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Ask HN: How did you earn your first $100 and first $1k online?

51 points by bhu1st ↗ HN
I made:

First $100 = Freelancing on oDesk.

First $1,000 = Freelancing as a Web Developer for a client from referral.

How did you earn your first $100 & first $1,000 online?

73 comments

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rozenmd
First $100: I built a SaaS that monitored GraphQL APIs really well, before anyone really used GraphQL in production. I ended up shutting the project down after only having one customer for a year. A few years later, I rewrote it from scratch and made it a website and API monitoring service (https://onlineornot.com), and it's doing significantly better now.

First $1000: After building a few SaaS projects that made "meh" money, I monetized my blog about React, and sold a book about React's useEffect hook. The experience made me realize how much easier it is to sell one-off products than subscriptions.

altdataseller
How much is your saas doing now?
rozenmd
on the way to employing me full time, but still a year or two away
asicsp
Reviewed a technical book (and the follow up video course).

I then started self-publishing programming ebooks. It's been more than 4 years now and total earnings has crossed $10,000.

yyyyddmm
Hi! Can you briefly explain the process? I'm linux and k8s admin and thinking about writing a book.

Thanks a lot!

asicsp
I mostly focus on a short topic. For example, regular expressions, grep/sed/awk, etc. I prefer having plenty of examples and exercises while learning, so that's what I do while writing the books as well.

For producing the ebook, I use pandoc (https://learnbyexample.github.io/customizing-pandoc/) to convert from markdown to pdf/epub versions. I also use mdbook to create web versions.

I've also collected a few blog posts about book writing from other authors here: https://learnbyexample.github.io/my-book-writing-experience/...

bhu1st
How long are your ebooks? Do you cover a language end to end or only specific aspects of it?

I'd like to learn more about your process how can I get in touch with you?

asicsp
Around 100 pages. I pick a short topic like regular expressions and CLI tools like grep/sed/awk. For such topics, I start from the basics and go till intermediate-advanced levels. I use plenty of examples and exercises.

I've written a few blog posts about my experiences here: https://learnbyexample.github.io/tags/career/

addaon
Both: Topcoder, circa 2002 or so, when they would give you hundreds of dollars for a less-than-one-hour coding challenge. Never understood that business model, but it paid for some decent beer.
DwnVoteHoneyPot
Made tens of thousands on online poker from 2002 for about 5 years. Then the gov't decided online poker is bad. Meanwhile 20 years later if you watch sports on TV, every second TV commercial is a sports betting website.
Olphs
First $100: Ads, mainly Google AdSense

First $1,000: Ads, mainly Google AdSense

bhu1st
How much was your monthly traffic at the time?
Olphs
It fluctuated month per month, but something between 500k and 2 million
mfalcao
I made a couple thousand when I was 14 making and selling cheats for online games. I blew most of it on games and computer parts, which were things that as a kid from a poor family I would have never been able to have otherwise.

I’m not proud of the mayhem that my cheats caused, but it was a defining moment in my life - I learned a lot and soon started doing small jobs for various companies, starting a career in software before I was even an adult.

Sohcahtoa82
First $100: Amazon referral account. I set up a stupid website which had a referral link. Also, occasionally I'd post referral links to reddit and Facebook when the product I was linking was highly relevant to the conversation.

First $1,000: Haven't made it yet. My referral account got banned after I stupidly sent a referral link to a finance person at work who was ordering more RAM for my system and wanted to know exactly what to order.

Someone paid me $150 to rewrite a Perl script in Python.

Maybe one day I'll finish writing this game I haven't worked on in a while and reach $1,000 with that.

xu3u32
Why/how did that result in a ban?
Sohcahtoa82
According to the e-mail:

"Purchases resulting from Special Links on your site have been for personal use, resale, or commercial use."

yyyyddmm
what the freak does this stuff even mean.

They bought something with your ref, you should have a piece of the pie, period.

xu3u32
Thats what I was thinking
freeplay
Both $100 and $1000: Way back in the dial up days, there used to be companies that paid you by the hour to run an always-on-top ad bar on your computer while you browsed the web. I wrote a simple little program in Visual Basic to move the mouse, browse sites, and click links. Wrote another program to reload the adbar if it stalled or crashed.

I started to give friends and family a 60/40 split to run my setup on their computers. This also paid referral bonuses on my account.

