11–20 of 75 posts
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.
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.
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 e…
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 substantiall…
First $1000: Still waiting. (Unless you count selling old stuff on Craig's List)
First $1,000: Three hundred copies sold of my Video Hub App
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
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.
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!
$1000: freelancing on Elance
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.