Reflection on starting a business

As a young boy, I was told I had an entrepreneurial spirit and I like to make money. A funny and repeatable story that my mom constantly repeats is how I manage to sell an empty water bottle to a fellow student in my secondary school for $10, more than when it was full. She needed it for a craft project and as I was the only empty bottle owner, I could charge monopoly prices. I think my connection to me liking money is because of my early interest in the stock markets. I use to think I’m one of the chosen stock prediction gurus and can time buying the highest and the lowest. These embedded ideologies led me to always want to take more risks and start something of my own. I recall at 21, when I started a new job that by 25 I need to start my own business. My early twenties flew by. During it, I worked on a few fun projects, including a website to help UK residents find the optimal driving test centre, an algorithm to figure out when to cross the streets in New York gridlike structure. Perhaps my favourite was my flappy bird game in VR. None of these really fufilled my desire to start a business. So at the end of age 25, I made a risky decision of leaving my stable data analyst role and go into the wild for 1 year to test out my many ideas. I was really into smart homes back then and thought applying machine learning to the home control pattern would be a big leap. This led me to create TheSillyHome. It begun as a for-profit project but I could not find traction in enough users to share information for training. Then it morphed into a more open-source project. I found how hard it is to actually get people to pay you for your product and also how tough the open-source community is to their founders. There’s no slack cut out just because it’s free. Perhaps, they demand even more. After 6 months (this seems to be a repeating offense), my passion for the project wilted away. The next project I tried was a meeting management tool. Everyone hates meetings right? Why not automate/track meeting time more efficiently. Turns out tracking although useful does not actually have any actionable insights. Meetings are meetings, just like taxes are taxes. After 6 months (a conincidence?) I again lost interest and abandoned the project.

I look back now and found that period of time with joy. I had freedom to plan my days and to go out on long walks. Hit the gym and did a lot of thinking. These projects also helped me learn proper software engineering concepts and allowed me to find jobs in the startup field.