How I made 100,000 INR(1500$)+ before I turned 18.

This article is primarily meant for fellow students, who are looking to earn some decent income while doing things that are not repetitive or boring in nature.

When I turned 17, I had an immense urge to earn something on my own. It didn’t need to be a lot, it didn’t need to be flashy or be a flex, it just had to be something that “I have earned”. Being an Indian student, it wasn’t tough to “earn” money per se. Teaching younger students is a route that many of my friends follow and regularly complain about. This is easily justifiable since, as students, you don’t have a reputation on your back for teaching and parents tend to lowball you. Human nature. Some of my friends teach for as low as 50 cents(40 INR) per hour, which in my opinion is far too low and being an Economics student, I feel the opportunity cost is far too high. You could be learning something worthwhile for 2 hours rather than earning a dollar! (or you may teach at an NGO and put smiles on faces). All this to say that I have total and utter respect for the profession and everyone is learning empathy, patience and the skill of clear communication while teaching young students. However, if you ever feel the need to get out of that low-paying gig, I want to suggest 2 decent alternatives here.No sponsorships, no paid advertisement. Simply things that have worked for me and can work for you.

It all started with me searching for “How to make money online” on Google and on YouTube. Cliché much, however, the next few weeks provided me with great insights and the profound knowledge that 99% of the websites and methods suggested on Google and YouTube don’t work. Everyone is running ads to earn money and no one is willing to give you a dime from it. So what works? The things that work are the ones that have legitimate backing and money to actually pay you for your work. I will save you the trouble of finding such websites and bring you the first one here, which I discovered in late 2021.

Mindsumo

A website that essentially is a crowdsourcing platform, Mindsumo offers "challenges” from various companies looking for your opinion on a particular topic. Challenge questions can be extremely diverse, ranging from “What is the future of toilets?” to “Which innovation in Big Data will be the next big thing?” Mindsumo is paid by companies to post their questions for it to crowdsource answers. As you may have figured already, the way you earn money from MindSumo is by submitting a winning answer(due to the crowdsourcing model). Payout is instant and winnings can range between as low as 2$ to even up to 500$ for a single answer. Answering questions doesn’t take more than 20–25 minutes of your time including the research it takes for any potential answer.

My experience with MindSumo has been sluggish, to say the least, I have made 313$(25k INR)so far in a little over a year and to be honest, I actually earned nothing for the first 4 months. My answers were simply not good enough. You will find recurring names in the winners' tab as they have hacked the formula to write a winning answer and top solvers earn anywhere between 200–2000$(16k–160k INR) per month just from 1–2 hours of work. Ask any person from a weak currency country such as mine and you will understand how lucrative MindSumo can potentially be. I am continuing it now and honestly, I enjoy the various challenges they pose. Makes me think of things from new angles and I learn a lot of new things while solving the challenges, and if I win sometimes, that just sweetens the experience.

The second one of them has been far more lucrative for me and that is the “LinkedIn for Students”, called Goodwall.

Goodwall

Goodwall is a platform where the users are all students because that’s what it is meant to do. Students from around the world interact, communicate and share ideas on diverse topics. I consider it to be a student-exclusive social media platform. The money-making part comes with Goodwall’s challenges. They are backed by a funding of 10.8M$ and they regularly post new challenges sponsored by organizations such as the UN and Friends of Bata. Winning these challenges means an instant bump of 100–200$ in your account and winning them isn’t a great deal either.

These challenges demand that you submit a short write-up or video about you talking about the subject of that particular challenge. Mind you that these challenges always focus on modern-day problems and doing them will help you learn and grow a lot as well. I have made 770$(63k INR) in about 10 months from winning such challenges and you can find a lot of videos of me talking about various topics should you decide to give Goodwall a visit. To give an example, one of my most successful wins was for a challenge called “#BreakTheStigma” where I talked about female menstruation problems faced in India and how we can tackle them.

Both of the above-mentioned platforms should be treated with a “learning first, earning second” approach as you may be someone who does not have the drive to earn right now, but these platforms are very good for learning new things and networking as well besides the monetary aspect.

My third source has been a one-off gig that I took up through a cold message on Discord right before my birthday. I write the whitepaper for a Play2Earn Web3 project since I wanted to dip my toes in technical writing. Fortuitously, the founder of the project loved my work and offered me 350$ for 10 hours of work. 35$/hour is huge pay and I don’t expect to make it again anytime soon so I have not mentioned this along with the 2 websites.

The learning that you may take from this is “cold emails, cold calls, cold messages” can be very powerful for your career.

Overall, it was a figure of about 120k INR (adjusted for exchange rate) before I turned 18 and these are the methods that I used. These earnings have given me a sense of autonomy which I thoroughly relish and don’t have to depend on my parents for trivial spending.

These may or may not work for you, but at least these give you an alternative to something that you detest right now.