Turning $0 into $10,000 CHALLENGE
Welcome to part one of my attempt to turn 0 dollars into 10,000.
About two years ago, I tried this same challenge, but… I failed and scrapped the video altogether. This time, I’m going to try a little harder and, well, you’ll see the results whether I fail or succeed. Let’s do this.
Day 1
If I learned one thing this summer, it’s that every good challenge needs a game plan. So I’m going to start by trying three different things to kickstart this series.
First, I’m going to look for something around my house that I could sell pretty quickly. I realize that means I’m starting with something, but I think a lot of you probably have something around you could sell for ten or twenty bucks, and if not, well stay tuned.
Second, I’m going to re-activate my Fiverr account. If you’re an OG viewer of my channel, you may remember two years ago I tried making money on Fiverr. Near the end of the challenge, orders started to roll in and after the thirty days was up, I deactivated my profile and haven’t touched it since.
Third, I’m going to look for a promo offer on Swagbucks I could do. In my video about making money with surveys, I found the most lucrative options are usually those involving a mobile game like Slots, so I’ll see what I can find there.
Fourth, I’m going to search around on Facebook Marketplace and see if there’s anything I can get for free and re-sell.
Alright, let’s get started.
I thought a video game would be a pretty easy sell. I played Splatoon 2 like once and didn’t really like it, so I’m going to list it on eBay. It’s going for around $25, but I want it sold quick, so I may go a little under that.
Next, onto Fiverr. I had three gigs from a couple of years ago that I reactivated. I’m not going to promote them at all… just see what rolls in naturally. I did reach out to one of my past Fiverr clients to let him know I was back on the platform in case he had any projects for me, so we’ll see what pans out here.
Now, onto Swagbucks. I searched through their offers and found one for MGM Slots. You have to make an in-game purchase and reach level 60 within 7 days. Now, that’s usually hard to do without spending lots of real money on lots of fake chips, but, with my last slot game experience like this, I found sites that post links to millions in free chips, so I think this could work out.
On Facebook Marketplace, I didn’t find a whole lot of promising leads. There was a nice Denon CD player that I’m sure cost a fortune back in the… 90s. I don’t think there’s a market for this… I saw two that sold a few months ago for $60 and $70 bucks apiece, but I think it would take too long to sell and I don’t want it sitting around my house. I decided to email a shop that buys and sells audio equipment… but they weren’t interested. No surprise there, really, but it was worth a shot.
So, I’m off to a pretty good start for day one – I’ll check back in later.
DAY 2
This morning I woke up to an offer on my Nintendo Switch game for $20. I countered at $23 and got it sold. The buyer paid for shipping, so after I just missed the mail lady while searching for tape, I got it packed up and it’s ready to ship out tomorrow. After ebay’s fees, I’ve locked in $20 to kick things off. I just need to do this 500 more times…
And I must be on a lucky streak because someone did reach out to me on Fiverr… but I think they just wanted to say hi.
Meanwhile, I’ve been playing this stupid slots game for a few hours. I think I forgot to mention it, but the reward for completing the Slots promo is 5000 Swagbucks, which is essentially $50 because those Swagbucks can be redeemed for Paypal gift cards. Unfortunately, I’m finding that most of these free chip offers are expired, so I’m not able to rack up a ton of chips which I’m sure I’ll need to reach level 60, so this may be a bust.
I’ll check back tomorrow.
Day 3
Alright, so while I’ve been waiting for Fiverr gigs to roll in I’ve been lurking over on a subreddit called PhotoshopRequest. Here, people post an image they want photoshopped in some way and the community of Photoshoppers will do it for them. A lot of times, there is no pay involved, but people will still post a link where the OP can tip them if they like the Photoshop job. Other times, there will be pay involved– usually in the 5 to 20 dollar range.
Sometimes the requests are simple… sometimes they are more challenging. I went ahead and tried one with a $25 tip at stake. This guy wanted his girlfriend removed from a photo, but of course I’m left to recreate his other arm and other details of the photo.
This one took a long time… and the end result didn’t look great either. But I posted the watermarked version and a link to tip me via PayPal. He ended up going with someone else’s version. I then tried doing a lot of different ones. I would basically keep refreshing the subreddit looking for a new post that I could do quickly and try and get tipped before other redditors are able to post. Still haven’t got paid, but I’ll keep trying.
Good news. I received an order on Fiverr to cut down someone’s Twitch stream into a 60-second TikTok. This should be simple enough…and I’ll get $40 for completing the gig. Well, actually, $32, because Fiverr charges an outrageous 20%. So… at least it’s something.
