Ask HN: How did you made your first $1 on internet? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How did you made your first $1 on internet?

22 pointsmr_o4725 comments

Hello,

This question is geared more towards people who made a living through internet businesses. How did you made your first dollar on internet

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I made a recipe app. I hated ads, and we figured they were really inefficient too. People in a health recipe app want food stuff, and they'd get ads for chocolate or blow up dolls.

So I released the app with a "store" button that went to a coming soon page, but let people enter their postcode if they were interested. We also released with a really janky chat system that just flooded later with people asking for where to get some ingredients.

We found a partner who sold diet ingredients. They offered to do distribution and delivery, and we'd just tell them who to send it to, then pay 2 weeks later.

I added a janky cart system. Users would click add to cart with their personal details and it adds the whole thing to the db. We'd then link the items into a cart based on phone number && delivery status (I did not take database classes at this point and did not know about normalization and JOIN TABLE).

So we released expecting someone to accidentally click add to card on maybe 3 items. But nope, it was 300 items within the first hour. What's worse was we didn't have an order management system.

I expected most of it to be pranks and fake numbers, but they were real. So I did probably the most heroic bit of coding since college and built a whole order management system in a day. It bundled orders into a "cart", had templates for WhatsApp telling people where to bank in cash, notified an admin if payment or delivery was pending past N days, and let us track who received the orders. Day 1 features. Customers loved the really hands on service, especially us asking if they received the package.

We spent 3 full days, day and night, trying to clear the backlog. Orders kept coming in. I asked an accelerator mentor what to do in such a situation, and he said they'd just take the latest orders because the ones from days ago would already be pissed and cancel by now.

And, how did things turn out? How long did it all last?

I had a side project that I posted on HN, and which was subsequently covered by Fast Company, Gizmodo, and a couple dozen other tech/news sites. I kept the software (Chrome extensions) free for a couple years, but eventually started charging, partly to prove user demand for the purpose of fundraising or convincing technology partners that end users viewed our tech as "aspirin" (which they were willing to pay for), not just "a vitamin".

After the initial batch of signups (from the free users who wanted to support further development), new customer signups were infrequent enough that I didn't have an email filter for the Stripe notifications — and my phone wasn't buzzing all the time. It was a humble beginning!

Nowadays, most of my revenue is B2B (largest customer is Blackboard), but I still do all the customer service for my B2C customers, who pay a couple bucks a month to be able to read faster.

Thanks, HN, for getting me started! [1]

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6335784

thats pretty impressive how did you landed your first B2B customer

My first B2B customer was an app dev who approached me about including my software in his reading app. He paid an initial fee, and a a revenue share. His app was eventually acquired by another company, and they're still paying customers!

In general, you may have to give stuff away for free to break into a sector. Then you prove your value with the first customer or two, and use the qual/quant data from those pilots to get paying customers.

Your are totally correct sometimes you gotta provide something for free to prove the value of your product

I built a SaaS that snapshot monitored GraphQL APIs, before anyone really used GraphQL in production.

Ideally, you'd craft a maximal query that used as many nodes as possible, and it'd check every hour or so that the snapshot hadn't changed (I worked for a small company that couldn't keep their API stable, so I built a tool to alert me as a frontend dev)

It turned out we were the only shop in Sydney with that problem (I actually went in to real startups and asked how they were testing their GraphQL servers), so 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/API/scheduled task monitoring service (https://onlineornot.com), and it might just employ me one day.

Wow the site looks really cool and the design looks very simple and clean.

How did you came up with the idea for this

It was my very first transaction on eBay. I sold an iPhone 1st gen a year after it came out. I got an email asking if I would be willing to send it to an address in some country but the billing address was from someone in Florida. I said I could but they'd still need to verify they were this person... anyways, guessing they got impatient and paid $600 to try and get me to send the iPhone. I was 17 years old. So I was just going to send it. I didn't care. I had my money. What could I really do? They won the bid. I think when the phones first came out, they were $500 so to sell it used a year later for a higher price than what I bought it for was awesome.

So I was getting ready to send it the following day, packaged up and ready to go. And Paypal sends me an email me to let me know I was involved in a fradulent transaction and that they were looking into it, but that I should do nothing. They froze my account and said it was pending an investigation. I was frustrated and checked for 2 weeks and it remained frozen.

