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- Jul 11, 2022
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First of all, I would like to thank MJ for writing "The Millionaire Fastlane " (TMF ). The book came at the perfect time for me, as I was just finishing high school and didn't exactly know what I wanted to do with my life. It was the first book that created a distinct change in me—there was a "me" before reading it, and a "me" after reading it, one profoundly different from the other.
With this post, I want to start a public journal of sorts for my Fastlane Journey, which I will expand on in further threads. I will fill in a lot of details about my personal life that are not directly related to business because I think those are important, especially for people starting out like me. Some people might have a lot of non-business-related work to get done before even making a single cent from business; I know I did.
Now, I am not going to lie—I am putting this out now mainly because of the announcement about the forum going private. I really value the information and the raw motivation one can get from this forum. Seeing the stories and processes from people who are already deep into their journey is incredible. There aren't many places on the internet like this, especially free of charge. I wanted to wait a bit longer for my projects to develop further so I could provide actual value to other members. Looking back at my older messages, I realized I was being a massive value sinkhole, and I didn't like that one bit.
With all of that said, let's get into it!
When I was a kid, people would ask me what I wanted my profession to be when I grew up, and the answer was always either "a writer" or "I will start my own company." The problem is, I never actually believed I would ever be able to do either of those things. I was always the good kid in school with straight A's. I did everything I was told to do, but at the same time, it didn't feel right.
- Businesses are only created by rich people who want to become richer.
- Small businesses need generations to become big! The big shops around your town, the hot dog stand that became a proper restaurant—they were all started by the parents of the current owner. Even if you started your own thing, it would be thinking about your children.
- You are simply not the type of person entrepreneurship is meant for. You've got a speech impediment; people will never take you seriously. Ever heard about a stuttering salesman? You feel bad about deceiving people. You watched "The Founder," right? "The Social Network?" That one about Jordan Belfort? Liars and "evil" people get ahead. Just wanting to create new things or help people is not enough, and even if you were willing to do it you would be really bad it.
I believed in all of those and then some until I first got introduced to TMF . I got it from a book recommendation list from a YouTuber, and man, it came at just the right time. It was my last year of high school. In my country, the SAT works a bit differently, but my score would determine which universities I would be able to get into and, most importantly, which courses. However, at that point, I didn't give a damn about any of that. I was burnt out; things weren't going well since middle school. I felt isolated, and everything I tried so hard to make work seemed to just fall apart. I was skipping classes, which I feel the need to express again were REALLY important, so I could read books in the cafeteria while cloud gazing, thinking my life meant nothing. I spent all my middle school years going straight home to play video games, filling in details and plot points for stories I would never actually write, working on game projects I would never finish, and daydreaming about my family winning the lottery. Then, after that, having my high school years completely shut down by the COVID response. That's it, I guess. Time to find a major I don't hate, get a job I can tolerate, and try to live as best as I can.
That is until I got my hands on that book, TMF. From start to finish, the book was a roller coaster for me, from the realization of time being more valuable than money, young time being better than old time, but especially that creating a business system is not only possible but actually the best way to achieve true time freedom. I love everything about the book. It put into words ideas I had for a long time and also gave me new perspectives. I don't want to be a profession; I want to be me and help people, both in scale and magnitude, and while at it, make a living out of it.
Now that all sounds well and good, but where to go from here? My first idea was simple enough. Every year, the entrance exams for various academic institutions around my country had different books marked as required reading. I would simply print those out at a stationery store and sell them in my class. I don't know whether it would have worked or not because I decided to go bigger. What if, instead of selling them to my class, I found a way to scale it up to the entire country? And so my first business-ish idea was born. It would compile all the public domain books that were required for each entrance exam in the country and allow you to see which ones you needed for each test in an app, together with keeping track of the ones you already read. The development was a NIGHTMARE. I used what I already knew to code, the Unity Engine, which is made for games, not apps. Secondly, it took me a really long time to download each book, make them readable in the phone reader I wrote (this was another mistake; I really should have used an external one and just provided the book), and assign each book to each test correctly. I also procrastinated a lot, which for a time-sensitive project like this was a major mistake. Adding the review times for the Play Store meant it was released about 2 months before the first final year exams, which is to say not good. My monetization was atrocious too. I went for a freemium model where you could either watch an ad before getting back to reading each book or pay about 1 USD to remove them forever. When it was finally up, I used some of my mother's contacts, mostly teachers, to get the word around. In the first month, I got about 80 downloads, no sales of the ad remover, and about 0.002 USD worth of ads. After all of that, it was only downhill. I lost users, and no one ever bought the ad remover. This was my first try and my first complete failure. Although nowadays I can see a lot of the things I did wrong and learn from them, at the time it all just went over my head.
What I learned:
- Properly test an idea before committing to it. The closest thing I did was show an earlier version of the app to a literature teacher at my school. He liked it; however, he was not the target audience, so it really didn't matter.
- One-time hustles are fine, but you can't let it spiral out of control. Had I just created a Google Drive folder with the required books for my class, I could have sold that instead of creating this whole app in a game engine to try and reach out to a non-existent public.
- Not attending classes to work on this idea was a terrible decision in the long run. This almost led me to not being able to get into a decent college, but I will get more into that later.
- Believing in what you are working on makes everything that much easier. I genuinely thought I could make at least a few bucks from this. Sure, I wasn't expecting to become financially free from this, but hey, you gotta start somewhere. This project brought me that amazing feeling of waking up and feeling excited to work on something.
