Student Stories — What People Built and What They Charged
Below are five real accounts from people who took the cohort. Three went well. Two did not. We include the numbers, the hours, the awkward client emails, and the parts nobody puts on a landing page.
Names are used with permission. Amounts are what actually landed in a bank account, before tax. Nobody here quit school, went viral, or made five figures in a month.
Case study: Maya, second year, built her family's bakery site
Maya joined the cohort in her second year of a communications degree. She had never written a line of HTML. Her first project was not a portfolio piece — it was her aunt's bakery in East Oakland, which had been running on a single social media page and a phone number.
What she built
Four static pages: home, menu, custom cake ordering, and directions. The menu is hand-coded HTML that her aunt updates by editing one file, because the bakery changes three items a week and Maya did not want to teach her a dashboard. The order page is a plain form that emails the shop. No shopping cart, no online payments — the bakery takes deposits by phone and preferred it that way.
What it took
- Time to first version
- 5 weeks, evenings only
- Hours logged
- 61
- Paid for the bakery site
- $0 (family)
- Referrals it produced
- 3
- Earned from referrals
- $2,150 over 7 months
The unglamorous part
The menu page took three rewrites. Version one had a photo gallery Maya could not get to load quickly on a phone, so she cut the gallery entirely. Version two used a font that made the Spanish accents render oddly. Her aunt also asked for a "hit counter," and Maya spent two evenings explaining why she was not going to add one.
How the referrals happened
They were not mysterious. Her aunt told a florist two doors down. The florist told a tutoring service. Each time, Maya sent the same short email: here is the bakery site, here is what I charge, here is how long it takes. She priced the florist at $600, the tutor at $750, and a barber shop at $800 after she got faster and more confident.
The first site was free and it was still the best decision I made. I had something real to point at. When the florist asked what I could do, I did not have to describe anything — I just sent a link and she recognised the bakery.
Maya R., communications student, Oakland
Where she is now
Maya takes roughly one small business site per term, around $700 each, and turns down anything that needs e-commerce because she has not learned payments yet. She is honest about that with clients. It has never cost her a job.
Case study: Dev, 17, self-taught, sells landing page templates
Dev found us through a forum post. He was sixteen when he started, still in high school, and had been copying tutorials for about a year without finishing anything. He did not want client work. He said, plainly, that he did not want to talk to adults on video calls. That is a legitimate constraint, so we pointed him at products instead of services.
What he built
A set of six HTML and CSS landing page templates aimed at people launching small side projects: a waitlist page, an event page, a one-product page, a freelance profile page, a newsletter page, and a simple documentation layout. All static. All under 30KB. Each ships with a plain-English README explaining which three lines to change.
The actual numbers
- Templates published
- 6 over 14 months
- Price each
- $14
- Best month
- $412
- Worst month
- $26
- Rough monthly average
- $140
- Total to date
- just under $2,000
The unglamorous part
The first template sold four copies in three months. Dev nearly stopped. What changed things was not marketing — it was writing the README properly. Buyers were emailing him confused about where to put their own text, so he rewrote the instructions for someone who had never opened a code editor. Refund requests went to zero and reviews started mentioning the documentation.
He also spends about two hours a week on support email, which he did not expect. Product income is not passive. It is a small ongoing job attached to an asset.
A hundred and forty dollars a month is not a business. It is my phone bill, my bus pass and a bit left over. But it arrives whether or not I feel like working that week, and I built the whole thing before I turned eighteen.
Dev S., self-taught, 17 when he started
Case study: Tomas, 26, career-switcher, now subcontracts for an agency
Tomas managed a warehouse team for four years. He is the oldest person in this set of stories and the one with the clearest reason to move fast: he had savings for about five months and a partner expecting him to contribute to rent.
What he did differently
He treated the cohort like a job. Thirty hours a week for eleven weeks, tracked in a spreadsheet. He finished four projects instead of the required three, and the fourth one — a booking page for a mobile bike repair guy — is what got him hired, because it had a form that actually worked, error states included.
