How did you start your first online business from scratch like what steps did you take?

Answered by Jacob Laukaitis, marketer

I was only 15 at the time and I didn't know anything about starting a business, I just knew that it was what I really wanted to do. So I began doing 2 things: reading books (for many hours every single day) and going to as many entrepreneurship events as I could find.

This led to me learning tons of things about starting and running a business and eventually led to me making friends with my to-be first business partner. Then, we discussed all the different business ideas we wanted to do and settled with 2 main ones - a small book publishing company and a tiny e-commerce website that sells physical books. Then, we went through the whole process of opening up a company (I had to make my mom the official CEO as I was too young haha!), launching a website (we did it with a similar system like Shopify.com, but much worse) and all of that.

In those days, I was doing nothing but school and work (I even had an office) and those were some of the best days of my entire life. We were making money from publishing books and kept losing money from selling books online. However, it was all an absolutely wonderful experience. Eventually, after 10 months of working together, me and my partner separated and I got a pretty decent exit deal because I made quite a bit of money that kick-started my other ventures. So speaking of steps:

Read as much as I could;
Attended all the seminars/meet-ups I could find;
Networked with tons of people;
Found my to-be partner;
Discussed all the different ideas and weighed their ups and downs;
Launched the 2 ideas that seemed to be the best (tried to make the MVPs as simple and as cheap as possible by using pre-programmed solutions as opposed to doing everything custom);
Worked my ass off and learned from my mistakes;
Once it wasn't fun anymore (because we were fighting a lot), I exited the business.

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