How I made 10K$ a month as a 19y/o working for US startups remotely.

It was Feb, 2020, one week before covid was to shut all colleges in India.

I was a fresher, working for my dorm room on a startup idea called Grapevine along with a batchmate and a senior. When I see a text on a WhatsApp group of someone looking for a developer who worked on Flutter framework.

This message changed the course of my life, for the best. I achieved things I never imagined, and I am eternally grateful.

And this is something, you and every middle class born ambitious kid in any Indian college can manufacture for themselves.

I got lucky because I said yes.

I wasn't ready. All I had built was a basic chat app on Flutter and Firestore, and it had failed. I was still learning how to code UI.

The pay was $5 an hour. At the time, that felt huge. I was teaching at a coaching centre to keep my bills going, earning far less, and cycling 8 km every day to get there and back.

I didn't think much. I said yes, and told myself I'd figure it out.

The timing got lucky too. Flutter was new, and most mobile developers were still building on Android and Kotlin. Because I started on Flutter, I got to be native to it before most people had picked it up.

A few days later, covid came. We went home thinking it was a week off.

Pankaj, who hired me, never really interviewed me. Maybe it was the NIT tag. Maybe it was my long hair making me look creative. Or maybe he just didn't know Flutter himself. Either way, I was in.

He mentored me through everything I didn't know about how Android and iOS work. I didn't even own an iPhone, so I didn't know you could swipe from the edge to go back. That was an iOS thing.

So I bought my first iPhone, just to understand how iOS apps feel.

Pankaj got his projects from Upwork. Out of curiosity, I made an account too.

Soon I found someone in Spain building an OLX-like app. I applied, he onboarded me quickly, I built his first feature, and I billed $18 an hour.

It wasn't full-time. Maybe 5 to 10 hours a week. But I was already earning 3x per hour what I'd made a month earlier.

So I kept applying. Almost 90% of my applications got a reply. That wasn't because I was exceptional. There were just very few Flutter developers back then.

Four months in, I got connected to Michael, the founder of a Edtech startup based out of Denmark. They had raised around $60 million, backed by a16z, and built virtual science labs used across the US and Europe. Now they wanted to launch in India and China, both mobile-first markets.

I had a JEE background, so I understood how Indian students learn science. And I could build mobile apps. He was impressed.

I declined at first. A professional team felt like too much for me, and I was still working with Pankaj.

A couple of weeks later, Michael texted again. My workload had eased by then, so I said yes.

We never discussed the contract. He could have asked what I was earning and offered 30 to 40% more, maybe $9 or $10 an hour. He sent me an offer for $25 an hour. I didn't ask for it, and I didn't expect it.

That was the first time I understood what kind of leader he was.

Michael hired me personally, so I had direct access to him. He'd jump on calls and build alongside us. He led by example and was never afraid to get his hands dirty. He showed us what a good engineer does when building a good product.

Two months later, he told me: "Samyak, from today I want you to lead scrums."

The team was five people, most of them 5 to 10 years older than me and more experienced in every way. I asked how I could possibly lead them.

He said, "I have faith in you."

That's where my real learning began. I worked with our product manager, translated ideas into engineering timelines, planned roadmaps and team capacity, and kept shipping my own code at the same time.

Nine months later, we launched. The app crossed 500,000 downloads on the Play Store, and I got to see what an app in production really looks like.

A year later, I wanted to grow again. I wanted to work for US companies, and I wanted to double my rate, from $25 to $50.

On AngelList, I found a startup building an EdTech product that taught chemistry reactions through interactive simulations instead of textbooks. They needed a Flutter lead.

I quoted $70 an hour, knowing they'd negotiate. They agreed to $60.

That conversation happened at night. The next morning I sat next to my mother and told her, "Mom, I'll be making $2,400 a week now."

Neither of us could believe it. She hugged me, with a slight tear of happiness in her eye.

I was 19. That was roughly $10,000 a month. I saved enough to help buy us a new flat.

I said yes to a $5 job I wasn't ready for. Everything after that came from saying yes again, every time something bigger showed up.

Later, I left that role to start my own dev agency.

More about that later.