Consulting pays well (very well) but of course it doesn't scale. I made my first $10k doing that.
Ask HN: How did you make your first $10,000?
11–20 of 97 posts
Re: Ask HN: How did you make your first $10,000?
#12Selling a domain name.
Re: Ask HN: How did you make your first $10,000?
#13Running bots for poker, backgammon, blackjack: https://github.com/alexhanh/Botting-Library
This is actually something I've been toying with for some time. I have a pretty decent poker bot I've built from scratch, but I need a way of interacting with "real" poker clients, and configuring screen scrapers is BORING.
Do you recommend any other methods besides scraping? I've heard of people injecting DLLs into the process of the casino app, but I have no idea how to go about doing that.
Re: Ask HN: How did you make your first $10,000?
#14I made my first $1000 by doing a project for someone while in college which was a javascript based Basketball scoreboard back in 2003. No fancy jquery. Plain old boilerplate javascript and DOM manipulations. It was fun. The guy sold it to high schools for thousands more while my cut was $1000. It was intense and took a while to get it right but it taught me a lot. Since then, haven't done anything like that and just a consultant now!!
Re: Ask HN: How did you make your first $10,000?
#15First $10k was made almost 14+ yrs ago when we were asked to build a website for a music artist. We had never built a web site before nor had we any knowledge on the backend. But we spoke well and seemed to know what we were doing. We spent the first 2 weeks learning how to make it and luckily it turned out decent. That led to about 5 years of consistent work from the same client and launched our new web dev business.
Re: Ask HN: How did you make your first $10,000?
#16I made my first $5000 writing open source code during Google Summer of Code.
Re: Ask HN: How did you make your first $10,000?
#17AllAdvantage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AllAdvantage Back when I was in middle school (on AOL)
Someone actually made money from AllAdvantage? How?!
I think I earned $100 or so but was never paid.
Re: Ask HN: How did you make your first $10,000?
#18The first $10k I made were from ads on websites (pay per view, pay per click, affiliate marketing). In the meantime I sold one of them and then moved to domain names (catching dropped domain names and then parking/reselling them; still own most of them). Then I've built the biggest tattoo community in Poland with over 500k fans on Facebook (currently only making revenue through ads; next month we'll release our first t-shirt). Now I'm concentrating on building an easier and more secure authentication solution for the web (using mobile phone based cryptography instead of passwords).
Re: Ask HN: How did you make your first $10,000?
#19A one time thing a while ago. Consultation job that evolved into a developer gig (when he quit) and that turned into a designer gig (he quit too) and I ended up doing all three.
But I have no complaints though. That company hired some very talented and loyal people who're still together to this day long after I left.
Re: Ask HN: How did you make your first $10,000?
#20Was asked at university who would like to write code for the summer (no other details). I said yes as i had nothing else to do. It turned out to be a project working for a large company which paid the equivalent of $900 a week for 16 weeks. Went a nice way towards our mortgage deposit.