Exactly one year ago, I left my corporate job to try building something of my own.
I had never really started a business before, so I had no idea what I was doing.
Over the last year, I ended up building three different businesses.
The first two failed.
The first one was actually in the same industry I had been working in before leaving my job. I spent around six months working on it and, at one point, I actually managed to make it somewhat scalable because of a trend in the market.
But there was one problem:
I couldn't make significant money from it.
I had spent months building and scaling something without really stepping back and asking whether this was actually a business worth building.
Looking back, I think I was too focused on proving that I could build something rather than proving that people actually wanted it.
Eventually, I decided to move on.
My second business lasted about two months.
And this time, I made a different mistake.
I picked a really difficult category with extremely high competition and once again started building before doing enough validation.
I spent my time thinking about the product, features, and how to make it work.
But I wasn't spending nearly enough time talking to potential customers or figuring out how I would actually get the product in front of them.
It failed too.
At that point, I had spent months of my life building things that weren't going anywhere.
That's when I decided to approach the third business completely differently.
I started working on it around January.
But instead of immediately building the product, I spent the first 2–3 months just validating the idea.
I talked to a lot of people.
I tried to understand whether the problem was actually painful enough for someone to pay for.
I changed my assumptions.
I questioned the idea constantly.
At one point, I even put up a website to collect a waitlist while I was still validating the idea.
The product barely existed.
And somehow, that waitlist grew to around 700 people.
That was probably the first time I thought:
"Okay, maybe I'm actually onto something."
Only after that did I start building the product.
And this time, I wasn't building based on what I thought people wanted.
I was building based on what I was actually hearing from users.
About two weeks ago, I finally launched.
And now I'm looking at my first real revenue from something I've built.
It's not a huge number.
And I don't want to pretend that it is.
We're still extremely early, and I know there is a lot more work ahead before this becomes a genuinely successful business.
But honestly, seeing someone actually pay for something I built feels pretty surreal.
A year ago, I was working a corporate job.
Since then, I've tried three different businesses, failed twice, and finally got my first small piece of validation that maybe the third one has a chance.
The biggest lesson I've learned isn't really about the specific product.
It's that building the product is only one part of building a business.
My first two attempts taught me that I could spend months building something and still have nobody care.
This time, I focused much more on validation, talking to people, understanding the customer, and figuring out distribution before spending months building.
I used to think:
Build something great → people will come.
Now I think it's closer to:
Find people with a real problem → understand them → find a way to reach them → then build what they actually need.
I'm still very much figuring things out.
This isn't a "I made it" post.
It's just a small milestone that means a lot to me, especially after the two failures that came before it.
Hopefully, this is only the beginning.
