Hasty Treat - Our First Bucks Made From Web Dev, Teaching, YouTube and Tutorials

Welcome to Syntax in this Monday, history treat. We're gonna be talking about the 1st we made from web development amongst other things. Just sort of little first steps into the world of both entrepreneurialism as well as web development professionally for both Wes and I. So we're gonna be talking all about the 1st buck made from web dev. And this episode is sponsored by one of those softwares that you're going to want to have in your tool belt anytime you're working with client facing code because, tool like Sanity at Sentry Scott I o allows you to see all of your errors and bugs in a trackable interface so that you can quickly and easily attach them to GitHub issues. You can check performance. You can attach them to specific resources. Or let's say, Jim sorry for all you Jims out there.

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So first, buck made from web dev. Now this is hard for me to quantify in a lot of these things. I was doing a lot of, like, free work for friends and and times here, and I may have gotten paid for it, may have not gotten paid for some of it. So for me, personally, I'm gonna be talking about some of my projects that I definitively did get paid for early on in my dev career.

Your first check, Wes, for doing is this just this is just straight up client work. Right? What does your 1st check look like from client work?

Yeah.

I I very clearly remember this one because it was it was before even Myspace got super popular. Myspace was certainly there, but it was for a local band called The TypeScript, and I built them a a website. And I remember it was the Iframe. We sliced it up, and you did the whole thing where you export it via ImageReady.

And, they got me $300 for that, which I thought Wes, I think, also included a couple of T shirt designs as well. Oh, nice. And, I remember the check came in from, like, the drummer's mom, which is hilarious. Yeah. And I I had to, like, go to the bank and and deposit it. I think that was really funny.

Nice.

Yeah. Believe it or not, my 1st dev check would have come from my parents because my parents were opening up a tea store, blooming tea Scott. They were opening up a tea store and did not know what to do. And I said, well, I think I could do that. So I put together a Magento website for them, which was really a little bit beyond my beyond my skill level, to be honest. I wasn't necessarily knowing what I was doing in PHP and everything. At that point, I was just Scott of struggling through it. But it worked, and, they were able to accept payment via credit cards and stuff. So that was really it because it Wes, like, you know, my parents' tea store or whatever. It was a nice first introduction.

I didn't have to be a good good entrepreneur or good business owner in that regard. I didn't have to to to hunt them for money. I didn't have to it was all just like a nice and relaxed experience to get my feet wet in what would be an actual client facing real world thing that people would use. I I was just thinking about that, and I also did a website for a pool company. And I don't know if this was before the the band won, but that was my 1st, like,

client outside of just friends doing music. You know? Like, the it was, some it was the drummer's dad actually had a a pool company, and I went ahead and built a a website for them. And that was like, I remember that because, like, they literally paid me for it, and we got it online for them.

And that was, like, my first time being like, oh, wow. Like, this there's, like, there's businesses out there that are past

bans that don't have any money, and I could maybe make some money off of them. Yeah. My first one for that was a client I got off of, wait for it, Craigslist. Yeah. Classic. Just hunting for clients on Craigslist. I just responded. Somebody had posted an ad saying that they, needed development for a store that they were doing. They needed some design stuff. And I I really fancied myself as being an all around or an all arounder at that ESLint, even though I I definitely wasn't.

But I came up with this, logo.

Believe it or not, I actually got paid to do a logo. It was one of my first things that I did. And it actually was on a building in downtown Ann Arbor for many, many years. So it was very cool. I got to drive by and see my logo up there and say, hey. I did that logo. And then I built them a website in a little actually wonder how much you can find out about this tech right today. But this tech is called Magento Go, I believe. And it was like, what would we what would happen if, you know, Magento, which was definitely not a lot of fun to work in, was, like, very, very easy? Like, we didn't we hide we hid all the code stuff for you. It was sort of just like a very early version of the, like, e commerce as a service type of thing. And, honestly, I think if they would've kept with it and kept evolving it, it would've succeeded in today's world. But, like, at the time, it was just sort of like, oh, Magento's hard. Hey. We'll make it not hard. But the problem is is that they really limited you from working on any sort of CSS in like, they they limited you to get access to the code so you could only do CSS.

