Nothing depressing about that - it's part of what needs doing. The thing I sometimes find a bit depressing is that there's more money to be made selling tools to the miners than there is in the actual products. For instance, I bet patio11 could make way more money from consulting/seminars/books/courses/motivational speaking (haha, just kidding, sorry Patrick:-) than from AR, from how he's describing it.
I'm not sure that's true. My hypothesis is that we find it easier to meet and communicate with people similar to us, so marketing a product aimed at other developers is an obvious path. There is lots of money to be made by getting out of our stupid little bubble--last week I went for coffee with a guy that sells a modern UI for a legacy system in the construction industry. His code base is probably not the prettiest, and he has less than ten clients, but he is a multi-millionaire.
Here's why I think it's true in some abstract sense. Actual details may not be quite so clear cut - apologies to patio11 if I'm tweaking things a bit to make a point.
Let's take the bingo card thing and ignore Appointment Reminder: it makes good money, but seems to have some kind of upper bound in that he's never going to turn it into a multi-billion dollar business.
On the other hand, he's developed some serious competence in things like A/B testing, email marketing, and things like that, and is able to demonstrate their effects on companies' profits and thus command a percentage of those profits or at least get paid really well. So, by selling to companies that deal in the millions of dollars, it's almost mathematical that he's going to bring in more money than by fiddling around with niche products.
That's not to say he could have gotten to B without first going through A (sorry:-), as he gained those skills with the niche product.
Ahh, I think I may have originally caught you before an edit (or just misread). There is probably more money to be made teaching eg. email marketing for someone in patio11's position, but that doesn't extrapolate well. For young developers like myself, I think it would be foolish to target other developers when there are so many valuable business problems that software can solve. (IOW I was contesting the idea that there is generally more money to be made selling shovels, but I do not contest the idea that patio11 or perhaps bdunn might be able to make more money selling shovels at this point.)
