I didn’t think about my business model before. I just went to work and paid attention to my monthly salary, year-end bonus, project delay and weekend overtime… This may be the situation in the past, ideological awareness did not improve. Read the following books on the importance of self-marketing, personal branding, and personal business models. Realizing that to reach the next level, you need a clear business model:

  • The Growth of Programmers by An Xiaohui

  • Li Xiaolai, The Road to Wealth and Freedom

  • Soft Skills: A Survival Guide Beyond Code by John Z

I may think that the concept of business model does not have much to do with myself, because the impression of business model only exists in enterprises. Individuals need to work for companies.

  • Companies make money from business models

  • Individuals make money through ability and luck


If a business can make money consistently over a long period of time, the business model behind it actually exists from the beginning, but in a few cases, it needs to discover its own business model along the way. The business model for individuals, in fact, has established a fact:

Everyone is selling their time

Because if you no longer have to sell your time to satisfy your life needs, you’ve achieved financial freedom. In fact, before the realization of wealth freedom, all people are selling their time.

Personal business model: the way a person sells his or her time

Don’t assume that people all sell their time the same way, or that there are no good or bad business models.

The first business model: sell once a time

Programmers have a regular job and live a ninety-six year life, finishing one project, immediately following another, and selling off x hours of work every day of the year, excluding official holidays. It seems to be a bit of a batch feeling, perhaps you have thought, batch time is often very low price. This is a typical “sell once per serving “.

Second business model: Sell many times at the same time

Some of them can sell the same piece of time many times, the same piece of time, and the most typical one is the writer. They took a certain amount of time and experience to produce, printed books, and then had the potential to “sell the same copy many times “. Over time, sales of books went up and began to have what’s called “after-sleep income.”

The third business model: Buy other people’s time and sell it

Entrepreneurship is a personal business model of “buying other people’s time and selling it”. Own ability, good idea, start your own business, hire people to work for you, and sell the product. It’s essentially buying someone else’s time and selling it.

In fact, if I want to make progress, I should gradually learn to use various business models, and then try to optimize each one of my own business models. On the whole, many people have been able to make good use of the first business model. The latter two business models need continuous accumulation and learning to master.

How do programmers progress from the first business model to the second? Well, there are signs. We work at ordinary times the basic belongs to short time and heavy task, the pace of the development of the company’s rapid advance we step forward, but often overlooked anything actually has two sides: maybe you put all your time to complete the project, after the completion of the project, it projects into products, sold to more people. This is actually this:

Personal first business model + personal second business model

But in the second business model, the revenue is owned by the company. Isn’t it a bit unwilling, it also hides a truly belong to own the second business model, is to do the project experience and technology, if every time you do a comb after the completion of the project, the problems in the project process, adopting new technology, summary, classification, share, accumulate over a long period, the project you are more experienced at the same time, The knowledge points and project experience summed up can be shared or written into words and printed into books.

One project I worked on in my own work successfully transitioned from the first business model to the second:

My habit is to make corresponding summaries when the project is completed. No matter how tight the time is, I will write down the problems encountered and new knowledge learned during the project and share them. GitChat is a new reading/writing sharing platform. A GitChat consists of an article and an online chat to share your accumulated research in a particular area, especially in the vertical field. Of course, if your sharing is very popular, with the increasing number of people signing up, in fact, you can also get a considerable income. There’s also a geek book module in GitChat, so if you’re smart enough, you can write your own technical book.

Note: Illustration from Programmer’s Growth Lesson

A share at work after completing a project