Or the story of how I monetized my first Firebase “Hello World”.

A few months ago I’ve been to an event at Google’s Developer Space, in Singapore, where they introduced me to Firebase, a mobile application and web app development platform that supports developers in different aspects, from hosting and and data storage, to analytics and monetization.

In less than 5 minutes I had my first web app up and running.

A few weeks later, on a warm and humid Singaporean night, I decided to give the service a try. As always, the first thing to do is making your own “Hello World” app. Doing so it’s very easy in Firebase: first I installed the command line tool on my laptop, then I created a project in the Firebase Console, and in less than 5 minutes I had my first web app up and running.

At that point I still had the night in front of me, a new service to explore, and little to none desire to sleep. So I started to wonder, how can I expand my web app? I started to brainstorm for ideas. At that point the question in my head was: “what would I use?”, and to get a more realistic idea of what I needed i started to look at my browser history. Research papers, documents, videos, and then, ideas for presents for my long-distance girlfriend.

Now, as a man, I really suck at making presents, and I also found the idea completely inefficient. So, I decided to sketch out an idea to simplify gathering ideas for presents, as well as for investing not in useless stuff but in smart products. With that in mind, I imagined a platform to share ideas about cool and environmental friendly products. And i had a name for it: Ethical Gifters.

What does it takes to monetize an Hello World app? (Photo by Safar Safarov on Unsplash)

Coming to what I therefore had to set up, is nothing but a web platform where users can signup and login, browse uploaded products, and suggest their own Eco-friendly ideas. The good thing is that Firebase helps you with hosting, storage, users’ credentials and databases. In 10 minutes I had Google login enabled, in 15 more I had a form for uploading products. By the end of the subsequent hour I had finalized the browsing system, added a search bar, uploaded some sample products and tested it on both my laptop and mobiles. At that point I wondered, what’s next?

Well, for the last few weeks I have been reading a bit about progressive web application (PWA), so I decided to give it a try and converted my simple listing platform in a progressive web app listing platform. And apparently doing it in Firebase is very easy, as most of their services support offline storage, so everything I had to do was to implement a service worker and tell the browsers where my icons were.

Because we all want to make great gifts, but I also wanna make useful presents (Photo by Nynne Schrøder on Unsplash).

At that point, I had a simple progressive web app where users can upload and read about products. Easy. I felt ready to dig into more advanced stuff, add functionalities and so on, but a thought popped up in my brain: what if I can earn some money out of this? I am not talking about big amount of money, but let’s say enough to cheer with a drink up of my learning. Everything I had to do, was to monetize the links of my platform.

Despite the fact that I am not a big fan of Amazon Ads, the service is pretty easy. Take a product available on Amazon, get a personalized link, have people click on it and buy the product, earn a percentage. So, I add some affiliate links to the products in my platform.

Can I earn enough to cheer with a coffee on my learning curve? (Photo by Micheile Henderson on Unsplash).

Final stage: driving people to my page. At that point, everything I had was up and running on Firebase, and accessible by anyone at ethicalgifters.web.app. I started to share the links with friends and colleagues, on my social media, on Reddit. And the conversions started to appear on my Amazon account. I also decided to start an Instagram page, and i clearly saw an increase in my number of active users, and subsequently, of earning. Yes, I made a coffee out of my Firebase learning steps. And you can as well. Sometimes it doesn’t take a multi million dollar idea to start your passive income, but just a small test can do the job as well.

If you like my story or if you have any comments, let me know below or give me a clap of hands. For more details about the evolution of Ethical Gifters, and the next stages of the platform, follow the projects’ on Instagram (@ethical.gifter) or Twitter (@ethicalgifters).