- It is not about you. This was the biggest one for me. I really wanted to add value to other people's lives, as small as that could be—saving them the 10 minutes of having to look up each book required for each of their entrance exams, finding the downloads scattered around the internet, keeping track of the ones you already read, etc. However, whether or not that was worth the ads or the 1 USD fee was not up to me. As stupid as that sounds in hindsight, I was trying to create a Productocracy with this thing, and I completely failed at it.
Now, straight out of this app's failure, I set my sights on another app idea, a kind of customizable delivery app for the restaurants around my neighborhood. I spoke to some of the small business owners I knew around here, and they said it would only really be worth it to them if it would expose them to new clients. Ladies and gentlemen, I realized I was just trying to create a worse version of a website. I also had a lot of smaller ideas that required manufacturing, such as a monitor mirror that would hide bezels or a pen that could also hold your phone. Also, many of those already existed, but I knew of some ways to possibly make them cheaper or add my own personal improvements to them. Suffice it to say, it was just too much to chew for me at that point.
Finishing school, I did my SAT and got a mediocre score—not good, not terrible, as they say. That was a miracle on itself as I had barely studied that year, but still, I couldn't get into any good colleges with that grade, so I decided to double down on trying out more ideas. At this point, I remember reading a quote from MJ. I don't remember if it was directed at me or if I just read it from another post, but it was something along the lines of "Your first business doesn't need to be fastlane; you just need to start something." At this point, my parents wanted me to get a job since I was not going to be a student anymore, and I must say they were completely justified and right in doing so, even if my younger self got a bit annoyed at that. So, with that in mind, I made a list of all my skills and assets and tried to figure out my next step. What that step was? A delivery skewer business! I had a grill, our home had a nice spot along the main road, and I could spread the word through social media, especially since my cousin is an influencer of sorts. So, I got to work. I just wanted to: A) Have some money coming in to show my parents I wasn't just being lazy at home and B) Prove to myself that I could finally do this. The only problem was the meat. I had some money but not nearly enough. However, soon I would have a small inheritance coming my way, and I planned to use that to jumpstart my operation.
That "soon" only happened yesterday as of the writing of this post, two years later. Just as explained by MJ in his "Someday" warning in TMF, I wasted an entire year being useless around the house, angry at everything, and feeling depressed. I could have easily gotten an entry job to raise the money, but I never did. The few times I tried, I felt like they were beneath me and it didn't last more than a day. I was the best student in any of my classes. I am doing all of this exactly to avoid having to live like this! None of my cousins ever had to work a job they hated; why do I? I failed to understand that in my situation, that was just the reality of things. I chose not to focus in the last year that actually mattered. I didn't think about the consequences of stopping going to class, which is not to say that having rich parents wouldn't have helped me get started, but I still made that choice, even being aware that it's far from my case.
Another opportunity came in the form of a public employee hiring spree from our national bank. It would be a test about subjects I had never heard about before. The highest grades would get the jobs. I managed to get some study material from my uncle, who had a lifetime plan for a platform just for that. I procrastinated a lot, would do a few exercise questions, and then burn hours watching YouTube to "relax." Suffice to say, I didn't get accepted. This was a really big moment for me. Looking at it now, it was my best opportunity to have enough of a foundation to eventually break into the Fastlane. It was an office job, yes, but the compensation was really good for where I live, the hours were generous, plus a myriad of benefits public employees get. But I simply wasted it; I didn't take it seriously enough.
By May of 2023, I just couldn't handle being at home letting time pass by anymore. I fired up Google and started looking for a sales apprentice position. My mindset was that if I needed a job, I might as well pick something that would be useful for my future business. But it turns out I was right: nobody takes a stuttering salesman seriously. After quitting another warehouse job on the first day, I was simply angry at life. Why must it be like this? All my friends from high school are out there going to other states and rediscovering themselves at university while I am stuck here, constantly not knowing what to do and dreading the ticking of the clock. So, in a move I cannot describe any other way but extremely dumb, I got my father to pay for a realtor course for me. Now, it was $200, which might not seem like a lot, but in my country, that is a big deal. A course like this is also required for you to be allowed to sell property with a commission. Quickly after the rush of getting everything done subsided, I realized what an idiot I was. I simply couldn't sleep that night. I spent all of it writing in my journal, thinking about what the hell I would do now and how I would pay my father back. After watching what people thought about realtors online and seeing what their job is actually like—which I should have done long before paying for a $200 course—it became clear that it is not the type of job I would ever want. Sure, you can potentially make big bucks off commissions and running multiple clients at the same time, but something about being an intermediary between two parties who don't really need you, or lying to get sales when things get tough, didn't seem right to me. So, after fighting for a refund for a week, I managed to get the $200 purchase canceled.