This is actually great. You could only do CSS through upgrades in a in, like, a single, like, text field. So what I would do is I had my CSS. I would do all of the CSS in the dev tools to sort of update it. I basically copy and paste my CSS from that and then paste it into the text box and click save and then see if it worked and then refresh. It was just like an absolute nightmare to do anything in in terms of, like, custom aesthetic. And I somehow was able to, like, really, really theme some of these sites with even image backgrounds and all sorts of interesting stuff. But it was such a giant pain in the butt to theme outside of one of their themes that it was ultimately probably not worth it. But, I did a e commerce store, and I did a logo that appeared on a building. And that's not too bad for your first client. And I didn't know them at all, Wes. They were nobody's dad. Okay? They were nobody's relation there.

That's great. There's no drummer's dad there. Alright. Let's talk about I'm not sure if you have this or not, but first, AdSense income. So Yes. I do. Maybe 5th 15 years ago, it was, like, the thing to create a blog and put ads on it and just, like, rake in, all the all the money. And I remember being part of this website called, young go getter. This is probably 15 years ago. It was like a forum of people who were just sort of trying to do this type of thing.

And the 1 person I actually remember from that was, Darius Monserf, who he created this website called Color Lovers, and then he went on to create Creative Market. Oh, wow. It didn't Wow. It didn't click till, like, a couple years later. I'm like, oh, that was the guy from the forum. Wow. And now he's, like, like multimillionaire, I think. Yeah. That's a big deal. Anyways so I I was really excited about that. And at the same time, I was flipping Blackberries.

So I would buy

Blackberries That sounds kind of illegal. Whatever you're doing, it sounds like it could have been illegal.

No. I was I was buying, like like, cell phones off of Craigslist, and then reselling them.

And what I would do is I would unlock them, and I would buy a cheap case and a SD card, and I would just, like, put it up for $150 more. Because often, there was people that had, like, AT and T BlackBerries in Toronto. They moved from the States, and they couldn't use them, so I would buy them and unlock them and flip them. And so I made this website called Craigonomics, where it was like a blog about flipping stuff. And I wrote, like, 4 posts, and it never panned out because I didn't get immediately rich from it. Yes. Right. Yeah. But I did make, like, $17 or something from that. I remember getting a check from Google, and it had, like, $17 on it. And I thought that was so cool that you could make money on the Internet,

like that. Yeah. That is so cool.

My 1st AdSense income was my 1st AdSense income was something very similar. I heard tell of similar tales of being able to make a lot of money on doing AdSense. And, of course, I published a blog, and I one of the first things I did is I, wrote a post on I I I could even tell you from memory. This is just straight up from memory because this I don't have the access to this anymore. But the, the name of the blog post was 6 sites to get your music heard. Now how is that for a cookie cutter blog post? And, it actually I posted on Reddit and did not get murdered at the time, so that was like man, that was a long, long, long, long, long time ago.

That would have been, like, 2,000 and oh, man. I would have probably posted that on Node too. That's how how long ago that was. Oh, yeah.

Site Scott Doug. Site Got Doug. Right? And and then, actually, it it it made me, like like you said, like, $10 or something. I was like, And then I never had another blog post rival it at all. So I eventually got tired with that just like you did.

What about 1st YouTube video, so, like, that you made money off of? And I just went back on my YouTube channel and looked, for my very first programming video, and that was 9 years ago. So 20 in 2010, and that was a programming video about I I had a couple of videos before them, but the first one that got really popular was how to import a large SQL database with BigDump.

So at the time, WordPress databases, sometimes they got pretty big because some of these websites had a WordPress with thousands of posts, thousands of comments, and they would get pretty big. And the, like, servers would only allow you to upload, like, 6 megs at a time or something like that. So there was this tool called BigDump, and what it would do is just up upload your database in in, like, smaller bits, I think. And I made a little video on on how to do that, and that, I I just looked as almost 60,000 views on it. And I remember that was before YouTube had any, like, minimums in order to get paid. So, like, I I had ads on all my videos, and I remember getting a check or a direct deposit from them. And I thought that was pretty cool to to make some money off of a YouTube video. Yeah. My first ever YouTube video you can find on YouTube right now. I am very surprised that this thing is still published. It's from February 7th

2012.

Okay? So so this is February 7, 2012. Premiere tutorials number 1, starting a project, how to start a project in Adobe Premiere.

It has 3 3 comments, and 1 person wrote, first video, LOL.

It has 4 thumbs ups. One of which is my own, and I know this because it's blue on my end, and that means I would've put thumbs up on it, like, in 2012.

So this is very funny that this thing still exists. It only has 986 views on it. That's it. And in my my very first video tutorial, the first one that made me money, because I had some decent traction.

