
Ask HN: How did you make your first $10,000? - areeve
Or even $1,000, if you're yet to make $10,000.<p>From an entrepreneurial or self-initiated venture.
======
joelgascoigne
For Buffer, the first $10k came from approximately our first 1,000 paying
customers. That said, we've changed our pricing a few times so the number may
not be exact.

The great part about getting $10k from recurring payments is that it can grow
beyond $10k pretty quickly (now $100k+/mo).

As for the real "how", I think the key is to first find out something you can
solve which is truly a problem for some number of people, and then to provide
it and market to people the fact it exists.

------
edw519
I wrote an ERP system for SMBs. (Enterprise Resource Planning, Small/Midsize
Businesses). My first sale was to a 20 person automobile aftermarket wheel
manufacturer for $20,000. I remember sleeping with the check that night.

~~~
dmak
Can I see? How long did it take you to write it? How long did it take you to
sell it? Is it still alive today?

------
ChrisNorstrom
Haven't made $10,000 yet, but my first 1,000 was by selling a calendar I
designed and magnet pens I make by hand and sell here: <http://dayonepp.com/>.
Way back in 2008 I came up with a square-less calendar design that combined
the tradition layout with a todo list:
[http://www.chrisnorstrom.com/2010/12/invention-calendar-
layo...](http://www.chrisnorstrom.com/2010/12/invention-calendar-layout-that-
actually-has-space-for-notes-reminder/). Things got delayed, years later I
tried a kickstarter for the calendar but it failed miserably. My goal was too
high and my video sucked.

Over a year later I just said "screw it" I'm going for it. And threw in $2,000
to purchase my first 250 calendars & boxes & shipping supplies. I didn't know
how I was going to sell them, it was already December so I was late, but
somehow they sold. In a little over a month I sold a whole bunch on FAB.com
and my own Wordpress e-commerce site I threw together. I sold out in 2 months
and ordered another $6,000 worth of inventory mostly for next year. Upgraded
their design so they were more premium and could be rolled up. Taking the
packaging weight down to just 1 pound instead of 2.3 pounds. With the new
design my packaging uses only 6 ounces of cardboard instead of 1.2 pounds like
before. And redesigned my site.

The magnet pens I make by painstakingly by hand by boiling each and every cap
in hot water so the plastic softens just enough to quickly insert a magnet
into before the plastic cools. I searched all over the internet and Alibaba
for magnet pens and just couldn't find anything economical or high quality
enough. All the magnet pens out there were just weak or impractical. Plus with
mine you can recycle the magnetic cap on other pens. I've been selling a bunch
on ebay since last year. It took almost a year to become cash flow positive
with the magnet pens and about 2 months to become cash flow positive with the
calendars. I'm really bad at sales btw, it's my first time. But it's been
totally worth it. The learning experience alone is worth more than collage
classes.

Here's my store I opened up with my products: <http://dayonepp.com/> I've got
more original products on the way as well.

Just for you guys, use promotion code "hn" to get $1 off your order.

------
mistermcgruff
I shoplifted copies of Adobe software from a bookstore and sold them on Ebay.
Eventually I felt bad about this and turned myself into the bookstore owner
and paid them back. This was high school. Does that count as entrepreneurial
or just plain stupid? I'll leaning toward the latter.

~~~
terrykohla
I don't think you slept as good as edw519 with his check that night.

------
AlexMuir
While at university I managed to get a contract to temporarily install covert
CCTV recording equipment to catch staff stealing from a chain of UK retailers.

I wasn't making much money until I discovered I could park outside a local
swimming baths, sleep in the car, and then wake up for a swim and a shower in
the morning. Sadly as soon as I locked the car, the alarm was set. If I turned
over during the night, the car alarm would go off.

~~~
sturmeh
Couldn't you just lock the car by using the internal lock mechanism (e.g.
individual locks on the doors)?

------
misiti3780
Answered a tweet asking for help setting up an open source web service, ended
up landing monthly $1K fee for "maintenance". Worked a total of four hours in
one year for $12K, then the contract ended. I quit my real job soon after

------
brador
Saved my lunch money from junior to college plus everything from birthdays and
celebrations. Every cent was put away.

Worked surprisingly well as a strategy. Recommended, and gives a great start
in life.

