How I earned $ 200,000 at 16
About three years ago I published a story about the Follow application for Twitter, which I did in high school and how it collected 150,000 downloads in two years. In that article, I casually mentioned that my first steps in programming are a separate, even more lengthy story. Now this story is in front of you.
To date, nine years have passed (wow!) From the moment I was first offered a job related to writing code. Not that I had any official position, but I wrote scripts in Java. To give you a more complete picture: ten years ago I was thirteen, I was in the ninth grade and my entire programming experience was three months of independent study. Over the next couple of years, I earned $ 200,000 in net income. That's how it was.
It all started when I plunged into the world of computer games. Most of the time, I used to play Call of Duty, Gears of War, Runescape, and any other titles that fell into my hands. My friends and I arranged joint game sessions every day and gradually began to communicate online, instead of spending all day on the street.
')
The most addictive game was Runescape . I quickly hooked on this popular online RPG. If anyone knows, it was written in Java. Several times after watching the game load, I began to feel an interest in this language, which led to further immersion in programming.
With each new request to Google, it became clearer: if I learn to write code, I can create my own programs. From the very thought of this, I blew the roof. This was just the beginning, and in the next few months my interest in programming grew and grew.
Shortly after I learned the power of Java, somewhere on the web I came across the book Teach Yourself Java in 21 days . I downloaded Eclipse and got down to business. This book sucked me out and, although I remained an avid gamer, I liked the new hobby more and more each day.
Every day I returned from school and, as I did, I did housework, played games, wrote code. Very little time passed, and I could already apply my programming knowledge in practice. I wrote scripts to scan documents, create random interfaces, and even made a program that solved algebra for me.
At this stage of my life, the sensations were as if I had a superpower, and no one knows about it. Filled with enthusiasm, I told a friend that I was learning Java, and began to persuade him to join. But he just waved his hand and returned to the games. Then I realized that I had to learn programming in solitude, and decided to continue on my own, without telling anyone, even to my family.
A few months have passed and I began to get on my nerves about how slowly I was progressing in Runescape. I went hunting for cheats. To my surprise, during the search, a bunch of macros, bots, and scripts came to light, which could automatically and continuously play for the player. It intrigued me a lot. I tried all the bots that I came across, but most of them were no good.
And so it went, until I came across a community that offered a free client-bot, and even with custom scripts. I registered on the forum, not even suspecting that in the next couple of months my whole life would turn over.
In this community there was everything that a teenager like me could only dream of! Over the next month I experienced twenty scripts, no less. Some of them were intended for logging, some for fighting monsters, and some for quests. It's amazing how many things these bots could remake without any intervention from the player.
I noticed that the scripts were also written in Java, but the thought of making such a do-it-yourself did not occur to me. Shortly after I resorted to cheats, my account fell under the eternal ban, and for reasons not related to bots (I'm so lucky). It just killed me. I remember sitting in my room and almost crying because the account for which I had spent so many hours of my life froze. I applied to Jagex (the company that created Runescape) with pleas to cancel the ban, but they were adamant, and all I could do was accept it.
For a whole week I was angry, sad, and in a state of confusion. Why I was angry and sad, it's easy to guess - because I lost what I really valued. But at the same time I was also confused. What should I do now? What to spend your time? What will I tell my friends?
Many questions and no answers. After some time it dawned on me, and I decided to create a new account. The idea was this: I will use cheats to get to my previous stats as quickly as possible. I set a goal to return to the original level, but there was a small problem.
On the past account I had good stats on battles, but at that time there were few bots in the community that could fight for the player. I began to look elsewhere. I caught one bot, designed for fighting with chickens, and I thought: why only with chickens? Why not with all the monsters?
I looked through the code and saw that it would take only a few modifications to create a bot that could beat any monster in the game. Taking advantage of my newly acquired programming skills and having shown a little bit more creativity, I made GenericFighter, the first universal battle bot.
After some minor edits and tests, I was sure that GenericFighter was ready. Whatever monster I put against him, he won a brilliant victory. I was impatient not only to use it myself, but also to introduce it to the community.
A few weeks later, my bot was among the most popular but the forum, and my stats in Runescape have risen to old values. I received a lot of good reviews, but this was not the end. I began to receive requests to add new features and alerts about bugs. I got hooked on programming, and delighted at the fact that people like my work, spurred me on, forcing me to continue.
