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

#1

Post by bhu1st » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 2:43 PM UTC

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?

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

#2

Post by rozenmd » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 3:32 PM UTC

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.

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

#3

Post by asicsp » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 3:41 PM UTC

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.

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

#4

Post by addaon » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 3:56 PM UTC

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.

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

#5

Post by DwnVoteHoneyPot » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 4:08 PM UTC

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.

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

#6

Post by yyyyddmm » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 4:09 PM UTC

asicsp wrote: post #3

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.

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

Thanks a lot!

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

#7

Post by Olphs » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 4:13 PM UTC

First $100: Ads, mainly Google AdSense

First $1,000: Ads, mainly Google AdSense

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

#8

Post by mfalcao » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 4:13 PM UTC

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.

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

#9

Post by Sohcahtoa82 » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 4:40 PM UTC

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.

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

#10

Post by freeplay » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 4:50 PM UTC

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.