However, that still didn't answer the question for me: what the hell do I do now? I pondered for some time, made another list of all of my assets and qualities, this time trying to consider my entire life from that point on, not just a new crazy business idea to start while my parents support me. And I came to the conclusion that the best path of action for me was becoming a Software Engineer. I already had experience with game development since middle school and good enough English, so if I could just get a remote job working for a Western company, I might not only survive but actually thrive. And so I began researching how I was going to achieve that, and it turns out I was onto something. My country is really favored among international companies for remote work. I could very easily get citizenship from two European countries through jus sanguinis, so eventually, I might actually be able to get more than just outsourced jobs. The silver bullet being, for almost all of that to work out, I needed a Computer Science degree. So, I started looking into how I was going to get into college in the middle of June. You see, I really didn't want to wait another six months. That would make me almost 24 when I graduated. Something about that just stung me, but even if I see my reasoning as extremely flawed nowadays, I don't regret one bit of my impatience. With the help of my aunt, I managed to convince my parents to take out a loan to pay in full for the first semester of a top-tier private university, which besides prestigious public ones, is the only real way to be taken seriously by big national companies and foreign employers. And yes, I know what you are thinking, and I agree: I am a terrible son. Not only am I yet to make a single cent, but I also just got my family into a four-year commitment and $24,000 of total tuition. Now, for a top-tier STEM institution, that might not sound like a lot, and for a Westerner, it probably isn't. But with a simplified cost of living correction, that would be almost like $120,000 for an American. Still, we had a plan. I would keep trying for public employee positions. Many of the benefits are university-related, so for instance, I could have a big part of the tuition paid by them and even have flexible hours that would make it easier to study. Or, I would simply get a paid internship to help cover the tuition, all of that while applying to all higher education funding programs from the government. Thanks to my grades in high school and (at that time hopefully) while in university, it should be simply a matter of time before I got approved, and thankfully that gamble worked out and through those programs, the government pays for half of my tuition now.
And so I started my first semester of university. I met TONS of people, one of whom became extremely important for business-related events later on. At this point, I had almost forgotten about the whole entrepreneurship thing. I saw my future as being a well-paid remote worker. I hadn't completely forgotten TMF though. I am aware that this is your pretty standard slow lane approach. However, I had a trick up my sleeve, or so I thought. I was going to switch to a 19th-century road while keeping my indestructible used slowlane car. Through the magic of a lower cost of living, even a modest liquid $48,000 a year would allow you to build up a small fortune and live off government bonds. And of course, that on itself is still not a true Fastlane. You are stuck in your country where everything is cheaper if you want to keep that financial freedom. You are completely dependent on Western countries and your Third World country not deciding to mess with outsourcing. Growing backup reserves abroad with a weak currency is extremely difficult, and that is especially important if you don't live in a First World country. But still, it beats the hell out of the average salary of barely $800 here, which still has the exact same problems. All of that, and rediscovering TMF in my Kindle, led me to the realization that while getting that far would be amazing, my only shot at freeing myself from the script is still the Fastlane.
At this point, I also got my first actual job. The first one was cleaning dishes at a restaurant close to my college. The pay was only $100 a month, but for only 20 hours a week and included lunch, it was more than worth it. I hated the first three days as every other job I had prior, but I pushed through it. I don't deserve a better job yet, and writing about it now does make me feel silly about absolutely hating to work before, but I guess this time was different. I had a bigger goal in mind; I knew I wouldn't be there in five years. Over time, I grew to even like it. Now, every time I get the bus back home, sometimes I meet my old work colleagues, and that alone makes me feel like my time there meant something, instead of just being hours of my life sold for a few bucks.
I got my second job shortly after leaving my old one at the end of the semester. I worked for my uncle, who is an IT consultant. I would basically do all the boring work he didn't want to do. It was 30 hours a week, and I was paid less than my last job, but at least it was in my field. I learned a lot about SAP and Salesforce while there and also got a nice boost for my resume—a slowlaner thought, I know, but it makes me feel safer. I ended up automating a lot of the work for him using a mix of Python and PowerToys from Windows. I even created his company website during downtime. My uncle is old; he is an amazing programmer, but he barely speaks any English. That was when I learned what is truly the most important language any programmer needs to know, the one you are reading right now. He is your classic slowlaner, but it is painful to see how little you actually earn working for local companies here. He could have achieved his goals much sooner with an outsourced job instead of creating an IT company. This was one of the factors that made me consider if the fastlane really is my best bet. I remember reading a post by a fellow third-worlder on the forum, where he managed to achieve freedom through the fastlane. While that is remarkable and I am happy for him, I can't help but wonder if, in some places of the world, having an imported car on a dirt slowlane road is really that much worse than the hell that is the third-world fastlane path. The advice I received the most is to not think about how difficult everything is because otherwise, you will just get depressed and give up. It's funny but also tragic.
Writing this I realize how much my family has helped me, and how ungrateful I was at the time, specially considering not many people get this kind of help.
Another amazing thing was how many programs my university has to help you get started with entrepreneurship, especially startups in my course. After meeting one of the professors in a lecture, I found out about a small meeting group where professors and startup founders would come together to discuss and help each other. I immediately wanted in, but there was a catch—you NEEDED an idea. Now, I had some, but none of them sounded good enough to me. In the pitch to get in, I ended up putting three ideas into a single slide to see what sticks. The first one received a bad reaction—dumb idea. The second one made the teacher appear more convinced. The third one, he really liked, but I was a one-man team at that point, and it was clear even to me that it was simply too much for me still in the first semester. We talked it through and settled on the second idea as my first project. It was really nothing special—a platform that would help dog owners find each other for mating their pets, but with some twists. So, I began to work, did more thorough research, started actually learning React Native instead of using a game engine, did a few diagrams that are close to CENTS but not the same, and so on. At first, I thought this part wasn't that "real" and was only there because of the academic nature of being in a university, but it turns out this is exactly what I had been missing for so long and made me appreciate this whole thing even more. Still, the idea itself didn't exactly excite me. I even received a lot of feedback during my pitches for the project, saying how the idea has already been done to death, how my plan does make it way better for the clients but cuts my revenue so much that it is probably not viable, and how I would really benefit from a partner. Even if they don't mind my stutter, it still eats up lots of precious time from the 5-minute pitches.
