- Joined
- Nov 4, 2013
- Messages
- 164
Hello everyone!
My name is TheSilverSpoon and I've always had a great entrepreneurial streak and drive to make money. I'm in my early twenties and currently enrolled in college for engineering. I've recently withdrawn from most of my classes to focus on my business ideas.
A few weeks ago I stumbled into G_Alexandar's thread (https://www.thefastlaneforum.com/showthread.php/24068-19-Years-old-First-RE-Deal-done) while looking for information on Lonnie Deals - essentially selling a mobile home using owner financing. I couldn't believe the knowledge and support that there was! I've been pouring over the information here and had a fastlane forum tab open since then! I decided that the free information here alone is worth a lot and went ahead and subscribed as an insider.
To start I think it would be worthwhile to outline some of the events in my life that have led me to where I am now. Its a bit lengthy and rambles a bit so feel free to skip down to the business oriented stuff marked below.
Growing up my father worked well over sixty hours a week at his engineering job. It was a good career by most peoples standards. It supported the family, provided us with an upper middle class lifestyle, had good benefits, and allowed my mom to stay home to raise us kids. However he wasn't happy. He was a complete slave to that job and he missed out on an enormous part of his life for it. That unhappiness didn't take long to creep over into my mother and the house just seemed to be so full of stress and tension all the time. Now please don't get my wrong, I sincerely appreciate everything that my parents have done for me but, I just want to do things differently with my future. I want to have the financial freedom and more importantly the time to spend and enjoy with my future wife and kids. I don't want to be sweating the small things. I just want to be able to enjoy my life and let my future wife and kids enjoy theirs. This is my motivation.
When I was ten or eleven one of my father's coworkers gave me a copy of Visual Studio and I began my programming career with that. It started out with silly scripts that would display a message boxes saying things such as "Warning: Not a cupholder" when the CD tray opened and other such nonesense. That quickly progressed into basic pong style games and eventually into data scraping, artificial intelligence, optical character recognition, and poker bots.
Around the age of 15 or so I stumbled upon getafreelancer.com and began my freelance coding journey. It was here where I started my six-year dabbling with the freelance industry. It started primarily with programming and I eventually started to transition into engineering and product design. It was here where I realized how little the intensive theory that I was learning in school was applied in the real world. I also started to understand the incredible amount of competition out there.
Now onto the less fun stuff... I struggled all through high school. I didn't have many friends and really had trouble finding common interests with people. In addition, my classes simply weren't engaging or intriguing enough for me. I was truly passionate and excited about learning, but was just so dissatisfied with the content that we covered that it became a real struggle. I excelled in the classes that I did find interesting and managed to just scrape by in the ones that I didn't. I was the first person to pass the AP physics exam at my school (ever!). I tutored a small group of students in my calculus class and consistently placed for our school in math meets. I even managed to get my name on a plaque thats still on the wall to this day. All while barely earning a passing grade in my other classes. After four long years I did manage to graduate, but it was close.
I thought for sure that things would be much different once I got into college. I was excited about learning new, challenging things that I would be using down the road in my job. As soon as my first semester hit I started to realized that this really wasn't much different than high school. I found that, in general, the teaching quality was orders of magnitude lower. The coursework was disappointing and the variability in the grading metrics was gross. I had one professor who saved all of my reports to pass onto the accreditors to show them the high quality that was being produced while having another professor give me grades that were barely passing. Both reports had the same quality of work, same style, and same layout.
I also found the subject matter to be so entrenched in theory the actual application and use of the principles were almost entirely neglected. The theory that we spent months going over ended up boiling down to one simple table, chart, or rule of thumb in real world applications.
A degree is pushed as being such an important and vital element to becoming successful. I don't think this is the case at all. Nowadays people go to school thinking that upon graduation a nice safe corporate job with benefits will be waiting for them when they get done. This notion was pushed on me throughout my schooling, from high school right on up through college. I believe that the notion of the safe corporate jobs of today is going to go the same route as the pensions of my grandparents generation. They will be a relics for future generations to marvel at and reminisce of when the times were "good."
I read an article recently that talked about how the average person will change careers - not jobs but entire careers - at least once during their lifetime. I think that this figure will only grow in the future. This presents a serious problem when it is compared with the increasingly specific roles that people fill in today's job market. If you spent twenty years of your life designing say, the cooling systems for a battleship's engines and your ship yard got shut down what do you do? Thats a skill that is not easily transferable.
