How I Made My First Dollar Online At 13
2025-07-16 · Short · Ali · recording, 1:49 · watch on YouTube
Topic: Business and entrepreneurship · mode: Personal story · tags: His own numbers
In a Short, Ali tells how he first made money online at 13: a friend's dad paid him 10 pounds in cash for a newspaper-style personal website, and then he bid $5 or $10 on web design projects on getacoder.com from 13 to 18.
What is said
The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).
00:00:00 — His first paid website at 13 and five years of freelancing on getacoder.com
- ★★ At 13 Ali taught himself HTML, CSS and JavaScript after school because he thought building websites would be cool, and made his own personal websites. — 00:00:00
- ★★★ Ali's first money online came at 13 when a friend's dad paid him 10 pounds in cash for a personal website styled like a newspaper, which Ali built over a weekend with HTML tables and the Times font. — 00:00:21
- ★★★ After the 10 pounds, Ali wondered whether others would pay him to design websites and found the freelance platform getacoder.com, where at 13 he bid $5 or $10 on web design projects to undercut cheap Indian web design companies. — 00:00:50 · getacoder.com
- ★ Ali thinks getacoder.com is now defunct and says Fiverr and Upwork do basically the same job as freelance platforms. (hedged) — 00:00:58 · getacoder.com
- ★★ Ali got a handful of projects on getacoder.com and stayed on it for about five years, from 13 to 18, making his first few hundred dollars on the internet from tiny freelance web design jobs. — 00:01:13 · getacoder.com
00:01:27 — Plug for the six-week bootcamp to make a first $1,000 online
Threads in this video
- retold · Ali does freelance web development on getacoder.com as a schoolboy — Ali retells his start in web design at 13: a friend's dad paid him 10 pounds in cash for a newspaper-style website built with HTML tables, and he then bid $5 or $10 on projects on getacoder.com until 18, making his first few hundred dollars online. (00:00:21)
Mentioned
Central: getacoder.com
Also: Fiverr · Upwork
← Previous: Is Quick Cash Better Than a Big Dream? · Next → Are You In One Of These 30s Life Paths?