~~~
bluepanda_
How did you eat?

------
rprospero
This takes me back to my brief stint with consulting. I knew someone who had a
VBScript web application that kept crashing. I'd never done a lick of
VBScript, but I had cut my teeth on QBasic, so I figured that I could get up
to speed on the language in a week and probably get the bug fixed in another
two. I was straight out of school and only wanted $20 an hour, so we said
$2500.

With all of that out of the way, I finally got a look at the source code.
Fifteen minutes later, the bug was fixed (it was just a missing quote in an
SQL call).

Of course, while they could justify hiring a consultant for $20 an hour for a
three week job, management wasn't happy with the idea of paying a fresh
college grad $10k an hour to fix a one character bug. Thus, I wound up writing
another app that they had wanted, also in VBScript.

If there's a Hell, I'm going there for the SQL injection vulnerabilities in
that program.

------
louischatriot
Consulting pays well (very well) but of course it doesn't scale. I made my
first $10k doing that.

~~~
tptacek
What makes you say that? There are plenty of gigantic professional services
firms.

~~~
darkmethod
Trading time for money doesn't scale.

~~~
tptacek
Tell that to Skadden Arps.

~~~
dctoedt
It's scalable for the partners at Skadden (and similar service firms) to trade
time for money because the time they trade is that of other people (viz.,
associates, and/or analysts at investment banks) who put in prodigious hours
in the hope of becoming partners themselves someday in the distant future.

~~~
tptacek
Sure. That's how you scale a professional services organization.

 _Later_

You fleshed this comment out, which is great, but I want to be careful to say
I'm not endorsing the business model of wringing hours out of people's
speculative hope that they'll reach the top of the pyramid. We don't have
"work 60 hours a week and make partner" model, for instance.

But the general principle of developing and refining skills to the point where
they enable you to ramp up new people and deploy all your people more
effectively is a good one that works in a variety of different cases.

Tech is myopic (extremely) about professional services; many of the largest
firms in our economy are effectively scaled-up professional services
companies.

~~~
danielstudds
Agree that tech is myopic... or perhaps it's just a segment of tech - there
are a lot of tech people working happily for those large PS firms you mention.

------
seanalex
My first $100 was baking and selling apple pies locally. It was successful,
but the margins were just not there due to the price of apples and the time
spent.

My first $10,000 ever made was playing video games. It was all made in one
weekend at a Quake 3 tournament. It was my first tournament ever, so it was
fueled solely on excitement, fun, and sheer determination. I completed 2nd
place, took home a giant check, trophy, and was at that moment in time the #1
U.S. player.

------
agf
1\. I made money high school doing web sites and tech support for individuals
and small businesses around my neighborhood. Most of this work either came
through friends & family or people I'd met while working in a student job
helping people use the computers at the local library branch.

2\. I made more in college by making up a paid job with the student affairs
department (one that did need to be done, not make-work), related to my role
with the student government, and then doing it. Is that entrepreneurial?

3\. After I dropped out of college I worked doing odd jobs / handyman work,
and as a contractors apprentice, doing home renovations. Once I learned the
ropes, I went out on my own and worked for myself doing that.

4\. After I finished college I went back to doing freelance web development,
again working for myself.

While I learned things at all of these, any of them could have been my first
$10k if none of the previous had happened.

In between, I worked non-entrepreneurially at a series of non-profits / not-
for-profits -- a summer camp, my university, a hiking club. I now work for a
growth stage company, and it definitely has its advantages in stability and
ability to focus on the parts of the job you like. No doubt I will work for
myself, and for other non-profits, again in the future.

------
niggler
AllAdvantage: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AllAdvantage>

Back when I was in middle school (on AOL)

~~~
tlrobinson
Someone actually made money from AllAdvantage? How?!

I think I earned $100 or so but was never paid.

~~~
niggler
About.com paid out $800, a few small companies paid $100, but Northrop Grumman
took the prize for paying out $9300

Although not explicitly stated, I think there was a minimum requirement of
$100 to get a payout from a given company. Checks were issued from each
company individually, so you literally had to make $100 from a given company
to get that payout.

------
herval
My first company (a sales force automation product, back in 2002) made 10k in
its second month of existence by selling integration services to two
customers. We were only able to make 10k of RECURRING revenue (by selling
product licenses) YEARS later, however (and the consulting/integration side,
although lucrative, doesn't scale that well and was VERY time-consuming).