This sort of predicament scares me, especially with the field I have been pursuing in college. I believe that business is all about being able to quickly adapt to an ever changing marketplace. Being one small, static cog in a larger machine isn't a good place to be in a time when entire machines are becoming obsolete on a regular basis. Being such a small cog impairs my ability to adapt in an evolving job market.
It also leaves me with no control over my job future. If upper level management makes a mistake and they need to do layoffs, I have no control over that. I could be out a job and potentially facing a complete career change due to someone else's mistake. In contrast, if I were to mess up a sales pitch for my own business I may miss out on potential income but, I could learn from that mistake and use that knowledge to have a higher chance of closing my next sales pitch. I wouldn't be out a job and I'd have a learning opportunity.
I've been told by many people in my life that starting your own business is risky. I'm just now starting to realize that this isn't the case. Getting a job somewhere where you are playing the part of the small cog with little control over your future seems riskier to me. If you lose your job your are left with a very specialized skill set that is difficult to market. On the other hand let's say I build a successful business that fails due to technology change or some unforeseen event. The skills and knowledge that went into creating that successful business are still there. A new business can be created using those same principles that made the first one successful and finding a new need in the marketplace to fill. This is why I am scaling my college classes waay back and really focusing on developing a business that will help me on my way.
Finally onto some business:
Earlier this year I won a few different local entrepreneurial contests which gave me the the funds and resources, and more importantly the belief, that I can go start my own business. It has launched me into a six-month entrepreneurial learning binge.
This business revolves around the manufacturing and delivery of a relatively small niche fuel source in the heating industry. It was designed to be something that I could do part-time will working a full-time job. I have designed the machine used for manufacturing and I'm currently in the fabrication process. It will allow me to manufacture this fuel source in a more efficient way compared to my competitors. This, combined with a new marketing angle for this subsector should give me enough differentiation to get this rolling.
Looking at it now, I can see that it has a relatively low market saturation point with limited ability for scaling. It is still however, an idea I want to pursue, as it should provide me with some very stable income for a relatively small startup investment. It will also be a great learning experience for dealing with customers and running a business in general.
I recently came up with another idea that is a subscription based, B2B business that is similar to Dollar Shave Club. Its a relatively small niche in comparison to Dollar Shave Club, but with much higher subscription revenue per customer. Its catering to an industry that I have a few years experience in. I've recently began development on the backend using mySQL and Java.
Thank you everyone for reading. I'm very excited to become a part of the community
-TSS
My name is TheSilverSpoon and I've always had a great entrepreneurial streak and drive to make money. I'm in my early twenties and currently enrolled in college for engineering. I've recently withdrawn from most of my classes to focus on my business ideas.
A few weeks ago I stumbled into G_Alexandar's thread (https://www.thefastlaneforum.com/showthread.php/24068-19-Years-old-First-RE-Deal-done) while looking for information on Lonnie Deals - essentially selling a mobile home using owner financing. I couldn't believe the knowledge and support that there was! I've been pouring over the information here and had a fastlane forum tab open since then! I decided that the free information here alone is worth a lot and went ahead and subscribed as an insider.
To start I think it would be worthwhile to outline some of the events in my life that have led me to where I am now. Its a bit lengthy and rambles a bit so feel free to skip down to the business oriented stuff marked below.
Growing up my father worked well over sixty hours a week at his engineering job. It was a good career by most peoples standards. It supported the family, provided us with an upper middle class lifestyle, had good benefits, and allowed my mom to stay home to raise us kids. However he wasn't happy. He was a complete slave to that job and he missed out on an enormous part of his life for it. That unhappiness didn't take long to creep over into my mother and the house just seemed to be so full of stress and tension all the time. Now please don't get my wrong, I sincerely appreciate everything that my parents have done for me but, I just want to do things differently with my future. I want to have the financial freedom and more importantly the time to spend and enjoy with my future wife and kids. I don't want to be sweating the small things. I just want to be able to enjoy my life and let my future wife and kids enjoy theirs. This is my motivation.
When I was ten or eleven one of my father's coworkers gave me a copy of Visual Studio and I began my programming career with that. It started out with silly scripts that would display a message boxes saying things such as "Warning: Not a cupholder" when the CD tray opened and other such nonesense. That quickly progressed into basic pong style games and eventually into data scraping, artificial intelligence, optical character recognition, and poker bots.
Around the age of 15 or so I stumbled upon getafreelancer.com and began my freelance coding journey. It was here where I started my six-year dabbling with the freelance industry. It started primarily with programming and I eventually started to transition into engineering and product design. It was here where I realized how little the intensive theory that I was learning in school was applied in the real world. I also started to understand the incredible amount of competition out there.