Ended up making 3 or 4k in total but at that age, I might as well have been Zuck. The internet used to be so much cooler when it was the wild west.

weard_beard
AllAdvantage. I remember getting my 9.35$ check and my mom thought I was selling drugs or something. No one pays for drugs with a paper check MOM.
yarrowy
The days of free dialup internet with the advertising bar oh man
lockhouse
I loved taking the AOL and MSN discs we received in the mail and using them for updating the browsers on our computer. Saved a ton of time on rural dial-up.
kevincox
My first $100 is getting fed up with my existing feed reading and making https://feedmail.org/ available publicly.

First $1000 is still crickets, but I'll probably get there soon.

But I'm not really trying to profit, I just wanted a better reader for myself and figured I would make it available. Making it paid is mostly to greatly reduce the abuse opportunities.

takinola
First $100: I built a site that allows people to list their favorite movies and TV shows and then get notifications when they became available to stream on Netflix. Monetization was through referral links (to Amazon or iTunes I think)

First $1,000: I built a Shopify app. My original goal was just to play around with a new language I was learning but to my surprise it started to get some traction and grew substantially.

ravenstine
How did your users find your site? Ads? Organic? Word of mouth?
takinola
SEO. Each movie added to the site programatically created a new page. The long tail of pages generated enough organic traffic.
amerkhalid
First $100: Placed Google Ads and Amazon affiliate links on my blog.

First $1000: Still waiting. (Unless you count selling old stuff on Craig's List)

bhu1st
Yes it counts if its an internet money.
yboris
First $100: Thirty copies sold of Video Hub App

First $1,000: Three hundred copies sold of my Video Hub App

https://videohubapp.com/

Though I do donate $3.50 of every sale to a cost-effective charity so in theory I made no money for a while until I bumped the price to $5 / copy.

Now sold over 5,000 copies - but it's also MIT open source: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App

bhu1st
Your app size looks very large. Is it an Electorn app?

How do people find your website?

yboris
It's unfortunately Electron. It started out as a 60mb executable, but over the 5 years of updates the installer ballooned (it has to include FFmpeg in it for users' convenience).

I do no paid advertising -- promoted it a few dozen times on Reddit and a few times on Quora. Most traffic is organic (I suspect people search for "porn hub" but type "video hub" and stumble across the top result).

The website (and app!) are translated to almost 20 languages so I have many purchases from Japan, Germany, UK, and all over the world too.

ravenstine
First ~$50: I ran a web proxy website in high school that allowed students to bypass the web filter installed on the network. This was back before literally everyone had a cell phone and before 4G, so it was really the only way to surf MySpace, eBaumsWorld, and YouTube during class. I had no idea what I was doing, but somehow I cobbled together this site with PHP so that people could pay for an account through PayPal. I gave away accounts to various students and even a few teachers started using it. Every time the web filter blocked my domain, I just switched to another domain and sent an email to all my users with the new link. I didn't make much revenue because I only charged people a few bucks, and the site might have been a net loss, but it was fun and mostly for my benefit.

First $100: In the early days of YouTube, I ran a fan site for a channel and had permission from that YouTuber to collect ad revenue in exchange for running the site and backing up their content.

First $1,000: Probably the ad revenue from the same site I was running, but other than that, I got some freelance web developer gigs years later that paid out far more than that.

Doches
First $1,000 (and first $100, since it was a $1k contract): I made multiple semi-popular icon sets for KDE over 1999-2000, posting them all as FOSS-licensed artwork on kde-look.org. About a year into that I got an email from a random small startup, praising my work and offering me a fixed rate contract to do a novel icon set for their product, a GUI-ified backup client for Linux desktops.

Amazingly, they persisted even after learning that I was 14 at the time. My poor parents had zero idea what it was their kid did on his computer all the time; I imagine the conversation where I passed the phone to my mom to talk to their CTO was probably one of the more surreal things ever to happen — to either of them!

SethKinast
Haha, I was on the other end of this call around 2004-2005. Someone had a nice portfolio of iconography, UX constructs, etc., and I reached out to commission a theme for our software.

She had to ask her parents for permission because it turned out she was 15. I had to talk to her mom and convince her that we were an actual company trying to hire their daughter.

We used that theme for the life of the product, though!

bhu1st
What would you recommend to an aspiring graphic designer do to make their first $100 these days?
admissionsguy
$100: reselling items in an online game called Project Entropia

$1000: freelancing on Elance

ROTMetro
First $100 affiliate links/adsense on my blog.

