When I started with programming in 1998 there were still companies that invested in their own libraries. Finding help with things online was still hard. We were building state of the art software with the newly released struts. Inventing our maven based on ant with CVS, and our own OR mapping tool of course. Java guys love building frameworks.
Nowadays developers have it easy compared to back then, there is no functionality you can come up with or there is an opensource library for it. Finding help online is also easy there are great things like stackoverflow.com, forums and tutorials to get started fast. Even hosting and building it, you can find free services for. You can build and host your software on openshift for instance, now everybody can start a business without a lot of investment. Your site and thus your business can scale dynamically so no fear of getting slashdotted.
Now with mobile there is still one hurdle left for easy development and that is called _OS dependendcy _if you want to develop a mobile app for all platforms and want them as cool store downloadable apps. You can do this with cordova, but you’ll probably need to buy a Mac because Apple is the most restrictive. There you will have to install Windows and boot it natively or from a vm just to build your mobile app and get it on a device. The turn around from developing to testing is huge and that will slow you down.
There is a cool solution for this and it’s called phonegap build. With it you develop your software on cheaper hardware and on a great OS because they will take care of building it for all platforms. And that is not all they also make it very easy to get your app installed on tests handsets, making building mobile applications crazy fun!
So start coding take a look at some great opensource library like aerogear and publish your backend on openshift and start making money…. if only this last step was as easy as the other steps.