The Economics Of Owning a Business as a Developer

So, you want to own a business as a developer. Most people think that that means building a SaaS. You code something up at night, you launch it, your monthly revenue starts climbing, and one day you sell the whole thing and write off into the sunset. But, that part is pretty much the Hollywood

version. Except before any of that, you will need to deal with the part that nobody talks about when they romanticize developer entrepreneurship, which is the actual economics of the whole thing. And in this video, that is exactly what I'm going to do. And the first number that will hit you is not the one that stops

most people. It's the one that should actually make you most [music] suspicious. And I found this out the hard way because when I quit my quarter million-dollar software engineering manager job, and I decided to dive into the entrepreneurship world, I failed countless time at a bunch of SaaS. And the way that I started my existing

business, B2B Aid Consulting, from the dust seven figures annually, was through fundamentally understanding the economics of the business. Now, starting a business as a developer in the United States in 2026 is going to cost you anywhere between $200 and $2,000. If you compare that to, let's say, a cafe, where you're looking at 150 to 250,000

dollars before you're servicing a customer, or a restaurant, or a gym, or a franchise, all of which will want multiple six figures before the doors even open. Your number compared to those is pretty much a rounding error. And that number being so small is not necessarily as good of a news to you as

you think it is. Because that range of 200 to 2,000 hides a genuine fork in the road that every single developer faces before they write a single line of code. And almost everybody picks the [music] wrong direction. At the end of that fork, you build a SaaS. At the other end, you start a service business.