Being able to successfully ship things is a useful muscle to develop. People who can program radically overestimate where the bar is for being able to charge money for things. (And underestimate how much money businesses pay for just about everything.)
People who can program radically overestimate where the bar is for being able to charge
Very late response here just to second what Patrick said, but...
My latest anecdote to reinforce this is the person who wanted to pay me for the Arduino software I wrote for him in about 5 minutes, but I declined (that's on the order of the amount of help I give out on the internets for free). Not kidding: being generous, it took a grand total of 5 minutes including firing up the editor, while grumbling about how much overkill an Arduino was for the task...
It really is about providing value. He has a $250,000 machine sitting idle a lot of the time and that 10 minutes of code reduced the idle time so he could get more utilization out of it.
Phase 2 is figuring out how many other people have a similar problem and finding them...
If you haven't heard, patio11 is the original creator of Bingo Card Creator [1], which is both an excellent example for your purposes, and as a bonus he's helpfully shared many useful lessons from it on his blog [2].
