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

Both $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 computers. This also paid referral bonuses on my account.

Ended up making 3 or 4k in total but at that age, I might as well have been Zuck. The internet used to be so much cooler when it was the wild west.

I made a couple thousand when I was 14 making and selling cheats for online games. I blew most of it on games and computer parts, which were things that as a kid from a poor family I would have never been able to have otherwise.

I’m not proud of the mayhem that my cheats caused, but it was a defining moment in my life - I learned a lot and soon started doing small jobs for various companies, starting a career in software before I was even an adult.

Made tens of thousands on online poker from 2002 for about 5 years. Then the gov't decided online poker is bad. Meanwhile 20 years later if you watch sports on TV, every second TV commercial is a sports betting website.

First $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 even after learning that I was 14 at the time. My poor parents had zero idea what it was their kid did on his computer all the time; I imagine the conversation where I passed the phone to my mom to talk to their CTO was probably one of the more surreal things ever to happen — to either of them!

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 "meh" money, I monetized my blog about React, and sold a book about React's useEffect hook. The experience made me realize how much easier it is to sell one-off products than subscriptions.

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

My first $100 is getting fed up with my existing feed reading and making https://feedmail.org/ available publicly.

First $1000 is still crickets, but I'll probably get there soon.

But I'm not really trying to profit, I just wanted a better reader for myself and figured I would make it available. Making it paid is mostly to greatly reduce the abuse opportunities.

First ~$50: I ran a web proxy website in high school that allowed students to bypass the web filter installed on the network. This was back before literally everyone had a cell phone and before 4G, so it was really the only way to surf MySpace, eBaumsWorld, and YouTube during class. I had no idea what I was doing, but somehow I cobbled together this site with PHP so that people could pay for an account through PayPal. I gave away accounts to various students and even a few teachers started using it. Every time the web filter blocked my domain, I just switched to another domain and sent an email to all my users with the new link. I didn't make much revenue because I only charged people a few bucks, and the site might have been a net loss, but it was fun and mostly for my benefit.

First $100: In the early days of YouTube, I ran a fan site for a channel and had permission from that YouTuber to collect ad revenue in exchange for running the site and backing up their content.

First $1,000: Probably the ad revenue from the same site I was running, but other than that, I got some freelance web developer gigs years later that paid out far more than that.

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 substantially.

Both: Topcoder, circa 2002 or so, when they would give you hundreds of dollars for a less-than-one-hour coding challenge. Never understood that business model, but it paid for some decent beer.

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.

First $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.

First $100 affiliate links/adsense on my blog.

First $1000 after the 2008 tech bust I automated a process to look for expiring domains, analyze them for interest (either as a business idea or potential to build out a website) and got a few banger domain names that I had no interest in using that I resold for $1K+. I started doing this because my ex-wife insisted we spend quality time together, which was us watching reality TV while she surfed Facebook so I needed something to do to not go crazy but that didn't take much attention so I could quickly context shift away from it.

First $100: Amazon referral account. I set up a stupid website which had a referral link. Also, occasionally I'd post referral links to reddit and Facebook when the product I was linking was highly relevant to the conversation.

First $1,000: Haven't made it yet. My referral account got banned after I stupidly sent a referral link to a finance person at work who was ordering more RAM for my system and wanted to know exactly what to order.

Someone paid me $150 to rewrite a Perl script in Python.

Maybe one day I'll finish writing this game I haven't worked on in a while and reach $1,000 with that.

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.

https://aedsim.com/

First $100 = A shareware "Desk Accessory" for the Mac. (Early 1990s) It wasn't 100% online: some of the distribution was via BBS, but they still had to send me a paper check if they wanted to pay for it.

First $1,000 = A data editor for the Mac. (Late 1990s)

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

Alternative cryptocurrency (shitcoin if you will) trading. I also lost my first $100 and $1k online too.

I'd say freelancing WordPress sites for small business, but despite being 99% online/remote I did meet all those people in person at least one.

First $100: selling my band's music and merch on Bandcamp (https://aversionsband.bandcamp.com)

First (hopefully not last) $1000: same same!

First $100: Ads, mainly Google AdSense

First $1,000: Ads, mainly Google AdSense

My 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.

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.

Made a script that logged into as many computers as possible at university computers to fake clicks on porn ads. Mid 90’s. Not my proudest moment.

As a freelancer on Upwork in 2018

First $100 = Writing scripts and doing the odd jobs

First $1k = Working on a web application.

Both (if I remember correctly): blogging on Medium.com. It started as (and still is a) personal blog about software development things but it started to get some traction through Google search at some point.

Making a keto recipe app and selling flaxseed/konjac/stevia via that app. I hated ads and decided to directly sell the products. I didn't think it would work but it did.

I'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

First $100: Placed Google Ads and Amazon affiliate links on my blog.

First $1000: Still waiting. (Unless you count selling old stuff on Craig's List)

First $100 = Make a financial model from LinkedIn request First $1000 = Online financial consulting

First $100 and 1000: ebay, I also have been freelancing on odesk but I have made more money from ebay.

first $100: pdf photography courses with weekly chapters

first $1000+: built a shop selling silk scarves (100-odd) I collected myself from Laos/Cambodia/Thailand to balance trip budget (25yo back then, mad travelling). Sold all scarves, closed shop.

$100: reselling items in an online game called Project Entropia

$1000: freelancing on Elance

As a teenager in early 2000s

First $100 = selling PhpBB skin

First $1,000 = website contracting

Building websites as a freelancer.