First $1000 after the 2008 tech bust I automated a process to look for expiring domains, analyze them for interest (either as a business idea or potential to build out a website) and got a few banger domain names that I had no interest in using that I resold for $1K+. I started doing this because my ex-wife insisted we spend quality time together, which was us watching reality TV while she surfed Facebook so I needed something to do to not go crazy but that didn't take much attention so I could quickly context shift away from it.

bhu1st
I did this an earned $35 once. The process was manual. It would be interesting if you could share your automation process here or via email.

Good for you prioritizing family time.

ROTMetro
I just took upcoming expiring domains and processed them to get things like the number of returned search results for the keywords in the name (to show interest in the topic and get a potential value also how much competition a website would have for keyword SEO) plus some other mojo I was using to generate a score that would bubble up domains that might be of interest. Pretty sure Google blocks off lots of the ways I was determining metrics now. Basically I just took the tips people did for deciding if a keyword had SEO potential for a blog SPAM farm and automatically applied the rules to upcoming expired domains instead the manual coming up with keyword ideas, see if the domain is available, see if the keywords meet certain tests that most people were doing back then. The tools then sent me an email containing ones of interest so I could do a quick sanity check before picking them up.

But here is the REAL SECRET!!!! The one cool trick I personally used to generate $30k a year in side income while watching TV!!!!! You have to remember how bad things were in 2008. A lot of people just let go really good domain names that they had been hanging onto forever. So the main thing you need is for it to be 2008-2010.

gerry_shaw
In 2010 I wrote an AED Simulator for iPhone because we didn’t have enough in our volunteer fire department to do CPR training. It sold about $100 that year and continues to do so even today. This year I finally decided to give it an update but it very much looks and behaves the same.

https://aedsim.com/

glonq
I've done side jobs for previous employers, but was never ambitious enough to develop a side gig.

All the hustle porn on HN amost makes me ashamed to have only one job right now /s

TheCaptain4815
First $100 = Trading TF2 Hats and then selling them

First $1,000 = Created an 'imaginary' local concrete company on Google and sold the lead(s) to a friend.

bhu1st
Can you expand on your imaginary company? How far did it go? What did you do to make it work?
TheCaptain4815
It's called 'Rank and Rent'. Long story short, you get a business ranked on Google search, Google business profile (essentially google maps), yelp, etc that doesn't exist and forward the leads to someone who gives you a net percentage.

Way way too much to get into, but search for 'Rank and Rent' facebook groups to get yourself started and maybe Youtube.

Def don't need to buy any course people are selling, especially since they go for around $10k if you're tech saavy.

brian_herman
First $100 and 1000: ebay, I also have been freelancing on odesk but I have made more money from ebay.
cqcumbers
First $100 and $1000: In high school I created a website that automatically generated 3D renders of custom mechanical keyboard keycap set designs. There was already a market for professional renders, which people used when organizing group buys, so I thought an automated tool that cost 10x less and with turnaround in hours instead days could be useful. I earned a few thousand dollars over a year or two, but the market has gotten more and more custom, and group buys have gotten more and more professional, so a tool with limited options and generic looking results is now not very good for standing out. Actually I’m not sure it ever made much sense as a paid service, but the existence of paid sort-of competitors made it much easier to ask for money.
kebsup
My GIF making site https://gifmemes.io made over 1k, totally maybe >5k at this point from watermark removals and donations. What was crucial for growth was a few reddit frontpage memes with the link in the comments. Then just slow and steady google traffic increase and now it's stable for the past few months.
hooverd
Alternative cryptocurrency (shitcoin if you will) trading. I also lost my first $100 and $1k online too.

I'd say freelancing WordPress sites for small business, but despite being 99% online/remote I did meet all those people in person at least one.

bhu1st
I do WordPress consulting too. We should connect. Shoot me an email, its on my profile.
altdataseller
First $100 = arbitrage selling anime subtitles videos online (I bought it from another online provider and sold it higher in my own website, but delivery was done by the provider who had it cheaper)

First $1000 = affiliate commission from selling colon cleansing products

bhu1st
Can you buy and sell other provider's assets? Was it private label or what?
altdataseller
This was in the late 90's so it was the wild west. People would email me asking to buy so and so, and their address, and I'd give them my address to send the check or money. Then I would just order that same item in the other provider's website, giving them the address of the person who ordered it from me