How the agency work started
He emailed eleven small studios in the East Bay. Not a mass mail — eleven individual notes, each mentioning one specific thing from that studio's own site. Two replied. One had no work. The other, a four-person shop doing sites for restaurants and clinics, gave him a trial task: convert a designer's layout into clean, responsive HTML. Fixed price, $300.
- Emails sent
- 11
- Replies
- 2
- Trial task
- $300, one week
- Current rate
- $38/hour as a subcontractor
- Typical month
- 45–70 billable hours
- Time from cohort end to first invoice
- 6 weeks
The unglamorous part
His rate is below market. He knows. He negotiated once, six months in, and moved from $30 to $38, and expects to do that again. Subcontracting also means he does not choose the projects, does not talk to the client, and rebuilt the same clinic layout in three different colour schemes. He describes it as "unexciting and extremely useful."
There was also a two-week gap in month three where the agency had nothing for him and he earned nothing. Subcontracting is not a salary. He now keeps one small direct client as a buffer.
I wanted someone to hand me work so I could learn on real deadlines instead of guessing. That is exactly what I got. The pay is fine for now and the feedback is worth more than the difference.
Tomas M., former warehouse supervisor
What did not work
Roughly one in four people who start the cohort does not finish, and a smaller number finish but never earn anything. Here are two of those stories, told with permission, plus what we changed as a result.
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Priya stalled at the portfolio stage
Priya finished every technical module and built three solid projects. Then she spent eleven weeks redesigning her own portfolio site instead of contacting anyone. She rewrote her bio nine times. She never sent a single outreach email, and eventually drifted away from the community channel.
Her own diagnosis: the portfolio was a way to keep working without risking rejection. She is now employed in data entry and codes occasionally. She may come back. No hard feelings either way.
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Owen took a job he could not finish
Owen landed a $1,900 project in week six — a membership site with logins, payments and a member directory. Far beyond what he had built. He took it because the number was exciting. Four months later he refunded $1,400, lost the client, and stopped showing up.
He told us the worst part was not the money. It was three months of dreading his own inbox.
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What we changed after Priya
Outreach now starts in week four, not after graduation. You send your first three emails using a project that is still half-finished, because the point is practising the ask, not showing off. Portfolio work is capped at eight hours total and reviewed by a mentor before you are allowed to touch it again.
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What we changed after Owen
Every student now gets a written scope checklist and a "say no to this" list. If a job needs user accounts, payments, or anything storing personal data, you decline it or bring in a mentor as a paid second pair of hands. We also teach a refusal email template. Turning work down is a skill, and most people have never been shown how.
We keep these stories on the page on purpose. If everything you read about a programme is a success, you are reading marketing, not a record.
Student projects gallery
Six recent pieces of work, drawn as simple diagrams of their layouts rather than photographs, so this page loads instantly and works offline. Each caption is what the project is and what it earned.
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Bakery site — four pages
Maya's first build, unpaid, which led to three paid referrals totalling $2,150.
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Waitlist template
Dev's best-selling template. 143 copies at $14 each.
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Mobile bike repair booking page
Tomas's fourth cohort project. Built free as practice; it won him a $300 agency trial task.
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Tutoring service, five pages
Referral from the bakery. Invoiced at $750, delivered in three weeks.
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Community garden volunteer signup
Built by two students as a pair, for a nonprofit. $400 split between them, plus a written reference.
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Barber shop one-pager
Maya's third paid referral. $800, her highest invoice so far.
Share your story
If you took the cohort, we want an update — good, bad or stalled. The stalled ones change how we teach, so they matter more than the wins. Nothing gets published without your written approval, and you can ask us to use a first name only.
Tell us what you built, what you charged, roughly how many hours it took, and one thing that went wrong. That last field is the one we read first.
Prefer to just write to a human? Email hello@shipandearn.academy with "story" in the subject line, or bring it to the monthly meetup in Oakland and tell us in person.
Not a graduate yet?
Start with the curriculum, then read the earning path so you know what the first invoice actually looks like. If you have a question these stories did not answer, ask us directly — we answer every email.