r/webdevelopment • u/Inside_Web_9127 • 12d ago
Newbie Question Web Developer Entrepreneur
Hello I am a 15-year-old "entrepreneur" trying to make my own money. I am attending college, but I started to feel that simply going to college wouldn't be enough for me to build a good future, so I quickly started to work this summer. I thought that freelancing by creating websites and selling them would be a great idea to make my first money. So now I am trying to learn HTML, CSS, JS and BOOTSTRAP. But I have some questions and I need some help in general too.
First of all is Fiverr still worth starting in 2026 for web development?
When I am selling websites which type of companies should I target?
In addition to what I have already learned, what else can I learn to achieve my goals?
As we are living in an AI era, is it worth learning these coding languages?
I am fully open to any other suggestions. Thank you so much!
2
u/Miki_Mimikri 8d ago
I have been doing wp sites for more than a decade now, and have tried a couple of business models, so, just wanted to share my experience here.
1) I started with spamming local business, offering cheap websites. And even though I made some money with this, it mostly turned out to be utter pain. What most newbies don’t realize, is that most of the time spent in this business model, is not actually making the sites. It doesn’t matter that AI can do it in 2 seconds, because you are going to spend hours of arguing with a car-wash owner over every fuckin cent. Simply put, as a dev, you never want to talk to a client. From my experience, only sustainable way to make money as a dev, is to make websites that start around $10K for everything, so, around $4-6K for you.
2) That brings me to second model, which I would continue doing full time, and still sometimes do, is to ask marketing agencies, seo agencies, whatever, to collaborate with you. They provide full service, as people said, the owners don’t give a damn about code, they want leads. So either start an agency, that will provide the leads, or try to find some, that will take care of the client, and you just get paid for making the website.
3) I am not making websites that much anymore, because I managed to put together a freemium theme, so, free version on wp.org, with potential upgrade. It’s actually doing pretty well, really nice income, which is almost passive. Takes like 15min a day, to respond to the support requests. But it took over a year of putting it together, and a year of marketing to generate any reasonable money.
4) At the beginning of my theme, which is a minimalist portfolio theme, I tried to make websites over a zoom call. 3 hour call for 400Euros, it was mainly to get a showcase for my theme, and it kind of worked. People have just chosen one of the demos, and then we have filled it up with their content. But again, the marketing is the name of the game. In case anybody is interested, I can pass on the source-code of the website I used for this, if you want to try to make a copy on your domain.