Having all of that as a background, this is my current situation:
One of the friends I met at university is REALLY good at 3D printing stuff and polishing it. She even sold some of her work at conventions. One day, I had an idea and went to my father, who is really into rail transport modeling, and asked if there was anything he would need for his model. He showed me a very simple control holder. You could walk into a store in the United States and buy one of those at around 10 USD a piece, but importing one, after freight, fees, taxes, and markups, sets you back around 50 USD per unit, which is just insane. There were already some people making them with 3D printers locally, but the quality was pretty bad. It was easily breakable, ugly, and felt cheap. I got one of those and showed my friend. I asked if she could make a few for my father. She took a look, listed all the ways she could improve it, and we settled on 6 USD a piece. We spent around two weeks going back and forth with prototypes, slowly making them better and prettier. We got to the point where my father and some of his friends preferred her design over the American ones. I learned a lot about 3D printing and modeling during that time. We made an agreement to sell them online where she would print them, and I would take care of the selling and distribution. With my father knowing almost everyone in the local model railroader community, it was actually pretty fun. I made banners, a few videos, met lots of interesting people, and learned lots of frameworks to show what our product was and how it differed from the rest. Thanks to her amazing talent at producing 3D parts, everyone likes them. It is now a skill I am starting to develop, and I couldn't ask for anyone better to teach me. She even sold me a 3D printer for insanely cheap. Last week, we sold six holders, or about 60 USD worth of goods. It's not that much, but we just started about two weeks ago, and it is picking up speed. I will be attending some events and finding more avenues to let people know about our product. Three of those sales came from 1+1=3, or people liking them and telling others. So, I know the buyers like them. The agreement was that it would be split 60% to her for producing the parts and 40% to me for selling and delivering them. However, now that I got my printer, she said there is no problem if I make them myself and keep all the revenue. I even tried to pay her for each sale since she made the original 3D model, but she refuses to accept it. Suffice to say, we are still looking for more products we could start selling related to the hobby. Normally, a 3D printing business wouldn't be very profitable since a lot of people can do them nowadays, and I am sure it is extremely hard for you to go fastlane with it. That is fine. After an entire year, I am just happy I was finally able to act on MJ's advice of just starting something. The moment our first sale was made, just 10 minutes after I launched the first banner, I jumped out of joy. I saw many people in the forum saying how your first sale feels amazing, and it is true. All the work you put blindly into something, not being sure if it will even be worth it, the second the first person sees it and recognizes it as something they want to give you money for is simply amazing.
I started the other project with two of my friends and we are it getting off the ground as I write this. I don't want to get into too much detail, but it is an education platform made with specific exams in mind, a mix of new ideas with improving what already works. Before it was even a thing, I joined a pitch competition at my university where people would develop ideas and bring them for a round of investors to rate and give actual money to start turning that into reality. The first two rounds take place this year and are carried out by teachers from the university. One gives you 600 USD to spend on the project, and the second one about 1000 USD. The last pitch is only given to the three best projects, and they give you the chance to talk to real investors and startup owners. I myself always prefer the fastlane approach of building a business system that grows more and more independent of you over the years, over the academic techbro Public Seat but with AI startup approach. As you can imagine, those are the bulk type of people attracted to these kind of university, and that is fine. I tried some different teams, but all of them had the same problem in my eyes. You see, the entire first step of the program was about teaching you how to have and validate ideas. Having a MVP of people interacting with the processes of your eventual product was heavily favored in the pitch, but most groups joined already with an idea in mind. I wasn't joking about the AI Seat, by the way. I ended up in a group that was not right for me. Nobody would show up to the mentoring sessions except me. We would agree on dates for meetings, and people would either show up muted or not show up at all, and then mumble about how amazing our idea was without any product in mind. When it was almost time for the pitch, people just started leaving, saying they didn't want it anymore. So, I also jumped ship, with one week left before the pitch and basically no idea and no team. I went to my class to look if anyone was interested in joining in. We had this one project from class, already with all the market research done, some questionnaires, and most importantly, a small MVP documented from a test we did in a middle school. In one week, we turned that school project into the best pitch we could. I thought about leaving the talking to my teammates because of my stutter and the time restriction. However, the day of the pitch was literally my birthday, so I just had to do it too. The day for the first pitch arrived, as did my 20th birthday. Our group was almost the last to be called, and incredibly, during those 1:50 minutes I had to speak, I didn't stammer at all. Words just flowed out like nothing. It felt amazing. The evaluation panel seemed to like our idea but had a few problems with our pitch, so in the end, we didn't receive the round investment. And are now working towards the second round in october. But not all is lost. We are still working on the idea and are now moving towards having a working MVP. We aim to test this MVP at the same school where I stopped attending classes, which I find ironic. Even if we don't pass the pitch again, at this point we just want to create something to help people. Honestly, I think that's the most important part of a business.
