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

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

#61

Post by takinola »

ravenstine wrote: post #14
takinola wrote: post #12

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…

How did your users find your site? Ads? Organic? Word of mouth?

SEO. Each movie added to the site programatically created a new page. The long tail of pages generated enough organic traffic.

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

#62

Post by TheCaptain4815 »

bhu1st wrote: post #43
TheCaptain4815 wrote: post #24

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.

Can you expand on your imaginary company? How far did it go? What did you do to make it work?

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.

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

#64

Post by asicsp »

yyyyddmm wrote: post #6
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!

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/...

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

#65

Post by asicsp »

bhu1st wrote: post #53
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.

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?

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/

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

#66

Post by rozenmd »

bhu1st wrote: post #49
rozenmd wrote: post #2

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 "…

Can you please link your blog here?

it's in my bio: https://maxrozen.com/

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

#67

Post by yboris »

bhu1st wrote: post #50
yboris wrote: post #16

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

Your app size looks very large. Is it an Electorn app? How do people find your website?

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.

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

#68

Post by yyyyddmm »

asicsp wrote: post #64
yyyyddmm wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 p…

Thanks for the reply!

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

#69

Post by yyyyddmm »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #57
xu3u32 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why/how did that result in a ban?

According to the e-mail: "Purchases resulting from Special Links on your site have been for personal use, resale, or commercial use."

what the freak does this stuff even mean.

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

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

#70

Post by altdataseller »

bhu1st wrote: post #52
altdataseller wrote: post #33

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

Can you buy and sell other provider's assets? Was it private label or what?

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
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