As for a "consumer" product, myguestmap.org (2005 - about to go defunct in a
couple of weeks due to changes on google maps' licensing) made 10k in donation
revenue in its first year (it paid VERY handsomely for a product that took me
_a day_ to make, both in donations and in ads). It never generated enough
revenue to sustain itself, though, but was a very fun ride (most donations
came along with a great story on why they were using the service - and that
included all sorts of groups, from cancer patients to sheep farmers trying to
connect with fellow strangers).

------
mickeyben
It was in 2006, I needed some cash to pay my student loans.

At the time I was all about C++, wasn't very good at it and couldn't find any
part time job to continue my CS degree.

One of my contacts proposed me a freelance gig to rewrite the intranet of a
big french corp. It was written in ASP.net 1.0 and only worked on IE. I didn't
want to take the job but when they offered me 5,000$ I said yes without
knowing what I was doing.

After some consulting with friends I went with PHP5, smarty and prototypejs.
It took me a month of days and nights instead of the 15 days initially planned
but it was a blast! PHP, javascript, HTML ... found all this new world way
more funny and productive than C++,boost and wxWidgets/GTK.

Since then, I learned to plan things more carefully (especially when I don't
know the tech) and never stopped coding and working for the web.

------
pallavkaushish
I've been working for around 11 months now as a marketing guy and I now
touched my $10000 mark. In India $10000 is annual average salary of a fresh
graduate. I'm into my 11 month of my first job and I touched it even though I
started with below average salary. And the feeling is inexplicable.

------
mattwritescode
Was 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.

------
zwieback
Paper route. I went through a couple rear axles on my bicycle because the
papers were so heavy. At one point it just snapped right in the middle. I
guess I'm dating myself now, you kids don't remember what an actual newspaper
looks like.

~~~
beobab
My son does a paper round on his bike. :) The tradition is very much alive.

The weight of his papers is quite staggering. I sometimes think it weighs more
than he does. :)

------
mwww
The 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).

------
jere
I made a library application for Epic Games. Looking back, I think I severely
undersold myself (closer to $1k than $10k). Then sold it to another studio.
I'm thinking about converting it to a SaaS app, but I don't know how I'd gauge
further interest (I made a barebones landing page but apparently google won't
let you advertise those).

The one lesson that is extremely clear: _networking is paramount_. I only got
the job initially because my name was thrown around by a friend and was only
able to sell to the other studio because of a connection I made while doing
the project.

------
morisy
A customer read about what we were doing in the newspaper after the governor
threatened to shut us down, and then wrote us a very large check without even
asking the price.

It was never that easy again.

------
codegeek
I 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!!

------
alex_hanh
Running bots for poker, backgammon, blackjack:
<https://github.com/alexhanh/Botting-Library>

~~~
valdiorn
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.

~~~
alex_hanh
I haven't been following the scene for a few years now, so can't tell if DLL
injection and similar methods are detected by casino clients more easily and
thus being riskier todo.

I know what you mean. We did DLL injection, network protocol analysis, reverse
engineering, etc. and almost always went with screen scraping in the end due
to its easiness and universality.

If you are lucky tho, the client might produce logs real-time and you can get
events simply by polling the log file.

------
jroseattle
Lost my job. Updated my resume. Got on the phone. And pinged all my contacts
via LinkedIn.

And instead of taking the next F/T gig, I went to work for myself. 5 years and
counting.

~~~
PostOnce
Doing what?

~~~
jroseattle
First as an independent consultant, moving to establish my own firm and bring
on additional consultants.

------
centdev
First $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.

------
adventured
A content farm. A large scale database of information on businesses in the US
/ Canada. It did well, took a few weeks to build up (from various data
sources). This was the early days of Google Ad Sense, and long before they
concerned themselves much with content farms.

I used it to fund the development of larger, more ambitious projects (kept me
from starving, paid my bills, and paid for multiple servers).

~~~
brador
What do you do now? something related?

------
es20641
I grew up in a small farming community in Indiana and from 8th grade on I
worked summers and after school on a Dairy farm.

I think I got paid $9/hour or something like that, but I worked so many hours
that I had a decent amount saved up after a while.