Sorry if this last part doesn't have a real conclusion. As I said at the start, I wanted to write this post in December, after everything was more developed. However, with the forum going private, I decided to bring it forward a bit. Sorry if I made any grammar mistakes or if something isn't clear. I am happy to answer questions.
With this post, I want to start a public journal of sorts for my Fastlane Journey, which I will expand on in further threads. I will fill in a lot of details about my personal life that are not directly related to business because I think those are important, especially for people starting out like me. Some people might have a lot of non-business-related work to get done before even making a single cent from business; I know I did.
Now, I am not going to lie—I am putting this out now mainly because of the announcement about the forum going private. I really value the information and the raw motivation one can get from this forum. Seeing the stories and processes from people who are already deep into their journey is incredible. There aren't many places on the internet like this, especially free of charge. I wanted to wait a bit longer for my projects to develop further so I could provide actual value to other members. Looking back at my older messages, I realized I was being a massive value sinkhole, and I didn't like that one bit.
With all of that said, let's get into it!
When I was a kid, people would ask me what I wanted my profession to be when I grew up, and the answer was always either "a writer" or "I will start my own company." The problem is, I never actually believed I would ever be able to do either of those things. I was always the good kid in school with straight A's. I did everything I was told to do, but at the same time, it didn't feel right.
- Businesses are only created by rich people who want to become richer.
- Small businesses need generations to become big! The big shops around your town, the hot dog stand that became a proper restaurant—they were all started by the parents of the current owner. Even if you started your own thing, it would be thinking about your children.
- You are simply not the type of person entrepreneurship is meant for. You've got a speech impediment; people will never take you seriously. Ever heard about a stuttering salesman? You feel bad about deceiving people. You watched "The Founder," right? "The Social Network?" That one about Jordan Belfort? Liars and "evil" people get ahead. Just wanting to create new things or help people is not enough, and even if you were willing to do it you would be really bad it.
I believed in all of those and then some until I first got introduced to TMF . I got it from a book recommendation list from a YouTuber, and man, it came at just the right time. It was my last year of high school. In my country, the SAT works a bit differently, but my score would determine which universities I would be able to get into and, most importantly, which courses. However, at that point, I didn't give a damn about any of that. I was burnt out; things weren't going well since middle school. I felt isolated, and everything I tried so hard to make work seemed to just fall apart. I was skipping classes, which I feel the need to express again were REALLY important, so I could read books in the cafeteria while cloud gazing, thinking my life meant nothing. I spent all my middle school years going straight home to play video games, filling in details and plot points for stories I would never actually write, working on game projects I would never finish, and daydreaming about my family winning the lottery. Then, after that, having my high school years completely shut down by the COVID response. That's it, I guess. Time to find a major I don't hate, get a job I can tolerate, and try to live as best as I can.
That is until I got my hands on that book, TMF. From start to finish, the book was a roller coaster for me, from the realization of time being more valuable than money, young time being better than old time, but especially that creating a business system is not only possible but actually the best way to achieve true time freedom. I love everything about the book. It put into words ideas I had for a long time and also gave me new perspectives. I don't want to be a profession; I want to be me and help people, both in scale and magnitude, and while at it, make a living out of it.
Now that all sounds well and good, but where to go from here? My first idea was simple enough. Every year, the entrance exams for various academic institutions around my country had different books marked as required reading. I would simply print those out at a stationery store and sell them in my class. I don't know whether it would have worked or not because I decided to go bigger. What if, instead of selling them to my class, I found a way to scale it up to the entire country? And so my first business-ish idea was born. It would compile all the public domain books that were required for each entrance exam in the country and allow you to see which ones you needed for each test in an app, together with keeping track of the ones you already read. The development was a NIGHTMARE. I used what I already knew to code, the Unity Engine, which is made for games, not apps. Secondly, it took me a really long time to download each book, make them readable in the phone reader I wrote (this was another mistake; I really should have used an external one and just provided the book), and assign each book to each test correctly. I also procrastinated a lot, which for a time-sensitive project like this was a major mistake. Adding the review times for the Play Store meant it was released about 2 months before the first final year exams, which is to say not good. My monetization was atrocious too. I went for a freemium model where you could either watch an ad before getting back to reading each book or pay about 1 USD to remove them forever. When it was finally up, I used some of my mother's contacts, mostly teachers, to get the word around. In the first month, I got about 80 downloads, no sales of the ad remover, and about 0.002 USD worth of ads. After all of that, it was only downhill. I lost users, and no one ever bought the ad remover. This was my first try and my first complete failure. Although nowadays I can see a lot of the things I did wrong and learn from them, at the time it all just went over my head.
What I learned:
- Properly test an idea before committing to it. The closest thing I did was show an earlier version of the app to a literature teacher at my school. He liked it; however, he was not the target audience, so it really didn't matter.
- One-time hustles are fine, but you can't let it spiral out of control. Had I just created a Google Drive folder with the required books for my class, I could have sold that instead of creating this whole app in a game engine to try and reach out to a non-existent public.
- Not attending classes to work on this idea was a terrible decision in the long run. This almost led me to not being able to get into a decent college, but I will get more into that later.
- Believing in what you are working on makes everything that much easier. I genuinely thought I could make at least a few bucks from this. Sure, I wasn't expecting to become financially free from this, but hey, you gotta start somewhere. This project brought me that amazing feeling of waking up and feeling excited to work on something.
