How I made my first side-product Dollar online

Recently got interviewed by My First Dollar Online who of course asked the burning question. It was fun to dig up the old memories.

(I had made a few dirty dollars through Google Adsense but this was my first real first dollar made online)

Back in 2008, freelance clients used to send me ALL CAPS copy to integrate into their websites. Frustrated at the noisy, sluggish, ad-layered online solutions out there to convert case, I bought caseconverter.com and built a minimal, nippy One Page web app.

I didn’t know how to code other than HTML, so ask my dev friend Nic to help with the PHP code. I paid him ~$20 for 2hrs work. The result was exactly what I needed back then:

Click image to open up higher resolution

3 years of use later, I was intrigued by a marketplace called Flippa where you could sell your side projects. Case converting also started to become more native in apps like Word, macOS, etc. – so I thought let’s try this out and put it up for sale with no reserve. The site had zero revenue and 21k visits per month all through organic search.

After 2 weeks I was flabbergasted to witness a last-minute bidding war that landed $805 USD – there was no going back to freelance after this.

What a rush!

How did you make your first Dollar online? Lemme know on Twitter or hello@robhope.com

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