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How I Paid My College Fees With Just Weeks of Code and a Viral Side Project

How I Paid My College Fees With Just Weeks of Code and a Viral Side Project

programming

In 2019-2020, I was just another average college student trying to survive engineering lectures, late-night assignments, and the occasional side hustle. I didn’t have a big and million dollar plan. I wasn’t trying to launch a startup or impress investors. I just wanted to build something fun.

To be clear — it wasn’t even my original idea.

At the time, anonymous message games were already trending. Many of my friends were sharing links in WhatsApp groups and posting their anonymous replies on social media. At first, I thought, “What are they even doing? This is such a childish trend.” But then it hit me — maybe I didn’t need to join the game… I could build it.

Being an introvert, no one really sent me any messages when I tried one of those links myself. So I figured — if I’m not going to receive messages, I might as well create the platform where others do. At least then they’d play, and I’d earn. Win-win.

I didn’t know it at the time, but that small project would go on to change my life.

It ended up getting over a million visitors, paying my entire college tuition, and becoming a financial backup for my family when things got tough. All of this started with just a few weeks of code.

The Idea Was Simple — But Powerful

Back then, anonymous platforms were trending. People loved the thrill of receiving anonymous messages, whether from friends, strangers, or secret admirers.

So I decided to build same game and same feature with a different name of course and a different UI.

That was it. No user accounts. No complicated flows. Just:

I wasn’t sure if anyone would actually use it, but building it felt fun. Worst case? No one uses it — but I still get some hands-on development experience.

My Stack Was... Extremely Basic

This is going to sound wild in 2025, but I built everything using:

It was my first time writing something that even felt like a "real product." I had no deployment pipeline. No GitHub automation. Just manual uploads and lots of praying the database didn’t crash.

There were no logins. Messages were stored with a unique token. Links were generated using some random alpha-numeric string. It wasn’t elegant — but it worked.

Back then, AI tools weren’t like what we have today. If I ran into an error, there was no ChatGPT to help — just endless Googling and digging through Stack Overflow threads. I didn’t have a team. No mentors. It was just me, my laptop, and whatever I could figure out on my own.

When the Numbers Started to Climb

At first, I just shared the game with a few classmates and close friends. Then I dropped the link in some group chats. To my surprise, few people started posting their anonymous message links on Instagram stories and WhatsApp groups with captions like, “Send me something 👀.”

I had casually shared it and pretty much left it on the internet. I didn’t track any stats or check how it was doing. Honestly, I just moved on, assuming it would fade away like most random side projects.

But something unexpected happened — around six months later. One day, I was casually checking the hosting dashboard and noticed something strange — the resource usage was unusually high. Other websites on the same shared server were also being affected. I had no idea what was going on at first.

Out of curiosity, I opened Google Analytics… and there it was: 1,000+ real-time users on my anonymous message game. I was shocked. I hadn’t touched the project in months — yet somehow, it had blown up on its own.

Viral Web Game Analytics
Google Analytics

How It Made Money (Without Charging a Cent)

At first, we didn’t even have any monetization in place. So even during the peak traffic phase, we weren’t earning anything. Yes, I know — we completely missed out on monetizing the best time.

But a few months later, once things settled and I figured out how to implement some basic ad placements, the traffic was still decent. That’s when I slowly started seeing some revenue come in.

No popups. No flashy videos. Just basic display ads.

And to my surprise, it started earning.

Over time, it added up:

This side project became a lifeline. Not just for me — but for my family too.

What I Learned from a Million Users

This game taught me more than any classroom ever could:

1. Simplicity Wins

People love websites that just work. No signups, no delays, no onboarding.

2. Curiosity Drives Growth

The game didn’t need an ad budget — it had emotional pull. “Who sent me this?” is all it needed to spread.

3. You Don’t Need a Fancy Stack

I didn’t use React. Or Firebase. Or any modern library. Just old-school PHP and MySQL. But when the idea works, the stack doesn’t matter (until you hit scale 😅).

4. Side Projects Can Change Lives

I wasn’t trying to build a company. I was just experimenting. But that one project gave me confidence, stability, and income I never expected.

Looking back, I’m really glad I didn’t wait around for the “perfect” idea. I just built something simple and put it out there. A lot of the credit goes to my roommate in the hostel — he kept pushing me to keep going when I doubted myself.

I’ve never been the risk-taking type. I knew I could build, but I didn’t know how to put it out in the world or promote it. Selling, marketing — it wasn’t my thing. But I’m glad I gave it a shot. Because that one decision ended up changing more than I ever expected.

Developer Mistake I Learned From

There’s one technical mistake I made early on that caused huge problems during the traffic spike:

I forgot to call mysql_close() in PHP.

That one missing line caused a connection leak — where open MySQL connections never got released. Each new visitor created a new connection, but they stayed active even after the request ended.

Eventually:

Because if this happened, the site would crash and users wouldn’t be able to send messages. That’s when I realized I had to patch the issue.

What I Learned:

Always close your database connections, even in small projects and simple PHP codebases.

Use a pattern like this in PHP:

$conn = mysqli_connect("localhost", "user", "pass", "db");
 
// your logic here
 
mysqli_close($conn);

Conclusion

I don't think you need a great idea to build a side project. Sometimes, one weird or trendy idea is enough to take off. You might even become a millionaire — just kidding, not a millionaire. But honestly, if you have a decent idea and you're willing to build it and put it out there, it can work. It's always a win-win situation: if it doesn’t take off, you still learn a lot; and if it does go viral, you might end up earning more than you expected.