The work was really hard, and that's what made me decide to go to college for
Computer Science. I respect people who can do that work their whole life, but
it is rough.

------
bradleyland
By performing approximately 105 hours in basic computer repair, from which I
pivoted to...

Nearly doubling that rate for "consultation" for larger companies, from which
I pivoted to...

Dumping about $15k of savings (made possible by a dramatic increase in income
tied with a continued frugal lifestyle) in to an "enterprise" startup, which
made well over $10k in the first sale (took about three months).

------
nicholassmith
Developing an iOS app for someone, just over £1k when it's all finished. Prior
to that, bits and pieces here and there, I made a reasonable bit of money
licensing a photo to a UK newspaper after they'd used it without consent.

£10k would be a big chunk, don't think I'll hit it any time in the next 18
months. Never say never though.

~~~
ceeK
How did you manage to find someone willing to pay £1k for an iOS app? I'm an
iOS dev myself and am looking into possible freelance ventures such as this to
bring in some cash over the summer / university period.

------
eksith
A 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.

------
thisbehuman
Made my first real 1k€ came from developing a few LabVIEW interfaces to be
used in my university's physics courses. Back in the day, in middle school, I
used to host counter strike servers at home but couldn't scale it to make good
money.

------
betterunix
A rather long internship with a certain prominent North American Enterprise
Linux vendor. It was actually rather nice: I learned a lot, I was being paid
to do something I consider fun, and having money is nice when you are in
college.

------
adem
Regular full-time job as a service desk employee. Not the best achievement
associated with it, that's why I'm pursuing a research-oriented education in
university now. I was young though, I hit the mark 1 year ago (I was 21)…

------
orangethirty
I simply asked for the sale. Whatever you are selling, make sure to do just
that.

------
napolux
My first 10k were made in a year or so as junior PHP developer (Italy - 2006)

------
jiaaro
I made a CD (yes, like a music one) and discovered that social media (myspace
at the time) was a powerful marketing tool.

Didn't make it to $10k, but did have a net profit of a few thousand which
wasn't bad for high school.

------
uptown
I made a 3D animation using 3D Studio for the Thomas J Watson Research Center.
I was subcontracted - and very young, and I'm pretty sure the people that sub-
contracted me made a LOT more than I did.

------
ReedR95
High School student here. Made my first 10k the summer after my Junior year as
a software development intern at a startup that had recently been acquired by
a larger tech company.

------
keywonc
Combination of summer internship as a web app designer in Austin, TX, and
graphic design work for my college's alumni office and my professor in
Pittsburgh, PA -- all in 2000.

------
badkangaroo
I started a small 2 person "multi media" company using Macromedia Director.
Had a few cool clients who did some Quicktime3D accelerator cards... That was
around 1994

------
tosbourn
I made a porn site.

------
smoyer
Cutting greens and tees and watering fairways.

------
chippy
Made open source software to scratch an itch in my free time. Later got paid
to develop on this for a contract.

------
adkatrit
i hacked a certain (now deceased) startup right after their first round of
capital and then negotiated a signing bonus when they offered me a job. It was
a very simple xss but i was able to do enough with it to impress the founder
and make some money.

------
soufron
By selling imported dreamcasts...

------
jamesjguthrie
My first £1,000 (about 8 years ago) from a small PC repair shop I opened with
a friend.

------
skbohra123
I made my first $5000 writing open source code during Google Summer of Code.

------
JimmaDaRustla
TBD

------
sturmeh
Is this referring to $10,000 in one payment? (A large sale etc.)

------
shanelja
Buying a domain and selling it for £1,200 a few months later.

~~~
cantbecool
Out of curiosity, what was the domain?

~~~
onlyup
Would love to know too.

------
funkyboy
I did client work. I don't even remember for which client :(

------
czzarr
online poker, starting with $50 and slowly building up

------
tehwebguy
Freelance PHP dev work while I was in college.

------
ZephyrP
Building and selling browser exploit packs.

------
engineerhead
with a blog that covered iOS jailbreaking

------
jacquesm
Selling software licenses.

------
6thSigma
Playing poker in college.

------
gagabity
First $1,000 Admob Ads.

------
EliRivers
Stock-market investment

------
aabbaabb
Selling a domain name.

------
swayvil
building decks. wooden decks. also fences.

