Starting a Web-Based Business
Posted on April 28, 2018
It’s always been a dream of mine to own my own my business. Although I’ve worked my fair share of jobs ranging from pizza delivery driver to assembler at a manufacturing plant to working in an IT team to a professional tutor; I’ve always harbored a dream to be an entrepreneur. However, I’d come up with ideas, but kept getting stuck at some point and never following through.
I’ve always had an interest in computing and technology, and have built my first computer when I was 10 years old. Since then I’ve built countless PC builds, and developed skills in both IT and dabbled in programming. So I decided to take the knowledge from my skills to build and create workstations and builds for particular niches within the personal computing industry.
Also as I was working through some of my classes in University, I decided to try my hand in day-trading. As I was learning how to trade properly, I would make “paper trades” which involved simply writing down BUY or SELL in different positions. I would make paper trades as I was learning how to trade and developing a strategy on what works for me. Eventually I moved $100 into an account and started trying my hand trading. As I was seeing positive returns, eventually I moved $1000 into my account and kept up on the trading. As I was building up my returns I saw a definitive increase in my account. After a year of seeing positive returns, along with going through my engineering classes, I decided to diversify my position and use my skills in computing to leverage another investment.
Unlike regular e-commerce companies where I would be competing with the best internet marketing people in the world, I decided to tackle a much smaller niche market in computing. I knew that the supply of GPU memory chips was very limited due to a combination of different factors. Originally GPU’s were used primarily for video and graphical rendering or gaming. However in recent years the demand for GPU’s have skyrocketed because computer scientists have learned that GPU’s are great for repetitive computational tasks such as deep learning modeling and artificial intelligence. There is also a huge demand for GPU’s from cryptocurrency miners, not to mention the original use case of graphics and video processing.
Overall, it’s been an awesome learning experience. Even if it goes nowhere, I am confident I could start up a new business in a quarter of the time it took me to do this today. My plan today is to generate some sales through social media and look to google and facebook ads to expand.
PS. I wanted to say that this article makes it sound easy, but these overall were milestone goals leading to the start of my first business. The reality is that business is risky. It’s incredibly difficult, subject to fail, erase all your free time, and max out your anxiety and stress levels if you’re not careful. Sometimes it’s incredibly difficult to find customers. Nothing about building the business was easy. It takes an almost insane person to take on trying to make it in the world with their own two hands and take on all the responsibility. Not everyone is cut out for entrepreneurship to begin with and even then it takes a certain personality type excel. I’m still pretty new at this and am learning and improving everyday. I can only hope that you can learn something from my journey so far.