Now onto the less fun stuff... I struggled all through high school. I didn't have many friends and really had trouble finding common interests with people. In addition, my classes simply weren't engaging or intriguing enough for me. I was truly passionate and excited about learning, but was just so dissatisfied with the content that we covered that it became a real struggle. I excelled in the classes that I did find interesting and managed to just scrape by in the ones that I didn't. I was the first person to pass the AP physics exam at my school (ever!). I tutored a small group of students in my calculus class and consistently placed for our school in math meets. I even managed to get my name on a plaque thats still on the wall to this day. All while barely earning a passing grade in my other classes. After four long years I did manage to graduate, but it was close.
I thought for sure that things would be much different once I got into college. I was excited about learning new, challenging things that I would be using down the road in my job. As soon as my first semester hit I started to realized that this really wasn't much different than high school. I found that, in general, the teaching quality was orders of magnitude lower. The coursework was disappointing and the variability in the grading metrics was gross. I had one professor who saved all of my reports to pass onto the accreditors to show them the high quality that was being produced while having another professor give me grades that were barely passing. Both reports had the same quality of work, same style, and same layout.
I also found the subject matter to be so entrenched in theory the actual application and use of the principles were almost entirely neglected. The theory that we spent months going over ended up boiling down to one simple table, chart, or rule of thumb in real world applications.
A degree is pushed as being such an important and vital element to becoming successful. I don't think this is the case at all. Nowadays people go to school thinking that upon graduation a nice safe corporate job with benefits will be waiting for them when they get done. This notion was pushed on me throughout my schooling, from high school right on up through college. I believe that the notion of the safe corporate jobs of today is going to go the same route as the pensions of my grandparents generation. They will be a relics for future generations to marvel at and reminisce of when the times were "good."
I read an article recently that talked about how the average person will change careers - not jobs but entire careers - at least once during their lifetime. I think that this figure will only grow in the future. This presents a serious problem when it is compared with the increasingly specific roles that people fill in today's job market. If you spent twenty years of your life designing say, the cooling systems for a battleship's engines and your ship yard got shut down what do you do? Thats a skill that is not easily transferable.
This sort of predicament scares me, especially with the field I have been pursuing in college. I believe that business is all about being able to quickly adapt to an ever changing marketplace. Being one small, static cog in a larger machine isn't a good place to be in a time when entire machines are becoming obsolete on a regular basis. Being such a small cog impairs my ability to adapt in an evolving job market.
It also leaves me with no control over my job future. If upper level management makes a mistake and they need to do layoffs, I have no control over that. I could be out a job and potentially facing a complete career change due to someone else's mistake. In contrast, if I were to mess up a sales pitch for my own business I may miss out on potential income but, I could learn from that mistake and use that knowledge to have a higher chance of closing my next sales pitch. I wouldn't be out a job and I'd have a learning opportunity.
I've been told by many people in my life that starting your own business is risky. I'm just now starting to realize that this isn't the case. Getting a job somewhere where you are playing the part of the small cog with little control over your future seems riskier to me. If you lose your job your are left with a very specialized skill set that is difficult to market. On the other hand let's say I build a successful business that fails due to technology change or some unforeseen event. The skills and knowledge that went into creating that successful business are still there. A new business can be created using those same principles that made the first one successful and finding a new need in the marketplace to fill. This is why I am scaling my college classes waay back and really focusing on developing a business that will help me on my way.
Finally onto some business:
Earlier this year I won a few different local entrepreneurial contests which gave me the the funds and resources, and more importantly the belief, that I can go start my own business. It has launched me into a six-month entrepreneurial learning binge.
This business revolves around the manufacturing and delivery of a relatively small niche fuel source in the heating industry. It was designed to be something that I could do part-time will working a full-time job. I have designed the machine used for manufacturing and I'm currently in the fabrication process. It will allow me to manufacture this fuel source in a more efficient way compared to my competitors. This, combined with a new marketing angle for this subsector should give me enough differentiation to get this rolling.
Looking at it now, I can see that it has a relatively low market saturation point with limited ability for scaling. It is still however, an idea I want to pursue, as it should provide me with some very stable income for a relatively small startup investment. It will also be a great learning experience for dealing with customers and running a business in general.
I recently came up with another idea that is a subscription based, B2B business that is similar to Dollar Shave Club. Its a relatively small niche in comparison to Dollar Shave Club, but with much higher subscription revenue per customer. Its catering to an industry that I have a few years experience in. I've recently began development on the backend using mySQL and Java.
Thank you everyone for reading. I'm very excited to become a part of the community
-TSS
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