I think Elixir has bootstrapping built into its DNA

You could say Elixir and Phoenix have become the life’s work of José and Chris, and that they did it not because some huge company was instructing them to but out of passion and a vision for something they believed in, something that could impact the lives of people in a meaningful way.

It’s one of the reasons why so many of us support them, and perhaps because we see a little bit of ourselves in them too. They are an inspiration to single person/small teams and those who want to change the world in ways where doing it on the fringes may be the only viable option - something we can do thanks to the power of Erlang, made accessible to us via Elixir and Phoenix (and everything else we have) through their influences from Ruby and Rails since that’s where many of us come from.

So yeah, I think there is definitely entrepreneurial spirit on the forum - tho I personally think we have transcended mere entrepreneurship because I think many of us believe in something greater, something where there is a principle higher than that of making money. I also think this is another reason why so many people love Elixir; it’s community in a much truer form.

I’m currently doing my second “side-hustle” project with elixir, my first one was a system I created for the crypto market using Elixir + Flutter. Basically my backend would run a bunch of technical analysis in real-time in all crypto markets available at Binance and allow users to subscribe to them or create their own.

If I recall correctly I was running more than one million combination of market, time-frame, technical analysis algorithm and inputs in a very small server.

The problem with that one is that I, unfortunately, live in Brazil, and after I was done with the project and ready to deploy it (took me around 2~3 years to finish it) I discovered that I can’t make any marketing related to crypto if my company is from Brazil, even if the marketing is for some other country, so without marketing, I couldn’t make the number of users increase the rate I wanted to make profitable and I had to close it.

After that I started another project in the area of education. It is a tool to help teachers that work with a lot of reports/feedbacks for their students. This one is written 100% in Elixir (Elixir/Ash/LiveView) and I think I will be ready to deploy it probably in about 1~2 months.

I feel that Elixir is an amazing platform to develop SaaS products, it is really fast to have something working and with quality code.

It all boils down to contacts, I found. Knowing people, having others spread the good word about you, and also hanging around with business people whom you might solve a problem for randomly.

I made 600 EUR a few years ago with a 3-line PHP code change and an advice how to asynchronously load JS on a front page of a website. I can’t have spent even 2 hours on the whole thing. Still experience that high every now and then when I remember it.