This should only take me like 30 minutes or so to complete and that will lock in $52 here at the end of day 3.
Day 4
The good news is the Fiverr gig went well with no revisions, so that was relatively painless. You never know what you’re gonna get with Fiverr customers, so I’m glad it went smoothly. And, I actually got another order from someone else. This is a longer form video – around 10 minutes… kind of a meal prep cooking vlog. I quoted her $150 for the edit and will probably take several hours to go through her footage and cut it down. But before I do that, I’m going to knock out some more Photoshop Requests on Reddit.
Now onto the edit.
Alright, so that took about 3 hours. Within a few minutes of delivering the order, she approved it and tipped me $10, which is pretty sweet… but the skeevy little douchebags at Fiverr take 20% including my tip, so I’m adding $128 to the bank for a total of $180.
Now that I’m in Illinois, I want to log back into an old sports betting account and maybe use that tip money to place a bet on the Steelers game tonight. They have a same-game parlay with boosted odds, so you could wager $100 to win $800, but you need the Steelers to not lose by more than 7 points, and you need both Najee Harris and Nick Chubb to both score touchdowns. If any of those fail, you lose the entire amount. So I’m going to wager $10 to win $80 and hope for the best.
Day 5
So last night, both running backs scored a touchdown like I needed them to and Steelers were only down by 6. After some drama with the Browns not scoring a first down, Steelers got the ball back with a few seconds left… and they had to try one of those ridiculous plays of too many backward lateral passes and well… Browns recovered a fumble in the end zone to thwart my parlay. That was annoying. FanDuel either felt bad for me or is trying to get me hooked on gambling because they gave me $10 back in free bets, so maybe I’ll try again.
Also, awhile ago, my Xbox One took a tumble and now isn’t working right. I think simply replacing the hard drive and reinstalling the OS will get it back up and running, so I’m thinking about doing that and then selling it altogether. And again, similar to selling the Nintendo Switch game, sure, I already had this sitting around so it’s not a perfect example of starting from absolute scratch, but if you’ve got the know-how, you can find things like xbox consoles that aren’t working, fix them up, and re-sell them for profit.
So, I’m going to buy this replacement hard drive for $40 and see if I can get it up and running.
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Day 8
Okay, after doing more digging, it looks like the error I’m getting with the Xbox is related to the blu-ray drive and not the hard drive, and I just don’t think I’ll be able to fix it like I thought. So I’m going to refund the hard drive order and move on to something else.
But I did finally get tipped for a Photoshop request. I did almost 15 different Photoshop jobs and just made the $10 on one… so not the most efficient use of my time, but let’s add it to the total.
I then got two more orders on Fiverr. One was simple – just finishing the edit of a real estate video. That was good for $40 and I got a $12.50 tip, so after Fiverr’s ridiculous fee, we added $42 to the bank.
The second job was to take really crappy footage and photos of a spa and make it look… not crappy for another $40. I didn’t really understand what the guy wanted and my attempts to distract from the crappy footage were unsuccessful. I didn’t want to waste more of my time trying to get on the same page with this guy, so I had him cancel the order. Sooo, a good amount of time wasted and nothing to show for it.
I was kind of surprised how many inquiries I was receiving on Fiverr since I haven’t done that many jobs, so I searched video editing and found that I’m on the 2nd page of the search results and tagged as a Rising Talent, which is pretty cool. But that’s all for now.
Day 20
Alright, so it’s been a few weeks since I’ve started this challenge and I wasn’t sure which direction to take things, since I don’t think I can stand doing any more Fiverr gigs, and my attempts to fix my Xbox One failed.
So I’ve been wanting to do a stock options trade and now that I have a little money, I figured I’ll give it a shot. The S&P is rallying after a decent sell-off and I want to get a little piece of the action. We have a bull flag setup on the 5-minute chart with a bullish cross on the 1OP indicator I use, which unlike other indicators is not lagging, rather it's predictive, so if you have the right conditions, you can catch moves before they happen.
So you’ll have to forgive my use of Robinhood here… I’m using my wife’s account, but I’m going to buy 1 call option expiring in two days for… it looks like $220. I am expecting this to make new highs on the day, and I’ll probably sell before the market closes.
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Alright, we got the rally I was expecting, so I sold the call option for $303 for a pretty solid $83 profit.
I’m going to end part one here, but I’ve got some fun things planned for part two…