This went on for several months. The need to maintain the bot forced me to push my skills, and ultimately I learned Java at a much deeper level. At that time, I did not think about a broad context. I did not even suspect that the founders of the forum plan to take my project to a new level.
Now I played a lot less and spent most of my time improving my bot. My hard work attracted attention. One day the community founders contacted me. They worked on the creation of a premium marketplace bots, where the authors could sell their scripts. I was skeptical, but decided to join. Soon, I cooperated with the owner of RSBots.net and together we released a premium bot AutoFighter Pro.
AutoFighter Pro was priced at $ 12.99 - compared to other scripts, it was a low price. I will not go into the details of how the money earned was shared between the authors, the founders and the sellers. I can only say that from the beginning of June 2009 to the end of October 2011, AutoFighter Pro was bought 30,000 times. Count yourself.
Write-off history
From month to month, sales only grew, there were almost no drops. As the platform expanded, the founders invited more and more authors and vendors to trade in scripts. What was once a small, cohesive group has become a large, highly competitive community.
Before we could look back, the authors began copying scripts from each other and trying to beat competitors at the expense of functionality, usability or price policy. It was necessary not only to write code, but also to sell my product and myself. I quickly learned that every detail matters in competition.
Without knowing it, at that time I was balancing between the positions of the programmer and the product manager. I studied the feedback of users, planned new functions, was active on the forum and constantly prepared new updates - for me it was the norm.
In this race it was impossible to stop even for a moment. Users used bots not only for personal needs, they had entire businesses tied to them. Trading GP and accounts with good stats was then common, and in order to meet demand, we had to work hard.
Starting in the summer, when I went to high school, until the very beginning of the senior class, my life looked like this: I learned, redid the household chores in an hour and sat down at the code for the whole evening. To some extent, it even began to affect my school success - to such an extent I focused on improving my product. Programming has become a top priority for me, I gave AutoFighter Pro all my time.
At the peak of its development, the script allowed to fight with several monsters at the same time, healed the player, automatically sent answers to the characters of other players, and this is not all of its functionality. But, as you have probably guessed, it could not last forever.
After a year or so of trading scripts, the founders were sued. They fought because of all the forces and extended another year, but in the end, a few days before my seventeen year old, they still lost the case. As a result, all sites where premium bots were sold and the founders' forums were closed.
To be honest, when I first started, I did not plan on telling anyone what I was doing. I was glad that everything was going so well, but I was a little worried because I did not know what to do next.
And to whom I told about everything in the first place? To my mom. How did she react to this? She was intrigued, slightly bewildered, and a little alarmed. She could not understand what exactly I do, how I got involved in it and why people pay me. My father reacted in much the same way, but they were happy for me and supported my choice, provided that I remained under the protection of the law. I did not tell anyone anything more until the end of school.
Now you probably think: where would a kid like me spend so much money? Well, among other things, I helped my family pay debts, went with my parents to Disney World, and put something on myself. In retrospect, this opportunity came to us as could not be more opportunely. The US was in crisis at the time, and we, like millions of other people, had a hard time - but I can proudly say that my efforts softened the blow.
Follow Statistics on the Play Store
Since then I have been doing programming, design and product management. Shortly after the work on the bots stopped, I used the free time to learn how to develop for Android. In February 2012, I launched Follow , a Twitter app that tracked who unsubscribed from the user, who subscribed to it and who he did not subscribe to. In just a few months, the application has collected 20,000 downloads. I already wrote about how it came out on 150,000 downloads, and now the total number of installations has exceeded 200,000.
After the third semester, I dropped out of college and founded the Puricode grocery company. We wanted to make tools for small businesses and startups, as well as products for internal needs. Our first product was Runn, an on-demand delivery application for colleges. We conducted a beta test on the campus of Wayne University , which made a lot of noise there and prompted us to send a cold letter to Mark Kuban with an offer to invest in the project.
Two years later, we stopped working on Runn and turned our attention to other projects. In addition to my own searches, I had a chance to work in several excellent companies - Nexient , Ford and Nima Labs . Now I live in Santa Monica and work on SafePGP - a cryptographic tool that also allows you to engage in crypto-trading. I was very lucky that my favorite childhood hobby became a profession for me, I can not imagine how I would do something else. Thank you for reading this article!