- It is not about you. This was the biggest one for me. I really wanted to add value to other people's lives, as small as that could be—saving them the 10 minutes of having to look up each book required for each of their entrance exams, finding the downloads scattered around the internet, keeping track of the ones you already read, etc. However, whether or not that was worth the ads or the 1 USD fee was not up to me. As stupid as that sounds in hindsight, I was trying to create a Productocracy with this thing, and I completely failed at it.
Now, straight out of this app's failure, I set my sights on another app idea, a kind of customizable delivery app for the restaurants around my neighborhood. I spoke to some of the small business owners I knew around here, and they said it would only really be worth it to them if it would expose them to new clients. Ladies and gentlemen, I realized I was just trying to create a worse version of a website. I also had a lot of smaller ideas that required manufacturing, such as a monitor mirror that would hide bezels or a pen that could also hold your phone. Also, many of those already existed, but I knew of some ways to possibly make them cheaper or add my own personal improvements to them. Suffice it to say, it was just too much to chew for me at that point.
Finishing school, I did my SAT and got a mediocre score—not good, not terrible, as they say. That was a miracle on itself as I had barely studied that year, but still, I couldn't get into any good colleges with that grade, so I decided to double down on trying out more ideas. At this point, I remember reading a quote from MJ. I don't remember if it was directed at me or if I just read it from another post, but it was something along the lines of "Your first business doesn't need to be fastlane; you just need to start something." At this point, my parents wanted me to get a job since I was not going to be a student anymore, and I must say they were completely justified and right in doing so, even if my younger self got a bit annoyed at that. So, with that in mind, I made a list of all my skills and assets and tried to figure out my next step. What that step was? A delivery skewer business! I had a grill, our home had a nice spot along the main road, and I could spread the word through social media, especially since my cousin is an influencer of sorts. So, I got to work. I just wanted to: A) Have some money coming in to show my parents I wasn't just being lazy at home and B) Prove to myself that I could finally do this. The only problem was the meat. I had some money but not nearly enough. However, soon I would have a small inheritance coming my way, and I planned to use that to jumpstart my operation.
That "soon" only happened yesterday as of the writing of this post, two years later. Just as explained by MJ in his "Someday" warning in TMF, I wasted an entire year being useless around the house, angry at everything, and feeling depressed. I could have easily gotten an entry job to raise the money, but I never did. The few times I tried, I felt like they were beneath me and it didn't last more than a day. I was the best student in any of my classes. I am doing all of this exactly to avoid having to live like this! None of my cousins ever had to work a job they hated; why do I? I failed to understand that in my situation, that was just the reality of things. I chose not to focus in the last year that actually mattered. I didn't think about the consequences of stopping going to class, which is not to say that having rich parents wouldn't have helped me get started, but I still made that choice, even being aware that it's far from my case.
Another opportunity came in the form of a public employee hiring spree from our national bank. It would be a test about subjects I had never heard about before. The highest grades would get the jobs. I managed to get some study material from my uncle, who had a lifetime plan for a platform just for that. I procrastinated a lot, would do a few exercise questions, and then burn hours watching YouTube to "relax." Suffice to say, I didn't get accepted. This was a really big moment for me. Looking at it now, it was my best opportunity to have enough of a foundation to eventually break into the Fastlane. It was an office job, yes, but the compensation was really good for where I live, the hours were generous, plus a myriad of benefits public employees get. But I simply wasted it; I didn't take it seriously enough.
By May of 2023, I just couldn't handle being at home letting time pass by anymore. I fired up Google and started looking for a sales apprentice position. My mindset was that if I needed a job, I might as well pick something that would be useful for my future business. But it turns out I was right: nobody takes a stuttering salesman seriously. After quitting another warehouse job on the first day, I was simply angry at life. Why must it be like this? All my friends from high school are out there going to other states and rediscovering themselves at university while I am stuck here, constantly not knowing what to do and dreading the ticking of the clock. So, in a move I cannot describe any other way but extremely dumb, I got my father to pay for a realtor course for me. Now, it was $200, which might not seem like a lot, but in my country, that is a big deal. A course like this is also required for you to be allowed to sell property with a commission. Quickly after the rush of getting everything done subsided, I realized what an idiot I was. I simply couldn't sleep that night. I spent all of it writing in my journal, thinking about what the hell I would do now and how I would pay my father back. After watching what people thought about realtors online and seeing what their job is actually like—which I should have done long before paying for a $200 course—it became clear that it is not the type of job I would ever want. Sure, you can potentially make big bucks off commissions and running multiple clients at the same time, but something about being an intermediary between two parties who don't really need you, or lying to get sales when things get tough, didn't seem right to me. So, after fighting for a refund for a week, I managed to get the $200 purchase canceled.
