hey what's up guys nolan here and today i'm going to tell you
about a 42 000 a week passive income side hustle i actually
first learned about this on the how i built this podcast which i
actually linked below but i found it so incredible that i had
to make a video about it and in this video you're going to hear
the story of luis von on and how he created like i said a
42 000 a week passive income side hustle
which i'm sure you've seen before but i guarantee you haven't really heard
the backstory behind so i'm excited to have you here and
let's get started
so just to provide a bit of backstory luis von on was born and grew up in
guatemala city during a 36-year long civil war
and in fact and this is really crazy but his aunt was actually kidnapped and held
for ransom in his youth which is one of the
defining moments in his decision to move to the united states
which he later did actually at the age of 18 he began studying at duke
university where he would go on to receive a
bachelor's of science in mathematics in 2002. he later earned his phd in
computer science at carnegie mellon university
in 2005 and just one year later in 2006 he became a faculty member at carnegie
mellon school of computer science it was only one year into this program
however that von ahn attended a critical seminar from a top twitter executive
and in this presentation the exec discussed problems twitter was spacing
and how bots were actually creating thousands of free email accounts on
twitter servers to spam people this motivated von on to solve this
problem and led to the eventual creation of recaptcha
and i'm sure you've seen this program before and in fact it's
kind of annoying actually it requires you to type in some squiggly letters to
make sure that you aren't a robot and it's one of those necessary evils
that you always have to go through this program is really useful for
websites though as it prevents automated programs or
bots like i said from perpetrating large-scale abuse
such as automatically registering for large numbers of accounts or purchasing
huge numbers of tickets for resale by scalpers
but here's where things get interesting vaughn on initially created this program
and let websites use it for free as there was no obvious way to monetize it
however when vaughn was presenting his creation in front of a crowd
there happened to be a member of the new york times watching
this man spoke to vaughn on after the presentation and told him that the new
york times was actually trying to digitize
over a century of old newspaper articles and had to do it extremely slowly
van on eventually struck a deal with the new york times and made it so that
every time somebody was typing in a word to prove that they weren't a robot
they were actually digitizing a word in an old newspaper article
at the same time recapture had so many users that they could actually digitize
a year's worth of newspapers in a single week and because translators
were so expensive vaughn was charging 42 000 per year of
newspaper articles translated and like i said was making this money
every single week vlog on even described this himself as a
side hustle saying that he was the only person
working at this company that the program was effectively self-supporting
in fact he was a professor at the time and simultaneously was teaching courses
at carnegie mellon university luis von on is now valued at over 700 million
dollars as he eventually founded the language
learning app duolingo i hope this video was inspiring to any
potential coders or programmers out there
as if you can get creative there's a lot of genius ways to make money creating
programs online and if nothing else i really hope this
video was as interesting for you as it was for me
and i would encourage you to listen to the full podcast which like i said
is linked right down below so thanks for watching guys and don't forget to like
and subscribe for more similar videos thank you
you