I am trying to build a portfolio of small services at http://staticgarden.com and then charging people for the whole bundle of services. Services like form endpoints, json store etc, mostly targeted at the JAMStack.
Just add stripe, they are miles ahead of the competition and it is just so damn easy to set them up.
Paypal is gonna cut your conversion rate by a huge percent. I had a startup which initially had just paypal and after adding stripe my number of signups doubled. There are a lot of people who hate paypal or don't have an account with Paypal.
1. Create a few open source products/apps: This will teach you a lot about your gaps.
2. Start a blog and have a post per week on a consistent schedule: This will get you some visibility.
3. Bid on jobs on Upwork and other freelancing websites with a low rate: This will get you your first experience with freelancing. Having an initial lower rate will make you more favorable for a job. Also, this is the hardest. You may have to do a 100 bids before you get your first offer. Also, keep tuning your bids, the wording and the content of your messages matter. Think about the person reading your bid and why they would select you over the 100 other bidders.
4. After a few gigs, increase your rate to a proper doable rate.
Also, look out for people asking for resources on twitter, slack channels etc, those tend to have a higher probability of converting. You should look at online communities where people who are working on your stack loiter.
For 3, I really think we as developers don't spend as much time reading source code of others as we should be. So, this solves 2 problems:
1. Give repo creators ability to define the order in which people should read source code using a simple manifest which just lists the source files in an order. We can also default to an order based on the framework/language. E.g. Rails apps have a structure vs Elixir apps which have their own structure.
2. Build an epub/mobi/pdf which can be sent to Kindle or to any other device where the user can browse through the code at their own pace.
I'd go with GitHub, your potential users/contributors have a higher probability of having an account on GitHub which makes it easy for contributions. Moreover, there are a hundred free CI/CD services which work with GitHub and not GitLab.
That seems like a really nice idea. There is already a curated newsletter which sends you a bunch of good links from HN http://www.hackernewsletter.com/. However, you are probably thinking of something more personal which learns things every day. Thanks for sharing it.