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.
Ask HN: How did you earn your first $100 and first $1k online?
21–30 of 75 posts
Re: Ask HN: How did you earn your first $100 and first $1k online?
#22First $100: selling my band's music and merch on Bandcamp (https://aversionsband.bandcamp.com)
First (hopefully not last) $1000: same same!
Re: Ask HN: How did you earn your first $100 and first $1k online?
#23I'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
Re: Ask HN: How did you earn your first $100 and first $1k online?
#24First $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.
Re: Ask HN: How did you earn your first $100 and first $1k online?
#25Both $100 and $1000: Way back in the dial up days, there used to be companies that paid you by the hour to run an always-on-top ad bar on your computer while you browsed the web. I wrote a simple little program in Visual Basic to move the mouse, browse sites, and click links. Wrote another program to reload the adbar if it stalled or crashed. I started to give friends and family a 60/40 split to run my setup on their…
AllAdvantage. I remember getting my 9.35$ check and my mom thought I was selling drugs or something. No one pays for drugs with a paper check MOM.
Re: Ask HN: How did you earn your first $100 and first $1k online?
#26First $100 and 1000: ebay, I also have been freelancing on odesk but I have made more money from ebay.
Re: Ask HN: How did you earn your first $100 and first $1k online?
#27First $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.
Re: Ask HN: How did you earn your first $100 and first $1k online?
#28My 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.
Re: Ask HN: How did you earn your first $100 and first $1k online?
#29First $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 ev…
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!
Re: Ask HN: How did you earn your first $100 and first $1k online?
#30Both $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…
The days of free dialup internet with the advertising bar oh man