On October 22, 2026, someone paid $2.35 for a subscription to a website I had built.
The actual subscription was $1.99, with tax bringing the total to $2.35. I remember opening the payment dashboard to make sure it wasn't another test transaction, something I'd done countless times while setting up payments.
But this time, it was real.
I'd earned larger amounts before through freelance work, technical assignments, and even a $5,000 grant for one of my projects. This payment felt different because I had absolutely no connection to the person who made it. They hadn't hired me, weren't supporting me personally, and probably had no idea who I was.
A complete stranger had found my software and decided it was worth paying for.
A year of building things that went nowhere
About a year earlier, I was still in college, spending most of my time programming.
I was convinced that becoming a better developer would naturally lead to better opportunities. I built projects involving blockchain, payment systems, privacy tools, and developer education. Some took a weekend, while others took months of figuring out things I barely understood when I started.
One of those projects eventually received a $5,000 grant, which was incredibly encouraging at the time. I thought I'd finally figured out how to turn my programming skills into something meaningful.
But there was a problem I kept ignoring. I was becoming better at building software without really learning how to find customers for it.
As graduation approached, I started applying for jobs. I emailed startups, completed interviews, worked on technical assignments, and sent more applications than I care to remember. A few opportunities looked promising, but most conversations eventually went nowhere.
By August 2026, I'd graduated, and I was still figuring out what to do next.
I had repositories full of projects, plenty of technical experience for someone just out of college, and very little clarity about how any of it was supposed to become a sustainable career.
Eventually, I decided to spend more time building products I actually owned.
The project I thought would succeed wasn't the one that earned
My main project was an iPhone app that helped creators generate short-video ideas and scripts, with a built-in teleprompter.
I spent weeks polishing the interface, handling subscriptions, fixing bugs, and preparing it for the App Store. I even bought an iPhone partly because I needed a real device for testing.
I had convinced myself that this was the product with the most potential.
Meanwhile, I was maintaining another project in the background.
It was a collection of online image tools that I'd started as a relatively simple experiment. People need to resize images, convert formats, compress files, and remove backgrounds every day. I wanted to see whether solving those ordinary problems could attract users through search without needing some elaborate product launch.
That project eventually became SafeImageTools.
Over time, I added more utilities, batch image processing, AI-powered background removal, PDF conversion, and privacy-focused features. Many standard operations run directly in the browser, which is useful when people don't want to upload personal images to another server just to resize or convert them.
Most of the work wasn't particularly exciting. I spent days fixing weird image-processing edge cases, improving performance, connecting analytics, figuring out SEO, and dealing with payment integration.
I wasn't building something revolutionary, and that was almost the point. I wanted to make something useful for problems that already existed.
The funny part is that I still considered the iPhone app my main startup. SafeImageTools was the smaller project I worked on alongside it.
Then the payment arrived
By October, I'd started getting tired of making plans that never turned into revenue.
I had built enough software to know that shipping something was possible. What I hadn't proven to myself was whether anyone would voluntarily buy a product I owned.
So I gave myself a smaller goal: earn my first dollar from my own software before December.
A few days later, on October 22, someone purchased the $1.99 SafeImageTools subscription.
There was no viral launch, no big announcement, and no clever sales conversation I could take credit for. I'd been experimenting with SEO and different ways to help people discover the site, but I couldn't confidently identify which one brought that customer.
Someone apparently needed a tool, found my website, and decided the paid plan was useful enough to purchase.
And there I was, staring at a $2.35 payment with more excitement than the amount could reasonably justify.
I had spent months imagining that my first independent software revenue would come from an ambitious app. Instead, it came from a website handling ordinary image-editing tasks.
What that tiny payment changed
One customer doesn't mean I've found product-market fit. It doesn't tell me whether SafeImageTools will eventually make $100, $1,000, or almost nothing.
I'm still learning distribution, trying different ways to get people to discover my projects, and making plenty of mistakes along the way.
But the experience changed how I think about building software.
For a long time, I'd chosen projects partly because they seemed technically impressive. I enjoyed difficult engineering problems, and completing them felt like progress, even when I had no clear idea who would use the finished product.
SafeImageTools forced me to think differently. Nobody cares how complicated my image conversion code is if the output is wrong or the website is frustrating to use. People care about getting their work done.
I also realized how easy it is to hide behind development. There's always another feature to build, another interface to improve, or another technical problem to solve. Distribution is uncomfortable because you're putting your work in front of people who might simply not care.
I'm still nowhere near mastering that part.
If you're building side projects and haven't earned your first dollar yet, I won't pretend I have some guaranteed formula. I'm barely past that milestone myself.
But I'd encourage you to take boring problems seriously, release things before they feel perfect, and make it possible for people to pay if they find your work useful.
I spent a year wondering whether I needed to build something extraordinary to make money from software.
Turns out, my first paying customer just needed an image tool.
Now I'm working toward customer number two.
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