I'm curious. Why was it a mistake ?But after actually doing internet marketing, I generally think that pursuing it was a mistake.
You failed. Did you learn ?
The thing is, even if you become a great developer or programmer... if you can't sell (marketing) what you make, you'll fail again. Unless you get in a partnership, which is not really advised if you did all the hard work of programming something by yourself.
I have a colleague. He developed a plugin for Atom.io (a coding software/IDE) after realizing this software had no FTP/SFTP capabilities. The plugin has over 1 million downloads nowadays. What did he do when it blew up ?
He gave his code to the second contributor. 100%. He could not manage the amount of work all this popularity brought. He panicked. Yet, he could've released a premium version of it, subscription-based for something like $4.99/mo. With a stupidly-low conversion rate of 0.1%, he would be getting an extra 5K/mo, passively, and could've hired the second contributor.
Why am I telling (writing) you all this ?
You're seeking Entrepreneurial freedom. Or, freedom through entrepreneurship. Now, you can know how to hit a nail with a hammer, but the business man behind the construction company knows a little bit of marketing, finance, construction...
Whatever the means, even if it's through programming. The ultimate goal you're seeking will require you to sell your product or your services to somebody else. It will require you to take care of the cashflow and reinvest in the business. You will need pretty much everything you learnt through your past internet marketing "failures".
You didn't fail, you just learnt something NOT to do, or something you should've done X way.
Try again, just take another path when the same problem occurs and find your way to the top.
There's A LOT of cheap, yet excellent programmers waiting for contracts. I wouldn't waste my time too much if I was you and I'd kickstart my idea with an experienced dev.
-My $0.02 as a web developer.
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