However, that still didn't answer the question for me: what the hell do I do now? I pondered for some time, made another list of all of my assets and qualities, this time trying to consider my entire life from that point on, not just a new crazy business idea to start while my parents support me. And I came to the conclusion that the best path of action for me was becoming a Software Engineer. I already had experience with game development since middle school and good enough English, so if I could just get a remote job working for a Western company, I might not only survive but actually thrive. And so I began researching how I was going to achieve that, and it turns out I was onto something. My country is really favored among international companies for remote work. I could very easily get citizenship from two European countries through jus sanguinis, so eventually, I might actually be able to get more than just outsourced jobs. The silver bullet being, for almost all of that to work out, I needed a Computer Science degree. So, I started looking into how I was going to get into college in the middle of June. You see, I really didn't want to wait another six months. That would make me almost 24 when I graduated. Something about that just stung me, but even if I see my reasoning as extremely flawed nowadays, I don't regret one bit of my impatience. With the help of my aunt, I managed to convince my parents to take out a loan to pay in full for the first semester of a top-tier private university, which besides prestigious public ones, is the only real way to be taken seriously by big national companies and foreign employers. And yes, I know what you are thinking, and I agree: I am a terrible son. Not only am I yet to make a single cent, but I also just got my family into a four-year commitment and $24,000 of total tuition. Now, for a top-tier STEM institution, that might not sound like a lot, and for a Westerner, it probably isn't. But with a simplified cost of living correction, that would be almost like $120,000 for an American. Still, we had a plan. I would keep trying for public employee positions. Many of the benefits are university-related, so for instance, I could have a big part of the tuition paid by them and even have flexible hours that would make it easier to study. Or, I would simply get a paid internship to help cover the tuition, all of that while applying to all higher education funding programs from the government. Thanks to my grades in high school and (at that time hopefully) while in university, it should be simply a matter of time before I got approved, and thankfully that gamble worked out and through those programs, the government pays for half of my tuition now.
And so I started my first semester of university. I met TONS of people, one of whom became extremely important for business-related events later on. At this point, I had almost forgotten about the whole entrepreneurship thing. I saw my future as being a well-paid remote worker. I hadn't completely forgotten TMF though. I am aware that this is your pretty standard slow lane approach. However, I had a trick up my sleeve, or so I thought. I was going to switch to a 19th-century road while keeping my indestructible used slowlane car. Through the magic of a lower cost of living, even a modest liquid $48,000 a year would allow you to build up a small fortune and live off government bonds. And of course, that on itself is still not a true Fastlane. You are stuck in your country where everything is cheaper if you want to keep that financial freedom. You are completely dependent on Western countries and your Third World country not deciding to mess with outsourcing. Growing backup reserves abroad with a weak currency is extremely difficult, and that is especially important if you don't live in a First World country. But still, it beats the hell out of the average salary of barely $800 here, which still has the exact same problems. All of that, and rediscovering TMF in my Kindle, led me to the realization that while getting that far would be amazing, my only shot at freeing myself from the script is still the Fastlane.
At this point, I also got my first actual job. The first one was cleaning dishes at a restaurant close to my college. The pay was only $100 a month, but for only 20 hours a week and included lunch, it was more than worth it. I hated the first three days as every other job I had prior, but I pushed through it. I don't deserve a better job yet, and writing about it now does make me feel silly about absolutely hating to work before, but I guess this time was different. I had a bigger goal in mind; I knew I wouldn't be there in five years. Over time, I grew to even like it. Now, every time I get the bus back home, sometimes I meet my old work colleagues, and that alone makes me feel like my time there meant something, instead of just being hours of my life sold for a few bucks.
I got my second job shortly after leaving my old one at the end of the semester. I worked for my uncle, who is an IT consultant. I would basically do all the boring work he didn't want to do. It was 30 hours a week, and I was paid less than my last job, but at least it was in my field. I learned a lot about SAP and Salesforce while there and also got a nice boost for my resume—a slowlaner thought, I know, but it makes me feel safer. I ended up automating a lot of the work for him using a mix of Python and PowerToys from Windows. I even created his company website during downtime. My uncle is old; he is an amazing programmer, but he barely speaks any English. That was when I learned what is truly the most important language any programmer needs to know, the one you are reading right now. He is your classic slowlaner, but it is painful to see how little you actually earn working for local companies here. He could have achieved his goals much sooner with an outsourced job instead of creating an IT company. This was one of the factors that made me consider if the fastlane really is my best bet. I remember reading a post by a fellow third-worlder on the forum, where he managed to achieve freedom through the fastlane. While that is remarkable and I am happy for him, I can't help but wonder if, in some places of the world, having an imported car on a dirt slowlane road is really that much worse than the hell that is the third-world fastlane path. The advice I received the most is to not think about how difficult everything is because otherwise, you will just get depressed and give up. It's funny but also tragic.
Writing this I realize how much my family has helped me, and how ungrateful I was at the time, specially considering not many people get this kind of help.
Another amazing thing was how many programs my university has to help you get started with entrepreneurship, especially startups in my course. After meeting one of the professors in a lecture, I found out about a small meeting group where professors and startup founders would come together to discuss and help each other. I immediately wanted in, but there was a catch—you NEEDED an idea. Now, I had some, but none of them sounded good enough to me. In the pitch to get in, I ended up putting three ideas into a single slide to see what sticks. The first one received a bad reaction—dumb idea. The second one made the teacher appear more convinced. The third one, he really liked, but I was a one-man team at that point, and it was clear even to me that it was simply too much for me still in the first semester. We talked it through and settled on the second idea as my first project. It was really nothing special—a platform that would help dog owners find each other for mating their pets, but with some twists. So, I began to work, did more thorough research, started actually learning React Native instead of using a game engine, did a few diagrams that are close to CENTS but not the same, and so on. At first, I thought this part wasn't that "real" and was only there because of the academic nature of being in a university, but it turns out this is exactly what I had been missing for so long and made me appreciate this whole thing even more. Still, the idea itself didn't exactly excite me. I even received a lot of feedback during my pitches for the project, saying how the idea has already been done to death, how my plan does make it way better for the clients but cuts my revenue so much that it is probably not viable, and how I would really benefit from a partner. Even if they don't mind my stutter, it still eats up lots of precious time from the 5-minute pitches.
