Everyone says i wasted my high school years. i was too serious. i didn't enjoy. i started early. Maybe they're right. Maybe they're wrong. Read my story, then tell me what you think:
it was October 2023, i was in my first year of high school here in Japan. i hated school and every subject, even the ones I liked during my junior and elementary school, like math and history, probably because of the language barrier I had at the time, since it was just a year since I'd come to Japan.
i was scrolling social media like every other teenager my age, but something was wrong. But what? My Instagram and TikTok feeds were all full of videos of millionaires like Iman Gadzi, Davie Fogarty etc talking about how easy it is to get rich by using their frameworks and methods, and a bunch of other people rating online businesses on a daily basis. they would make it sound so easy that every minute I'd spend on my phone was like "wtf am I doing with my life" but I was only 16.
it seemed so easy:
open shopify -> create an account and get ur ready to publish site in minutes open Ali express -> connect it with your shopify store and that's it! you're officially an online business owner.
finaly I decided to get into this world and get rich like everyone else before turning 20. first, what i did was buy an online course worth 200$ to learn about these online things like dropshipping, affiliate marketing, content creation... second i had $200 left of my savings which i spent on Shopify subscription, domain, tiktok and facebook ads.
i would get stuck daily trying to make ads, but there was no result at all.
after spending about 4 to 5 months in this dream of becoming the first millionaire in my family, i canceled my Shopify subscription, domain etc
i sat down and was like:
"Maybe dropshipping is not meant for me"
"Maybe I am too late"
so I gave up.
but that guy who sold me his course? still selling it. probably rich by now.
Then it was the summer of 2024. High schools were off, and I was thinking about starting sth else, and this time i came across Amazon FBA, but after research, I found that it requires serious capital to start.
After thinking a lot i asked my dad for $2k to start selling stuff under my own brand name He agreed. i found a supplier on Alibaba and decided to sell water bottles as my first product. chose usa as my primary market.
the products reached Amazon warehouses in usa and congrats to me, I was officially a brand owner at 17.
i was so happy that my family would make fun of me at home.
Then there was no sale for weeks again. i waited week after week for my first sale until one day that wish was fulfilled.
however that was my first and last sale because after that i was just looking at a blank dashboard for months.
idk why that failed: private label? wrong product? wrong market? starting too big? but anyway, i then paid amazon to throw away them bottles so i could get rid of their costs, and this was the end of being a brand owner. still in debt to my dad :)
then it was January 2025.
new year, new attempt. this time, decided to go into the content creation world. chose X and created my account.
thinking that I'd be writing about my interests such as programming, AI, and gain followers but after discovering communities such as build in public and finding accounts like @marclou, @jackfriks talking about a new term called " vibe coding " and how people can make money with it by creating quick mvps and production-ready apps, i decided to give it a try. started with lovable. created a meme website called snapmeme and posted about it on my X accounts and communities.
but every post would have about 10 to 30 views. so as no one knew about this snapmeme, so-called my startup i didnt have any other way but to give up on this too
i didnt give up on writing tweets though, despite knowing that nobody would really see them. I had about 200 followers at that time. now i have 250 😇.
but as i was just writing tweets and not building anything, it didn't feel alright- i decided to learn programming from scratch.
i bought a 53h python course on Udemy. watched it for a few weeks but seeing people claiming that they made.....money with their vibe coded app built in a weekend, I quit that course too and decided to go back to vibe coding and this time build an app.
still building it.
i still do not know if what I'm doing is right or wrong or if this time I'm gonna succeed or not but I will keep going because of this quote: ( if you're tired of starting over, stop giving up.)
now reflecting on this journey full of failures and give-ups, i sometimes think; What if i had started another dropshipping store and not given up? What if i had chosen another product and sold it on amazon instead of quitting it all What if i had not quit that python course and finished it till the end? and .......
but because of these experiences: just because someone in some part of the world got rich doing X doesn't mean you can't, and just because they succeeded doesn't mean you will.
i now know that figuring out is an important skill, no matter what you do, because most of the time, the reason I'd quit was getting stuck at sth and not trying to figure it out.
I'm able to use/work with tools and apps like creating a store on Shopify, using WordPress, Lovable, Cursor, Codex, Claude, Canva, Gumroad, claude, chatgpt, gemini, git and github, VS Code, Xcode... that otherwise wouldn't have known or used them at all if it wasn't for these experiments. i now know that not everything is as easy and plain as it looks on social media and in the " best businesses to start in ...... year " videos.
So was it worth it? well i don't really know, but i do think i did well by experiencing different things and skills, as they helped me: develop a sense of curiosity the courage to start something new and that failures aren't always bad; sometimes they just open your eyes to a new world.