EDIT: given the down votes, let me pose it as a question--Is software obviously a public good? Are we actually making things better on balance?
Somehow, this suggests that perhaps your rubric needs amending.
The former is the nature of data itself, the latter having come into the existence the first time a creature with more than a handful of neurons was capable of making the choice to take what was right in front of it as opposed to venturing far afield for something similar. Both predate humans by millions of years at the least, and do not require the abstractions of market and money, or even the homo sapiens which first coined these concepts.
While these two give rise to the freeloading scamp who attempts to read entire magazine at the news stand if they can get away with it, the printing press or coinage are not specifically required, and, if we were to ever meet other aliens with some kind of civilization, they would likely have situations parallel enough to end up in our eventual xenoanthropology textbooks. Assuming they're not so busy coming up with their own copies of To Serve Man that we haven't the time for us to write said texts.
Fastmail, Garmin, Slack etc. WhatsApp had a paid model until Facebook bought it.