Blog/2024-02-27/Teenage Entrepreneurship

When we were kids, a few rupees would go a long way. With ₹200, you could get a pretty good meal (kababs!). And dollars? Dollars would walk a mile in the time a rupee would walk an inch. At the time the exchange rate was something between ₹40:$1 and ₹50:$1. When I visited Japan (where ¥150:$1) in 2018, I remember thinking to myself "oh, yen are more like cents! This country just prices everything in cents!" and only then realized that a similar thing applies to the Indian rupee.

Anyway, the dollar was quite valuable to young me at the time:

1. It was strong against the rupee and so a little bit of work in dollars was the equivalent of a lot of work in rupees.
2. Getting dollars on some US-available system meant you were (effectively) banked in some US-available system: some places only took dollars!

Dollar Strength

What I would travel on Saturdays to teach

As an example of the first of these, when I was about 19, I taught a Mathematics coaching class some weekends. This was a crazy operation. I'd wake up early in the morning, they'd drive me the 2.5 hrs there, I'd run coaching for two 2-hour sessions, then break for lunch, then coach for two 2-hour sessions again, and then they'd drive me back. This thing paid me either ₹125/hr or ₹250/hr only when I was teaching, not when I was traveling - which, to be fair, was a princely sum for me back then.

To compare against that, I made a few dollars a day for the simple act of logging on, browsing my friends' blogs and then clicking an ad. I made $20 (or ₹1000) per sponsored review I wrote on any of my web properties (heh heh), something that took very little effort, maybe half an hour of sitting in front of a computer and making up some bullshit about a product.

Dollar Purchase Power

My Visa debit card, hopefully sufficiently redacted

A picture of my Maestro Debit Card, suitably redacted, one hopes

Now it's one thing to be a strong currency, but the greatest thing about anyone who could supply dollars is that they had a variety of ways to supply dollars to someone for goods and services. I had rupees, and a debit card with a VISA logo on it, and I even had another debit card with a Mastercard (well Maestro) logo on it.

But despite all the stuff that says "International" on any of these and "For Online Use", at the time they were very limited in where they would work. I remember trying repeatedly to buy things on non-Indian sites, hitting 3D Secure or whatever and being unable to buy the thing.

So the most valuable reason to have dollars was that you could buy things online that were not in India. This meant random cables that, for some reason, we couldn't easily get in India or little electronics that just weren't convenient to acquire because I didn't know how to evaluate quality. And most importantly of all, it meant buying many things at US prices (which were ridiculously cheap in comparison to the converted rate). The thing I coveted above all was a domain name of my own. And one day, I did actually get it (arjie.com) with some online winnings, and then renewed with dollars from these online endeavours.

How We Got The Dollars

Well, the simplest form of getting paid was the click-fraud ring. Everyone in the ring would promise to log on to their dial-up connections and visit and click ads on our properties. One magical heavy industrial ad actually paid out $0.94 on a single click once. We were small scale operators, so I was never caught. A friend of mine tried to scale it up and was promptly banned, his AdSense winnings forfeit at $195 or so (I religiously withdrew at minimum withdrawal amount $100). But Google was an honest company and would send me the cheque converted to rupees (I believe).

To get the dollars we had to interact with the less-scrupulous operators. One guy paid us $100 if we generated a sufficient amount of posts under a few usernames on his forum. This being what we were liable to do in the first place, that worked out marvelously. His forum points also won me my first domain.

But the best paying operation of all were the sponsored reviews. We'd write our blogs and encourage our friends to backlink to ours (we'd respect the pingback haha). Traffic back then was a lot more organic. People would somehow find all the stuff we wrote, and each link on some random person's site to us would increase our rank ever so slightly. I believe we hit PageRank 3 or PageRank 4 at some point, PR3 being the minimum to write these sponsored reviews. Now these reviews were gold. You had to maintain a certain ratio of reviews to posts, and you had to keep your rank up, but each of them would pay $20 or more!

Being a person of some integrity, and not wanting my blog to be corrupted by these atrocious things I simply had two blogs: my real one and then a second one where I permitted the sponsored reviews. My buddy Marc, originator of many of these schemes, once attempted to ensure that everyone in India would see no reviews (thereby ensuring that our readers would be protected from this foul nonsense) and that everyone else would see them (thereby ensuring that both automatic and manual checks for existence worked). I wrote the code for that, and it worked for a few months, but then one day he was banned for hiding posts so that's the first time I destroyed an income source with a bug (or I suppose regression under changing circumstances) in my code.

I can only assume that BSNL sold some IP block to some foreign entity, which assigned it to whatever Western entity was checking for these things. Once again, undone by the forces of capitalism, I suppose. Still, other forces of capitalism assisted. Paypal at the time was IPOing and did very little KYC and so my Paypal account, poorly KYC'd, was the destination of these ill-won dollars. And that Paypal account was the source of funds to all these things I wanted.

You can see some of these sources of my funds mentioned in online news posts of the time still. But about then, I dated a girl at college who helped me find more lucrative local jobs doing things that weren't particularly different: acting in plays that she directed and writing totally fictional copy describing products and people I'd never seen. And I'd renewed my domain for 10 years, and my VPS (to which I'd moved from the cPanel-based free/cheap shared hosting I was previously using) was also paid for a while on the $1/month I was being charged.

And later I discovered my father's credit card would work for dollar purchases, so I'd ask him to use that for these renewals so everything was quite nice and safe. And that was the end of the desperate need for the dollar.