You open LinkedIn and the first thing you see is a screenshot of a $5,000 bounty. Scroll a little more and someone's flexing $10,000 in a month. Then comes a long thread about how "consistency changed everything."And somewhere between those posts, a thought quietly forms in your head:

"This year… this year I'll do it properly."

You tell yourself you'll start bug bounty again. New year, new mindset. New methodology. New tools. New plan.

Because surely last you year failed only because you were doing it the wrong way.

Right?

You are Wrong.

And the uncomfortable truth is this: by the end of this article, you'll realize you weren't missing a method, a tool, or a trick — you were repeating one fundamental mistake that guarantees you'll fail every single year, no matter how hard you try.

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Let's be honest.

You didn't stop bug bounty because you were lazy. You stopped because nothing worked.

You changed methodologies again and again. One month recon. Next month XSS. Then IDOR. Then APIs. Then JWT. Then cloud.

You watched videos, Read threads, Saved writeups, Bought notes. And still no real vulnerability.At best, a low-impact issue, Or a duplicate, Or a clean "not applicable".

So now it's January again. And you're making the same resolution.

What you're calling motivation is actually desperation. You want a bounty now. You want proof now. You want to feel that all the time you invested wasn't wasted. And bug bounty simply does not work for desperate people. The moment money becomes the primary goal, your thinking breaks. You start forcing bugs that don't exist, you rush testing, you jump targets, you copy techniques without understanding why they work, and then you wonder why nothing lands.

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Here's the part nobody tells beginners clearly. Bug bounty success is not a "this year" thing. The people earning consistently today didn't start last year. They already had years of exposure to systems, months of disciplined testing, and hundreds of failures behind them. If you've been in cybersecurity for one or two years, you need to hear this without sugarcoating: bug bounty should not be your earning goal. You can try it, you should explore it, but expecting money at this stage is unrealistic and only sets you up for frustration.

If you're early in cybersecurity, bug bounty is not a salary. It's a learning tool. The mistake you're making is treating it like a shortcut to money instead of a way to understand how applications work. That's why basics still confuse you, why every new vulnerability feels overwhelming, and why you can't replicate what you read in writeups. You're chasing payouts while your foundation is weak.

People who actually succeed don't start with "I want a bounty." They start with understanding systems — how an application is built, how data flows, and where developers screw up. Bounties come much later. If your first thought while testing is impact and payout, you've already lost.

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Let's clear one more illusion.

Bug bounty courses are useless. It doesn't matter if it's a $5 course or a $500 one — experience cannot be packaged. No course can give you intuition, no course can give you patience, and no course can give you pattern recognition. All of that only comes from testing, and testing takes time. Time needs patience. And right now, you need money fast. That's exactly why you're failing.

If nothing changes, you'll lose again this year. Not because bug bounty is hard, and not because others are lucky. You'll lose because you're chasing money instead of mastery. Because every month you jump to a new methodology. Because you count bounties instead of understanding. Because you follow hype instead of systems. This isn't an insult. This is just how this field works.

If this article pissed you off, good. It means you recognized yourself in it.

If you want real bug bounty talk without hype, join the Discord: https://discord.gg/rJexj8W7yd

You can also connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/minhazshaikh/

till then

keep hunting