All The Ways Your Dad Tried Making Money (And Failed)

I’ve wandered through a lot of ideas / projects in my early life. Here’s a few I still remember.

When I was 13, I figured I could flip PSPs. I ended up having 3 PSPs. None sold, lol.

Around the same age, me and my best friend back then, Andrei, learned about this stock image site. Basically you could take pictures of things, upload them there, people would use them and the site would pay you a few bucks.

Said and done, he bought a camera, I downloaded Photoshop and we started climbing buildings to take the most beautiful images we could take of our little town called Slatina. Let me tell you, not a lot of pretty shit to photograph. I don’t remember if we’ve made a few bucks before we gave up. But I do remember we gave up cause it just wasn’t working.

I sort of forgot about entrepreneurship during high school. I was too focused on boxing. But after I had to quit because we had almost no money, it resurfaced.

I remember my dad’s hotel closing down. Beautiful hotel, 4 stars, great interiors. Should have never built it in Slatina. A shame…

But after it closed down I took all of the alcoholic drinks I could find there. And I started selling them to my high school friends. Wasn’t too bad, I was able to do a 1 week trip to the seaside with that money plus buy some eBooks.

During the same period of time I also figured out that you can buy fake designer brand phone cases (supreme and whatnot) on Aliexpress and sell them in Romania. Most people didn’t know about Aliexpress, didn’t trust it and didn’t want to wait weeks for it to come or go to the customs office to declare the package. I did cause I could buy them for $1-4 a piece and sell them for $5-20.

Not my biggest money maker. I really only sold maybe 10 cases. But it was fun. In hindsight, could have scaled it to a real business if I was smart enough back then. Mobilfox for example makes a large amount of money right now.

That could have been me. But then again, I also wanted to start mining bitcoing when I was 15. I didn’t. Blame my dad for this one cause he told me it’s a scam, lol.

As soon as I sold my alcoholic stock, I was pretty much fucked. I only really made money on that cause I got it for free.

I also figured out that what I really wanted to do was earn money online. Like, fully remote. I knew this was possible because I followed a few bloggers that did it.

So, 2017 was a mixture of trying blogging, graphic design and coding. Didn’t really fail at any, cause I really didn’t give any of them an honest try. I quit each after max 2 months.

That said, it did keep my mind open to the possibility that some day I might earn money online. And I learned to make a WordPress site (this is important later).

2018, dad gets out of prison and says “go to college”. He said he’ll pay for it so I figured “why not? the last of my high school friends are leaving for college this year anyway.” So I (he) picked mechanical engineering and off I went.

I was more interesting in getting wasted and playing poker. Made small amounts of money from that, but mostly because I loaned my friends money.

I was quite depressed though. I felt useless. I wasn’t really serious about college. It felt like I was a drain on my family’s resources.

So I quit and came back home. Worked here and there for my father. Mostly construction work. Outright awful.

It was here that I realized I am not made for blue collar businesses. I need A/C.

Anyway, remember those bloggers I was following? Some of them were on twitter now. So I got on twitter to follow them. And I started following all sorts of people.

But this one guy in particular, “Abuamerican” was his online name, needed a website. Took a look at his site and it was shit. I figured “I could make something better with WordPress”. So I DMed him, we had a call (I was anxious and scared shitless) and we’ve decided on terms.

I was going to make a wordpress site for him and take 20% of the site’s revenue.

In my mind, this was it. I’d just need a few guys like him and I can make $1k-$2k per month and be set.

Well, it didn’t quite work out like that. But I earned a friend and it got me started in web development. Which I did actually ALMOST quit MANY times. But that is a story for another day.

What’s the lesson here?

Well, your dad had absolutely no fucking idea what he’ll do with his life.

But I kept going. Kept trying things.

Would I have been where I’m at faster if I had stuck with one thing from the get go? Maybe.

But I think it’s fine to wander. I’d even say it’s beneficial because you learn more about what you like to do. And you develop a skill stack. (You might want to read this and this on the topic of skill stacks)

Not that I liked coding / web dev when I first started doing it, btw. I hated it.

But I had just enough traction to keep me in the game. And just enough hunger (I was broke as a joke here) to *need* to stay in the game.

P.S.: As I read this to edit it, I realize my biggest support was my mother. Not because she told me to do these things, or had the best advice.

But because, unlike the parents of my friends, she supported me. She didn’t criticize my “waste of time” attempts, nor told me to go get a normal job.

She just left me to my own devices and loved me unconditionally. And it worked.

That’s it. Dad loves you, bye!