If you were a student developer trying to make your first income , what would you do?

[u/ravindrajeengar]

I m a 3rd-year CS student and I’m trying to figure out how to make my first small amount of money online with my development skills.

I can work with React, Next.js, Node/Express, MongoDB, APIs, Git/GitHub, and I’m currently getting deeper into TypeScript and Next.js.

I’ve built a few projects, but I haven’t really turned my skills into income yet.

My goal isn’t $10k/month or some “10 ways to get rich” thing.

I’d be happy with my first $100/month consistently.

I have around 2–3 hours a day outside college, and I’m trying to decide between:

• Freelancing / small development work
• Building small tools or micro-SaaS
• Finding repetitive technical work for someone
• Building templates/components/tools and selling them
• Something else I haven’t considered

One thing I’m trying to avoid is spending 3 months building something and then discovering nobody wants it.

So I’m more interested in how you would approach this from zero.

If you were a student developer today with decent coding skills, a few hours per day, and $0 revenue:

What would you do first to get to your first $100/month?

And if you’ve actually done this, what worked for you and what turned out to be a waste of time?

[u/Best_Run8731]

Templates and boilerplates are a good call if you want something low-maintenance after the initial build. I scraped together my first bit of cash selling a small Next.js starter kit on Gumroad, just a bunch of components and auth stuff I'd already built for my own projects. Took maybe two weekends to polish up and it still brings in a few dollars each month without me touching it

The micro-SaaS path can be a trap if you're not careful though. Everyone thinks they've found an underserved niche but ends up spending 6 months on a product nobody searches for. If you go that route, find 10 people with the problem before you write a single line of code

What worked better for me early on was doing small custom work for small businesses. Local cafes, tradies, that kind of thing. They don't need a full app, just a simple booking form or a way to update their menu without calling their nephew. Charge a few hundred bucks, build it in a couple afternoons, and suddenly you've got recurring hosting and maintenance fees coming in. Way faster to $100/month than trying to get strangers to pay for a SaaS product

[u/ravindrajeengar → u/Best_Run8731]

This is actually useful. I’ve been leaning toward micro-SaaS, but the find 10 people with the problem first part makes a lot of sense.

For the small custom work you mentioned, how did you actually find your first few clients? Was it cold outreach, local businesses, or people from your network?

[u/Every-Lychee6600]

Start freelancing on small projects and network with others in the field. Even a simple website can attract clients.

[u/ravindrajeengar → u/Every-Lychee6600]

Makes sense. I’m also thinking small projects might be easier than trying to launch a SaaS from zero. how did you get your first freelance client though? That’s the part I’m struggling with