How did you make your first dollar online? | Hacker News Reader

How did you make your first dollar online?

18 pointslaksmanv30 comments

I'll go first! My story: I was 13 years old and someone in the mIRC chatroom #graphicdesign said they were looking for a logo. I messaged him and he agreed, I designed the logo and he sent me a check for $150 and my parents opened a bank account for me and deposited it.

What's yours?

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I made an app called Random Facts for PalmOS. I was 16 or 17 and got 50 USD mailed to me. That was before app stores mind you.

Recently, I found the app again - source code included - on a website. Apparently I had given it away on a forum years ago, and someone kept a copy.

The code was adorably simple. It was not clever or clean, just the digital equivalent of a kid's drawing you put on the fridge. Software made for pleasure, using whatever works.

https://nicolasbouliane.com/projects/random-facts

I saw a scheme where you make domains and pages like "london best plumber .co.uk" or top london plumber. Then pick a guy to put on it. Put his phone there. Call in a few days and show him the page. He will say thank you and that you have already doubled his business. He will begin to pay you 100 a month to stay as your top pick. He will also pay for a redesign of his existing company website. You will also host the new site you just redesigned and generate recurring passive hosting revenue. You are welcome. My pleasure.

2010 called and wants it’s Google algorithm back ;-)

Nice hussle tho

Helping people on Reddit with tough problems and getting tipped. They would send me whole bitcoins (long ago). I lost the hard drive with the wallet which had several bitcoins. No backups. So, I guess that doesn't count.

Same here, though I only had about three quarters of a bitcoin.

Plain old google ads. My first $ came in a check and it was more expensive to cash it in my country than just frame it. Morale: you actually "earn" something the moment cash is in your pocket. Everything else is plain accounting.

I'm quite young so this happened very recently. Me and my friend created an Android app for students that could let you view our school's online workbook (so grades, lessons, news etc) in the app without opening and logging in the website. Some time passed and the workbook gained popularity among other schools (mostly because it was open source) and so did our app. Then a school asked us to change the ui a bit and paid us 80€. I think I used my 40€ in pc parts and other stuff :) Soon after we stopped working on it and graduated.

There are still like 200~ users using the app even after 2 years since we stopped updating (and it crashes a lot).

Back when the internet began to appear in households I had a friend who started a dial up ISP. I had a personal website hosted there. I found an adult clip and made a web page with a banner ad with a "click here to support". Honestly, I have no idea how people even found the web page. I'd get mailed $20 to $50 dollar checks every so often. I'd have to monitor the bandwidth used so my buddy wouldn't notice. I'm pretty sure I went over but I was never charged extra. The mid to late 90s were an interesting time.

Also, bought a CD burner when they were about $500. Bootleg live CDs of your favorite band were $30+. So I'd do some digging and find some live MP3 and and sell CDs to my friends for $15. There was a narrow window of time to do this before the technology became more common. Does that count as making money online?

Are there ways i can make even 20$ a day currently?I am a junior software developer with less than a year of experience.I have worked with, javascript,react.js and python.And the usual html and css

The commission rate for opening a bank account or getting almost any kind of insurance is about this much.

If you can build a tool that helps people choose these things, add some affiliate links and you are golden.

thanks for the tip

Can you intern somewhere?

I would definitely love to intern,just not gotten the internship yet.

I don’t remember exactly how much it was the first time, but I used to sell WordPress themes (design and coding with full reselling rights) on SitePoint.

I even found the page listing one of the themes I sold with Wayback Machine - "Winning bid: $125". Some people were buying these themes, change the "Theme by" link in the footer and give them away for free. Probably for SEO reasons.

My mom found me a web dev contract on our neighborhood list serve. It was an incredible opportunity to get paid quite well for a college kid. I knew hardly anything and had to learn every skill before I used it because I was the only employee.

In 2000, I sold a relatively high level Diablo 2 account for just over $200 on Ebay. I probably put more than 1000 hours into it so not a very good return on investment, but it sure felt cool to “get paid” for playing a video game I loved!

Selling modified versions of RAT's such as Netbus and Subseven. The modification was about circumventing AV detection, needless to say the clients would return on a regular basis.

Made a website for the guest house we were staying at in Japan in the early 90's. We even bought a digital camera to take pics of the property. Later on iOS apps when the app store was relatively new.

Adsense. I don't remember where I placed them. The internet was wild back in 2004

I made a photoshop brush back in 2010 for a competition which awarded me $100 because it received the highest number of upvotes. I bought myself a guitar with the money :)

Google was paying $1 to put Mozilla Firefox on a computer.

I made a bunch of few bucks or two every x minutes or so, 24h/day. Details escapes me atm.

Ad sales on a Web site probably late 90s?

Though before that sifting through USENET articles for technical gems for a large client paid better...

Does winning online/remote hackathons during college time count as "money I made online"?

Definitely.

$50 to skin my buddy's band's MySpace page. $200 for an actor friend's portfolio website shortly thereafter.

I built a SaaS for hosted GitLab runners and got a subscription.

Mechanical Turk. It probably took me like 4 hours.

Sold a prompt on promptbase

as participating in an online game. earning 70$.

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