How i made $10,000 as a Nigerian Teen in High School

As of writing this , the minimum wage in Nigeria is ₦ 40,000($66.66) and 27.4 million Nigerians earn less than ₦100,000($166.66) yearly. The only reason i am writing this is for a kid out there to be inspired and make magic ✨

[0] Introduction
Hi, i’m Pleasant, a teenager in Lagos Mainland, Nigeria and i like to build products & talk about it , i developed interest for software development 3 years ago (courtesy - my ICT teacher Mr. Oloni Leke) and i only started making money this year. This is me trying to sum it up in one article.
Heads up, i am not very intelligent, so i doubt there is an IQ requirement to do this. 😄

[1] The Pandemic
I’ve never liked school, teaching so many students the same way, the same thing and grading them with the same system never made sense to me, everyone is different, there are auditory leaners, Kinaesthetic leaners e.t.c and as Albert Einstein once famously said

“If you judge a fish by it’s ability to climb a tree, it would spend it’s whole life thinking it is stupid”

you would think you need a masters certificate to know this lol. A year before the pandemic, my ICT teacher showed me this new thing called programming and the great things i could do with it, he even gave me his laptop home for a day to do whatever i wanted, if you are thinking that was the day i started writing code on my own, well you are wrong, i watched spiderman lol. Never really took any action in my new interest in programming after that time, school was choking me.
The pandemic hit and it was just me and my mom’s android 5.1 device and i started researching to see where ever it takes me.

I and youtube had become best friends , from hardware reviews to programming tutorials , 2020 was my year of learning, i had gotten so much knowledge on the internet i could start and win arguments online with random strangers - iOS vs Android, Python VS PHP e.t.c (looking back yeah, they were silly). I wanted to practice programming but i had no laptop, so i had to download any programming apps i found on the store like Termux, Acode e.t.c , i ran my first Python server and i felt like i was on top of the world. I became addicted, i lost interest in basically everything, friends , movies. i just wanted to code. I also developed a new interest in making youtube videos and i made a few reviews.

[2] Buck

From day 1 of programming, Mr. Oloni had made me see programming as a tool for innovation , doing something new , becoming the next Ben Pasternak or Elon Musk, not Mark(we hated mark). So i never really built a calculator app as most beginners would, i wanted to build something new .
Meanwhile, i had gotten a community of techies on facebook cause of my popular tech reviews and hot takes, and part of being amongst the community is that you get to know different peoples day-to-day problems, some of which you might share with them and one of it was using stickers or gifs on facebook, back then we could only use this fixed set of stickers and trust me they were boring. So then i thought i could build something to help solve this, and thanks to my cousin sending me a laptop she had used, i had something more to work with, more about the project here => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RYw77yibQk&t=241s

That was my first project, i made no money from it and soon i abandoned it for a new project, Buck.
The laptop crashed and i had to go back to coding on a phone. Working with a terminal app on android called termux to run cli commands, i had to run so many repeated commands and it soon got frustrating to me so i wanted to fix that too and i created a little python project to do this called buck. it did one thing only - take a bunch of terminal commands and put it into one, it was brilliant, there was nothing like it out there . We resumed school and everytime i came home i implemented a new feature, from list, custom keywords, delete e.t.c . My grades started falling very badly in school and i had to make up for it plus i was a prefect , there was so much pressure from everyone so i decided to abandon buck till summer 2021.

We vacated for the session and i was to resume the next term to my final year in High School, i knew i had to do something to prove everyone wrong in high school that i was actually on to something , i started making tweets(fyi it is difficult to grow on twitter), tagging tech influencers and i got some of them to retweet my work which was great, i think i got 100 followers back then , i was so happy. As each week went by, i kept improving buck and telling everyone about it , things went well and buck got over 20,000 downloads by december -https://pepy.tech/project/buck
i was so happy, even though i still had not made any money from it after all the hardwork.

[3] 2022
With the incredible connections i had made on twitter i got in contact with the CEO of Onboardbase.com a dev security startup ,to whom i pitched buck, he loved the idea , i dont know what came over me but i saw that as an opportunity to sell what i had built, cause i wanted to move on to something else, he asked for a price , i was feeling in the moment , i cant remember how much i proposed first, but we ended up on 2.8 million naira which was $6,800 back then, fyi i had not even seen 100,000 naira before lol. i didnt believe it, until i signed the acquisition document(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIQIgGtuSYg) and i got credited on my Abeg wallet. WHAT JUST HAPPEND?? 🤯

That was the beginning to everything good for me, the acquisition , a job as dev advocate at onboardbase and someone on twitter had sent me a MacBook after he and his friends at Twitter and Microsoft heard my story. https://twitter.com/AnthonyAzekwoh

In 4 months i had made $10,000 which as of writing this Article is ₦6,000,000.

[4] Conclusion - What’s Next ?

I left my job and i now currently build startups. I dont know what H2, or the next few years has for me but one thing i am sure of and i can tell anyone else is that you can do great things from a small place. Go make magic ✨
Thanks to everyone who has helped me by reaching out through out this journey, Nat CEO @github, Gbenga CEO @Flutterwave and everyone else. ❤️

If you are just starting out , the internet is all yours and if you ever need help , send me a message on twitter - @pleasntszn.