Maybe not super quick. But my 1st video video video, was from February 9, 2012, Sass tutorials number 1, how to install Sass. Wow. That video has 235,000 views and Holy. A 97.6 thumbs up ratio, might I add. That's good. People really liked it, and that was my first one. It it got shared by some of the folks behind SAS and, Chris Epstein of Compass. So it, like, really it it blew up my channel pretty early in a way that, like, allowed me to to to make a couple bucks off it to say, oh, hey. Maybe I could maybe I could do this too, which then led led into Compass tutorials and then eventually Drupal tutorials. And yeah. I just watched your 1st Premiere tutorial. Yeah. And you started with, hey. What's up? This is Scott from level of tutorials. Like like, how did you have that all so down pat right out of the gate? Like, my first 4 years of tutorials, and even now are just kinda like, hey, guys. What's up? I used to watch a lot of video tutorials, both paid and free.

And Oh, yeah. It was just very I don't know what it was about it. Like, to be honest, I I don't know if I've ever watched this. I don't know if I've ever watched it even after I recorded it. Maybe, like, once I edited it, I don't know, like, what this thing looks like to me. So I'm gonna give this a go too and see how many of my my carryovers have stayed from this very first one. But it's very funny to hear you say that because I don't think I knew what I was doing, and it just sort of easily became a flow that I fell into. Not to mention that I only did, like, a handful, maybe, like, 2 or 3 of these Premiere tutorials anyways before quitting Adobe Premiere. Because I I just like most things in my career, I I looked at this, and I was like, why am I doing this? A Premiere tutorial? Like, web development's what I'm interested in and, like, better at and whatever. I think I started with Premiere tutorials because there was a 1,000 of them on YouTube already, and I knew that, there wouldn't be a lot of traffic on them if I if I released them and they were bad. Oh, yeah. But yeah. So SAS definitely was the first one that made me money, but it was only, like, my 4th tutorial or something. So that's pretty sick. Let's go on to the next one, which is,

first online product or or first, like, dollar made from creating a training something. Oh, yeah. So mine was my sublime textbook was the 1st thing that I ever put out that was paid.

And I remember, Ryan Christiani, who was teaching with me at HackerU, he bought it immediately, which I thought was really cool. So now cool. If I love it. If I sort customers by, like, oldest to newest, it just shows Ryan's name as the very first person who ever gave me a dollar for learning something, which Wes really cool.

My first Node, it's funny because I must have bookmarked this still because I started to Google it, to see if I could find it anywhere. I have the the actual files for this, but this was from tutsplus.com, marketplace.tutsplus.com.

I sold a series called SaaS Mastery that actually did fairly, decent for me. Basically, there's a little, little secret here. I basically took the free course I had on YouTube and rerecorded it. Not exactly the same. I I definitely got rid of a lot of the oomms and ahs, and I made it like a more pro thing. Right? I just redid it Yeah. In, like, a better way, sold it on marketplace.tutsplus.com, and it sold pretty decent for me to the point where I I was able to include it as, like, a add on to people subscribing to LevelUp Pro later on to say, oh, here's this extra course you may not have seen, that Wes, like, a, more premium course that I had done. So I actually kept that one around, and I used to sell a couple things. I sold some, like, audio loops on Audio Jungle too.

Oh, I remember trying I made a couple themes for like, that that was another thing. It's funny that you're back at all the dreams to get rich. Yes. Themes were definitely one of those. The theme that everybody was making a theme marketplace because, like, there was a couple people out there that were cleaning up. I remember there was, like, Kauizy, k a u I z y. He was, like, the number 1 theme dev on, ThemeForest at the time. And he had, like, 15 themes, and they all sold hundreds of thousands or something like that. Yeah. And I I ran remember if anyone knows who I'm talking about, I would love to get him on the podcast to talk about that because that was another thing I tried and failed at before I stumbled

finally upon being able to sell my courses. Me too. I developed, like, 2 or 3 themes. Unfortunately, I never got a single one on the market because I kept pivoting from, oh, I'm gonna do a Magento theme. No. I'm gonna do a WordPress theme. Oh, yeah. You know? So for me, that was always a big thing too. I always wanted to make a big theme, but I don't think I was a good enough designer to make it happen if we're being entirely honest. Mine just got rejected because they wanted it. Just got rejected.

Yeah. I think one of my audio loops got rejected because it just didn't sound Node. Even though, like, I'm just into dissonant music. So to me, it was like, what do you mean? Of course, it doesn't sound nice. It's not supposed to sound nice, and the people who buy it aren't gonna buy it because it sounds nice. You know? Yeah. Yeah. Last 1 I have here is just like a first in person

teaching money Node, and for me, that was I got a gift card at Ladies Learning Code after I did, like, 3 or 4 of them, which I thought was really cool.