Having all of that as a background, this is my current situation:
One of the friends I met at university is REALLY good at 3D printing stuff and polishing it. She even sold some of her work at conventions. One day, I had an idea and went to my father, who is really into rail transport modeling, and asked if there was anything he would need for his model. He showed me a very simple control holder. You could walk into a store in the United States and buy one of those at around 10 USD a piece, but importing one, after freight, fees, taxes, and markups, sets you back around 50 USD per unit, which is just insane. There were already some people making them with 3D printers locally, but the quality was pretty bad. It was easily breakable, ugly, and felt cheap. I got one of those and showed my friend. I asked if she could make a few for my father. She took a look, listed all the ways she could improve it, and we settled on 6 USD a piece. We spent around two weeks going back and forth with prototypes, slowly making them better and prettier. We got to the point where my father and some of his friends preferred her design over the American ones. I learned a lot about 3D printing and modeling during that time. We made an agreement to sell them online where she would print them, and I would take care of the selling and distribution. With my father knowing almost everyone in the local model railroader community, it was actually pretty fun. I made banners, a few videos, met lots of interesting people, and learned lots of frameworks to show what our product was and how it differed from the rest. Thanks to her amazing talent at producing 3D parts, everyone likes them. It is now a skill I am starting to develop, and I couldn't ask for anyone better to teach me. She even sold me a 3D printer for insanely cheap. Last week, we sold six holders, or about 60 USD worth of goods. It's not that much, but we just started about two weeks ago, and it is picking up speed. I will be attending some events and finding more avenues to let people know about our product. Three of those sales came from 1+1=3, or people liking them and telling others. So, I know the buyers like them. The agreement was that it would be split 60% to her for producing the parts and 40% to me for selling and delivering them. However, now that I got my printer, she said there is no problem if I make them myself and keep all the revenue. I even tried to pay her for each sale since she made the original 3D model, but she refuses to accept it. Suffice to say, we are still looking for more products we could start selling related to the hobby. Normally, a 3D printing business wouldn't be very profitable since a lot of people can do them nowadays, and I am sure it is extremely hard for you to go fastlane with it. That is fine. After an entire year, I am just happy I was finally able to act on MJ's advice of just starting something. The moment our first sale was made, just 10 minutes after I launched the first banner, I jumped out of joy. I saw many people in the forum saying how your first sale feels amazing, and it is true. All the work you put blindly into something, not being sure if it will even be worth it, the second the first person sees it and recognizes it as something they want to give you money for is simply amazing.
I started the other project with two of my friends and we are it getting off the ground as I write this. I don't want to get into too much detail, but it is an education platform made with specific exams in mind, a mix of new ideas with improving what already works. Before it was even a thing, I joined a pitch competition at my university where people would develop ideas and bring them for a round of investors to rate and give actual money to start turning that into reality. The first two rounds take place this year and are carried out by teachers from the university. One gives you 600 USD to spend on the project, and the second one about 1000 USD. The last pitch is only given to the three best projects, and they give you the chance to talk to real investors and startup owners. I myself always prefer the fastlane approach of building a business system that grows more and more independent of you over the years, over the academic techbro Public Seat but with AI startup approach. As you can imagine, those are the bulk type of people attracted to these kind of university, and that is fine. I tried some different teams, but all of them had the same problem in my eyes. You see, the entire first step of the program was about teaching you how to have and validate ideas. Having a MVP of people interacting with the processes of your eventual product was heavily favored in the pitch, but most groups joined already with an idea in mind. I wasn't joking about the AI Seat, by the way. I ended up in a group that was not right for me. Nobody would show up to the mentoring sessions except me. We would agree on dates for meetings, and people would either show up muted or not show up at all, and then mumble about how amazing our idea was without any product in mind. When it was almost time for the pitch, people just started leaving, saying they didn't want it anymore. So, I also jumped ship, with one week left before the pitch and basically no idea and no team. I went to my class to look if anyone was interested in joining in. We had this one project from class, already with all the market research done, some questionnaires, and most importantly, a small MVP documented from a test we did in a middle school. In one week, we turned that school project into the best pitch we could. I thought about leaving the talking to my teammates because of my stutter and the time restriction. However, the day of the pitch was literally my birthday, so I just had to do it too. The day for the first pitch arrived, as did my 20th birthday. Our group was almost the last to be called, and incredibly, during those 1:50 minutes I had to speak, I didn't stammer at all. Words just flowed out like nothing. It felt amazing. The evaluation panel seemed to like our idea but had a few problems with our pitch, so in the end, we didn't receive the round investment. And are now working towards the second round in october. But not all is lost. We are still working on the idea and are now moving towards having a working MVP. We aim to test this MVP at the same school where I stopped attending classes, which I find ironic. Even if we don't pass the pitch again, at this point we just want to create something to help people. Honestly, I think that's the most important part of a business.
Sorry if this last part doesn't have a real conclusion. As I said at the start, I wanted to write this post in December, after everything was more developed. However, with the forum going private, I decided to bring it forward a bit. Sorry if I made any grammar mistakes or if something isn't clear. I am happy to answer questions.
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