To date, nine years have passed (wow!) From the moment I was first offered a job related to writing code. Not that I had any official position, but I wrote scripts in Java. To give you a more complete picture: ten years ago I was thirteen, I was in the ninth grade and my entire programming experience was three months of independent study. Over the next couple of years, I earned $ 200,000 in net income. That's how it was.
From gamer to code
It all started when I plunged into the world of computer games. Most of the time, I used to play Call of Duty, Gears of War, Runescape, and any other titles that fell into my hands. My friends and I arranged joint game sessions every day and gradually began to communicate online, instead of spending all day on the street.
')
The most addictive game was Runescape . I quickly hooked on this popular online RPG. If anyone knows, it was written in Java. Several times after watching the game load, I began to feel an interest in this language, which led to further immersion in programming.
With each new request to Google, it became clearer: if I learn to write code, I can create my own programs. From the very thought of this, I blew the roof. This was just the beginning, and in the next few months my interest in programming grew and grew.
Shortly after I learned the power of Java, somewhere on the web I came across the book Teach Yourself Java in 21 days . I downloaded Eclipse and got down to business. This book sucked me out and, although I remained an avid gamer, I liked the new hobby more and more each day.
Every day I returned from school and, as I did, I did housework, played games, wrote code. Very little time passed, and I could already apply my programming knowledge in practice. I wrote scripts to scan documents, create random interfaces, and even made a program that solved algebra for me.
At this stage of my life, the sensations were as if I had a superpower, and no one knows about it. Filled with enthusiasm, I told a friend that I was learning Java, and began to persuade him to join. But he just waved his hand and returned to the games. Then I realized that I had to learn programming in solitude, and decided to continue on my own, without telling anyone, even to my family.
Delving into programming
A few months have passed and I began to get on my nerves about how slowly I was progressing in Runescape. I went hunting for cheats. To my surprise, during the search, a bunch of macros, bots, and scripts came to light, which could automatically and continuously play for the player. It intrigued me a lot. I tried all the bots that I came across, but most of them were no good.
And so it went, until I came across a community that offered a free client-bot, and even with custom scripts. I registered on the forum, not even suspecting that in the next couple of months my whole life would turn over.
In this community there was everything that a teenager like me could only dream of! Over the next month I experienced twenty scripts, no less. Some of them were intended for logging, some for fighting monsters, and some for quests. It's amazing how many things these bots could remake without any intervention from the player.
I noticed that the scripts were also written in Java, but the thought of making such a do-it-yourself did not occur to me. Shortly after I resorted to cheats, my account fell under the eternal ban, and for reasons not related to bots (I'm so lucky). It just killed me. I remember sitting in my room and almost crying because the account for which I had spent so many hours of my life froze. I applied to Jagex (the company that created Runescape) with pleas to cancel the ban, but they were adamant, and all I could do was accept it.
Lemon Lemonade
For a whole week I was angry, sad, and in a state of confusion. Why I was angry and sad, it's easy to guess - because I lost what I really valued. But at the same time I was also confused. What should I do now? What to spend your time? What will I tell my friends?
Many questions and no answers. After some time it dawned on me, and I decided to create a new account. The idea was this: I will use cheats to get to my previous stats as quickly as possible. I set a goal to return to the original level, but there was a small problem.
On the past account I had good stats on battles, but at that time there were few bots in the community that could fight for the player. I began to look elsewhere. I caught one bot, designed for fighting with chickens, and I thought: why only with chickens? Why not with all the monsters?
I looked through the code and saw that it would take only a few modifications to create a bot that could beat any monster in the game. Taking advantage of my newly acquired programming skills and having shown a little bit more creativity, I made GenericFighter, the first universal battle bot.
After some minor edits and tests, I was sure that GenericFighter was ready. Whatever monster I put against him, he won a brilliant victory. I was impatient not only to use it myself, but also to introduce it to the community.
A few weeks later, my bot was among the most popular but the forum, and my stats in Runescape have risen to old values. I received a lot of good reviews, but this was not the end. I began to receive requests to add new features and alerts about bugs. I got hooked on programming, and delighted at the fact that people like my work, spurred me on, forcing me to continue.
