I don't earn ANYTHING with 90% of my work 🤯

Aha, the answer is in your post. You said it yourself :

I can say I'm likely 3x more productive as a result, if not more.

You might be getting shortchanged by your own definition of "productive".

See, today, all I did was write a one-sheet proposal and shoot two 5-minutes videos.
By some metrics of "productive" it is a terrible day! Especially compared to a day where I could have been burning up GitLab servers with activity.

BUT

• These two videos (for a Black November offer) could increase my MRR +10% or more.
• The proposal, if the other party agrees, can be worth multiple 8-figures for my company in 5 years by bringing on a top-level advisor.

So it's all about how you measure "productive".

Here is a lesson I learned from business legend Perry Marshall.
He says to ask,

"What is ONE thing that, if I did it today, it would justify taking the rest of the day off?"

By that measurement, you have not been that productive. The issue is picking the right metric.

Sébastien

PS: I'm not saying that "coding < marketing" though. I'm saying, "most coding work == 0 ; most marketing work == 0".
I think the book "Essentialism: The disciplined pursuit of less" could be super useful to you. It definitely helped me 6 years ago to go from breakeven to 6-figure profits in a year in my previous business (with almost no additional topline revenue, and way less effort).

As a dev, you tend to build products first assuming there is a need for it. But validating an idea/product also includes validating your reach for the target audience.

If you have 100K audience talking about ecommerce and then you build a ecommerce extension, you have a easy reach.

But someone without 100K audience, for the same product, its extremely tough to market.

So, I believe what you are missing is creating a validation around reaching to target audience. I usually write at Micro SaaS Ideas around this and also we have a community of builders at Micro SaaS HQ

Some pointers,

• Instead of creating products, create a Landing page and create a waitlist
• Get on a call and talk to users if they are willing to pay
• Built MVPs/Prototypes/Design screens and get iterative feedback by posting to communities like IH, Reddit, Micro SaaS HQ etc and build traction
• Launch on PH, Betalist etc.

This should give you roughly 50 people on waitlist to get started.
Hope that helps.

Think of distribution channels. I mean places where devs currently look for tools. For example, the VS Code Extensions. Have you considered publishing your tools there?

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Unfortunately, many starting entrepreneurs fall into the same trap of creating new features instead of developing marketing channels

There are only 3 ways of creating a product while marketing it:

1. Build in public - Twitter seems to be the best fit for that for now
2. Create a viral feature - a feature that promotes your product itself (the more customers you have the more eyeballs you get on your product
3. Having such an outstanding product, solving a very niche problem, that people organically promote it to their peers and friends (this one is very rare, and still needs marketing of some kind)

Here's an article explaining how some of the biggest companies today have cracked their MVPs and marketing for their own products - http://kickstartsidehustle.com/a-billion-dollar-mvp/

Join the club. make some but not anything i'd consider spectacular.

I'm in a similar situation with my iOS app. I only learned how to code a couple years ago and I still remember how challenging and painful that was for me. I bring this up because I'm trying to use that experience to give me confidence in learning how to bring a product to market. It's just something to learn after all. If you put in the effort I think you will figure it out.

Do not create a new product until you make the last one, success or failure. I love to create and always have some ideas, but I will not allow myself to create a new product until I have an outcome for the last one.

Bro this is exactly how I feel lately. Couldn't relate more. I've been working on two software companies for the last year, and I made like $100 this whole year out of BOTH of them. Writing this down to let you know you're not alone and hopefully make you feel a little bit better.