What is a Full Cycle Developer, and should you become one?

I define a Full Cycle Developer to be the equivalent of a sole business owner, but as a software developer or engineer. You don’t just develop software. You own the entire software development life cycle, and sell to customers. This makes you extremely attractive in the current market, because you are the one-stop problem solver. You don’t sell your clients software, you sell them a headache pill. They have a problem, talk to you, and you solve it. They don’t care about your tech stack or fancy new framework.

From that point on, you are the only contact person. You talk to a prospect and have a unique selling point right off the bat. Namely, you are the person that will create what they talk about. There is no slimy sales person promising the blue sky without much technical knowledge, there’s just you. You are actually the person that will be responsible to make that sky blue. Chances are your prospect has been dealing with annoying “middlemen” before, most of mine have.

So let’s talk about why I decided to become a Full Cycle Developer. Maybe you want to become one as well. If so, there’s a Discord server with like-minded people that you can join.

I want to start this off with a few hard facts about myself, for those interested. If you don’t care, skip this paragraph. At the time of writing, I’m 28 years old, living in Central Europe, hold a master’s degree in computer science (which really is not needed to pursue this), exited my first startup after selling its main product to Airbnb, and make about $30k per month (before tax) in passive income from software contracts and licenses. I’m currently running a 2-person company, with minimal administrative overhead. The business plan and process is rather simple, but highly effective. I want to teach this to others.

Many industries are ripe and pushing for digitalization. Covid really benefitted this push. However, at least in Central Europe, there’s a lack of people that can offer affordable services to non-standard companies, e.g. where there are very specific processes already ongoing and roll-of-the-mill products like HubSpot won’t cut it. As a Full Cycle Developer, you are a One-Man-Army and have very minimal overhead. Not having to pay and manage a team allows you to be very quick in both making offers and creating an MVP. This also allows you to be affordable to your prospective clients. Real world client example: A client pays $4k a month for HubSpot enterprise, a software suite that’s not custom-made for their needs. Offering them a custom software suite that automates a lot of repetitive tasks (which HubSpot simply can not do) and also connects to HubSpot for $2k a month is a good deal for them. It brings you a lot of cash, because you pocket all of it (minus a few bucks for infrastructure costs). A software development agency would have to price their services at a multiple, because they must pay multiple people.

This sounds like you would need to be an absolute top 1% genius. Well, you don’t. Bringing more than one skill (developing software) to the table, namely also testing, deploying, operating and iterating, means that the bar is significantly lower. I once read that in order to be really successful, you need to either be in the top 10% in one discipline or top 30% in three disciplines. I found this to be true.

Do I know developers that write better code that I do? Yes. Do they make more money? Certainly not.

As you can imagine, as always in business, it comes down to getting clients to pay you. If you had a SaaS business, where users complete a signup form and add their credit card, the approach would be different. As a Full Cycle Dev, you don’t develop such software - you make tailored software. Why? Because once your client uses it, it becomes almost unfeasible for them to switch over to another (which means minimal to no churn), while there might just sprout another SaaS product with more funding and steal your customers in an instant. That’s part of the reason why I picked that niche for me.

The stages of signing clients are a bit too long for this post, because I want to explain them in more detail. So hit that subscribe button below to be notified once that post is ready!

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Let’s go full cycle together!