This went on for several months. The need to maintain the bot forced me to push my skills, and ultimately I learned Java at a much deeper level. At that time, I did not think about a broad context. I did not even suspect that the founders of the forum plan to take my project to a new level.
I got hooked on the code, and people noticed
Now I played a lot less and spent most of my time improving my bot. My hard work attracted attention. One day the community founders contacted me. They worked on the creation of a premium marketplace bots, where the authors could sell their scripts. I was skeptical, but decided to join. Soon, I cooperated with the owner of RSBots.net and together we released a premium bot AutoFighter Pro.
AutoFighter Pro was priced at $ 12.99 - compared to other scripts, it was a low price. I will not go into the details of how the money earned was shared between the authors, the founders and the sellers. I can only say that from the beginning of June 2009 to the end of October 2011, AutoFighter Pro was bought 30,000 times. Count yourself.
Write-off history
From month to month, sales only grew, there were almost no drops. As the platform expanded, the founders invited more and more authors and vendors to trade in scripts. What was once a small, cohesive group has become a large, highly competitive community.
Before we could look back, the authors began copying scripts from each other and trying to beat competitors at the expense of functionality, usability or price policy. It was necessary not only to write code, but also to sell my product and myself. I quickly learned that every detail matters in competition.
Without knowing it, at that time I was balancing between the positions of the programmer and the product manager. I studied the feedback of users, planned new functions, was active on the forum and constantly prepared new updates - for me it was the norm.
In this race it was impossible to stop even for a moment. Users used bots not only for personal needs, they had entire businesses tied to them. Trading GP and accounts with good stats was then common, and in order to meet demand, we had to work hard.
Clouds are gathering
Starting in the summer, when I went to high school, until the very beginning of the senior class, my life looked like this: I learned, redid the household chores in an hour and sat down at the code for the whole evening. To some extent, it even began to affect my school success - to such an extent I focused on improving my product. Programming has become a top priority for me, I gave AutoFighter Pro all my time.
At the peak of its development, the script allowed to fight with several monsters at the same time, healed the player, automatically sent answers to the characters of other players, and this is not all of its functionality. But, as you have probably guessed, it could not last forever.
After a year or so of trading scripts, the founders were sued. They fought because of all the forces and extended another year, but in the end, a few days before my seventeen year old, they still lost the case. As a result, all sites where premium bots were sold and the founders' forums were closed.
To be honest, when I first started, I did not plan on telling anyone what I was doing. I was glad that everything was going so well, but I was a little worried because I did not know what to do next.
And to whom I told about everything in the first place? To my mom. How did she react to this? She was intrigued, slightly bewildered, and a little alarmed. She could not understand what exactly I do, how I got involved in it and why people pay me. My father reacted in much the same way, but they were happy for me and supported my choice, provided that I remained under the protection of the law. I did not tell anyone anything more until the end of school.
Now you probably think: where would a kid like me spend so much money? Well, among other things, I helped my family pay debts, went with my parents to Disney World, and put something on myself. In retrospect, this opportunity came to us as could not be more opportunely. The US was in crisis at the time, and we, like millions of other people, had a hard time - but I can proudly say that my efforts softened the blow.
Games and programming have changed my life.
Follow Statistics on the Play Store
Since then I have been doing programming, design and product management. Shortly after the work on the bots stopped, I used the free time to learn how to develop for Android. In February 2012, I launched Follow , a Twitter app that tracked who unsubscribed from the user, who subscribed to it and who he did not subscribe to. In just a few months, the application has collected 20,000 downloads. I already wrote about how it came out on 150,000 downloads, and now the total number of installations has exceeded 200,000.
After the third semester, I dropped out of college and founded the Puricode grocery company. We wanted to make tools for small businesses and startups, as well as products for internal needs. Our first product was Runn, an on-demand delivery application for colleges. We conducted a beta test on the campus of Wayne University , which made a lot of noise there and prompted us to send a cold letter to Mark Kuban with an offer to invest in the project.
Two years later, we stopped working on Runn and turned our attention to other projects. In addition to my own searches, I had a chance to work in several excellent companies - Nexient , Ford and Nima Labs . Now I live in Santa Monica and work on SafePGP - a cryptographic tool that also allows you to engage in crypto-trading. I was very lucky that my favorite childhood hobby became a profession for me, I can not imagine how I would do something else. Thank you for reading this article!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/350642/
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