After that, I completely forgot about the whole thing and went about my life, and I ended up just keeping the iPhone and using it. Paypal and eBay were still just a few years old at that time and had nowhere the amount of support and business structure or insurance they have nowadays, so I just wrote Paypal off as this crappy company that was preventing someone from receiving their phone and me from getting my money. I was pissed and didn't want to be reminded of it so I logged out.

A year went by and I wanted to buy something on eBay and I had to go through this process of connecting both Ebay and Paypal together again... and I get logged in. The iPhone is right next to me at my desk. And somehow, there it is. There is money sitting in my Paypal account. It's the $600 that was frozen, but this time, it wasn't frozen and I immediately put in a request to be transferred to my bank account. I didn't think it was real until it actually hit my bank account. Back sometime in the early 200s, that was a lot of money... still is to get a bill paid.

They didn't ask about the phone? Just sent you $600 and didn't think about it?

I was quite baffled about it too... but it was likely someone from another country using a stolen credit card so they wanted to get the phone fast which I don't think was very available in other countries at the time. They couldn't ask me anything more after eBay banned their account. Aside from not being able to touch the money anyway, another reason I walked away and waited a year before checking Paypal again was because I figured I might receive an email stating the decision was reversed and I would hear from this person again. They wouldn't have anyway to contact me otherwise. ebay still has a very strict policy about sharing emails through messages. I was 17 at the time and it was my first sale on eBay so I didn't fully understand what had happened then.

~$78 (USD) Freelance Drupal developer.

I had spent a long time in the Drupal forums answering questions, simply because I thought it was fun. Someone sent me a message privately, saying that I had answered one of their questions and solved their problem, and asked if I could solve a harder one privately. It turned out to just be a character encoding issue in the database. Because of currency conversions, it came out to ~$78. I was absolutely floored that anyone would pay for something so "simple", so I started pursuing freelancing jobs. I didn't have a portfolio, so I simply pointed to my activity in the forums as my proof of knowledge and ability. I paid for my music degree, and then a CS degree (without student loans) this way.

> made a living through internet businesses.

Paid rent and bought food as a student by verge picking and garage sale chasing for interesting items and then posting them cleaned up and marked up in local city BBS for sale forums (mid 1980s).

Not long after I was getting a lot of return on software I had written but that wasn't strictly "internet business" save for emails as much of it was networked but isolated.

I made a reader-it-later app。

Even though I have been developing for over a year, I still feel that it's not perfect. Currently, no account system has been developed in the software, only a donation website address is left on the official website. Users can leave their email after paying, and I promise to send them activation codes in the future.

The software price is 60, and the income in the recent 30 days is 300 dollars. The total income is 420 dollars.

I reviewed peoples Resumes on Fiverr! It was only for people in the tech industry. I would thoroughly review them and give 2-3 pages worth of feedback.

Made around $50.

I used to post sound effects on Freesound.org My style attracted the attention of some independent film makers who paid me to do sound design for their film. The film was never released but the work paid for my first car.

I wrote a book! It's not paying for my summer house yet, but it's been very exciting to have people buying a product that I made for myself, not for any other client or employer.

The book is called "Insurgent Marketing" and can be found on Amazon if anyone is interested: https://www.insurgent.ca/p/book

I asked a similar question sometime ago. You might find it useful:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36667198

thanks for sharing this is very useful

I wrote two guest posts for Submittable's blog, Discover, in 2019. That was the year I started college.

They paid US$50 per post, although I got a little less than that because of bank charges (I live in India). It was the first time I got paid for my writing. I wish I'd kept writing for them and other platforms more regularly; I wouldn't have had to start from scratch when I started working as a freelance writer this year.

For me it was Adsense. But I didn't cashed the $103 check Google sent me: it was more expensive to cash out in Spain that what you could get for it.

I made websites.

For physical products, there was a point when I had setup a ecommerce site and sold shell necklaces that I imported.

These days I am focused on creating microcourses.

Early 2000 won a 2 dollar check on a free daily slot.

By publishing a font and after a few months I received a donation of a dollar.

I bought a small side project that was already making some money. Boom.

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