How I Started

I had only been involved in crypto investing for about a month—the trenches of random tokens that had no real relevance to anything. One day, I stumbled across a specific reward token and noticed something odd: most reward tokens had dashboards to track rewards, but this one didn’t.

I reached out to the project owner a few times, offering to build one for them. At the time, I had no clue how. I didn’t even know a frontend framework.

While waiting for a reply, I decided to teach myself React through an online course. I spent 30 hours over a single weekend learning as much as I could. It was probably unhealthy, but by the end of it, I felt confident enough to try copying another dashboard layout as a template.

It wasn’t perfect, but I managed to build something that looked like a real dashboard. I filled it with fake data and sent a screenshot to the token owner—who finally replied. It wasn’t using on-chain data yet, and it was far from production-ready, but he offered me 2 BNB (about $600 at the time). I couldn’t believe it.

I told him I’d deliver a working version in a week. That week, I taught myself the basics of Web3 and figured out how to get real blockchain data into a React frontend. It was incredibly stressful—resources were scarce at the time—but I pulled it off.

That was my first paid crypto dev job, and I was hooked.

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The Next Steps

I repeated the same approach: looking for other reward tokens that didn’t have dashboards and messaging their teams. Most ignored me. Some responded only to say they already had someone.

Eventually, I found another project in the same situation. By this point, I had improved my frontend skills, so I created a styled dashboard using their branding and logo. Then I reached out and asked if they wanted to make an offer.

They offered $1,000. I countered with $1,500, and they instantly accepted. That was another moment of realization: I was probably still undercharging.

What I didn’t expect was how quickly they wanted it—the same day. I later learned that one day in crypto feels like a month in normal time. Luckily, I had everything ready. I plugged in their smart contract address, updated the code, deployed it—and they paid me immediately.

This time, I added a link to my Telegram account in the dashboard footer.
That decision changed everything.

In the same week, the original project owner referred me to another team. I quoted $1.2K, but we settled at $1K since we’d worked together before.

By the end of those three weeks, I had earned $3.5K, all while still working my full-time job.

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Growing Pains

Once my Telegram link went live, the messages started flowing.

Some people balked at $1.5K. Others didn’t blink at $2K+. That was eye-opening. I realized that in crypto, many people are willing to pay well—especially if they know you can deliver.

I was getting one or two new clients per week, and some became repeat customers.

But this was also when the real growing pains began.

People didn’t just want dashboards anymore. They wanted:

• NFT functionality
• Token launch infrastructure
• Claimable rewards logic
• Complex smart contract integrations

I didn’t know how to do any of that yet. So I started turning down those jobs while I tried to learn. At the same time, I kept delivering dashboards using what I already knew.

During this period, I improved my React skills and rebuilt my base dashboard template. That was one of the best decisions I made early on—it allowed me to churn out new dashboards quickly. Sometimes, I’d deliver a $2K dashboard in under an hour.

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The Real Beginning

This was the true start of my crypto development journey. It laid the foundation for:

• My Web3 skill set
• My early client network
• My confidence in learning by building under pressure

In future posts, I’ll go deeper into how I scaled up, solved technical challenges, and automated parts of my process to handle more complex projects.

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Thanks for reading.

If you’re just starting out, remember this: you don’t need to know everything to begin—you just need to start.

Telegram was the spark. React was the bridge. Web3 is where it all began.

— Diary of a Dev