And then HackerU, which I've talked about on this podcast before, which is a boot camp Yarn time career college.

I taught there, which was, I don't know, 7 or 8 years ago, and I got paid for that as well, which is was really cool.

That is cool. I don't have the same sort of category. I've never done any IRL teaching still to this day. I probably could. I mean, I've I've done workshops and stuff, but nothing really major.

My first what I've decided to supplement this with is my first project at an ad agency. My 1st agency project, which was what's the word for this? It's a, like, recumbent cross chain trainer. It's like a trainer for, people who have joint problems with disabilities or maybe just, you know, unable to do certain exercises. So it's like a like a lay down sort of thing that moves your arms and your legs that where you use it. They used it on the the show The Biggest Loser for a long time. And so that was my 1st client. And the codebase was one of those ones that had been, like, authored by, like, 20 different developers over the course of 20 different years and is, like, just filled with patches over patches over patches. So it's like anytime you make a new file, well, you just duplicate another HTML file, and then, well, you just write a custom CSS file specifically for that file just because like, to avoid overrides. And it was one of those things where it's just like give the new guy the the worst project ever to work on. So that's what I did Yeah. For a little while, and it was, it was fine. It was my 1st agency project. Got my feet wet. And, That that's a good one. I'm gonna do mine as well. My first agency pro,

project was, with this company called Jet Cooper, which is they got bought by Shopify, and I was working with, Vercel and Satish, and they had me do some word custom WordPress dev for them. And it was for, like, a pillow company, I think. Oh. And I remember thinking that was so cool that they they have this, like, wicked office that you can just hang out. We went out for lunch, and that, like, really opened my eyes to, like, how cool working in web development can be versus, like, my other experience, which is working at a bank.

Yeah. Well, mine mine was, more along the lines of your bank experience because it was just sort of like, oh, we get the the new guide, the crap code Bos, and the the the crappy crappy looking site that's super old and because the company won't pay for a redesign when they need it. You know?

And so that was my my experience differed just a little bit there, but it's definitely how many, similar experiences we had, especially around selling stuff in those markets and, trying to do different gigs like that. I'm fascinated by that. Yeah. It's it's kinda fun to look back at it because, like, if if you were to ask me, I'm like, oh, yeah. I was always making courses. But, like, now that I think about them, like, no. No. I did a lot of different stuff until I stumbled upon what worked for me. And I also asked this on Twitter. Like, what was your 1st buck made? And I'll link up the tweet thread in the show notes because there's some really some really interesting ones of people saying, like, I got, Steve Schoger, who's the designer behind Tailwinds.

$400 for designing and coding a site for a miniature horse farm. Yes. Cool.

Hopefully, those are real horses and not like like, plastic miniature horses. Do you know what I mean? Oh, yeah. Because that'd be pretty cool too.

We Node to do some sort of, like, call in show where people tell us they're like I I we need to figure out some way for people to, like, call in because, like, I would love to hear little clips of people and their stories about how things went and and whatnot. I think that's a a great idea. It would be a lot of fun to do, I think. I think we should definitely do that. Yes. I have a quick question for you.

What is the 1st buck you made on a course for somebody else? A course for some what do you mean by that? You get paid to do a course for a company or not even a course. Maybe even a tutorial video. Does that ever happen to you? Oh. Because I know you've done at least 1.

Have I? Didn't you do one for Mozilla?

Oh, well no. I Mozilla paid me to do my own course. Oh. That was a CSS Grid. They sponsored it. I have been approached a couple times by companies to, make internal trading videos. Oh, yeah. Yep. I would, like, learn their like, just so they have good videos to give their own staff members.

And I either didn't do them. And some of them, I was like, yeah. I'll do it, and it never panned out. But, no, I've actually never I've I've certainly written for, like, Smashing Mag and CSS Tricks and couple of those other blogs I've written for them, and you get paid for that as well. So maybe that that's a good enough answer there. That counts. Cool. I think my first one was

I did a course for packaged publishing on Magento back when I was doing a lot of Magento. Did Oh, yeah. Not necessarily worth the time. But, you know, that's how publishing goes. So that is it. A lot of 1st bucks being made. Let us know what your 1st buck was outside or in that if you wanna get it linked up in that Wes Bos tweet. Link it up in that West Boss tweet. We've replied to that. Let's maybe, start that thing up again, or you can just share it with us on Twitter yourselves. So as always, this is Scott Tolinski and Wes Bos.

Wes Bos, signing off.

Reese.

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