My first successful business venture involved selling summaries of history class readings during my senior year of high school, at the age of sixteen. Six years have passed since that first taste of success. Now, at twenty-two, I want to recap all the business ventures I've started since then and analyze why some succeeded and some didn't.

In the following paragraphs, I will narrate in detail the stories of the five business ventures I’ve attempted so far. However, I’ll also write about the periods when I worked for someone else. I even started the first non-profit organization focused on promoting reading among students inside my college. Even though I didn’t obtain financial success with those projects, they were instrumental in my journey, so I wouldn’t be doing justice to my story if I didn’t include them. Sometimes, you need to take a step back to take ten forward.

Since I was born, my family’s most important concern was that my sister and I got a good education. Both of my parents devoted themselves to giving us the best education they could afford and in return they expected us to deliver excellent academically. Their roles followed a traditional family structure: my dad provided the money while my mom took care of us and raised us. My mom’s academic rigor set the bar up for me since I was little. I’m proud to say that since kindergarten I’ve always excelled academically - gaining the Academic Excellence Award when I graduated high school.

The amazing humanities professors I got since middle school inspired me to gain an affinity for humanities courses. Their passion was evident and they used to always turn each lesson into a tale, accompanied by videos, and images, and some even were skilled enough to draw on the board cartoons of history characters with fine detail. In particular, I became interested in history thanks to them so I never felt like reading about it was a dread; but that was not the case for the rest of my classmates.

Peru has one of the lowest scores on the PISA tests due to a weak reading culture. Many people either struggle to understand what they read or don't read much at all. In my early teens, I also didn't enjoy reading. However, when I began spending time with classmates who were both eloquent and well-informed to participate in the school debate club, I realized I needed to gain more knowledge to match their level. So, I started reading. At the age of twelve, I bought "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens" by Sean Covey, my first book.

Combining my passion for history with my interest in becoming more knowledgeable, it was unlikely that I would see reading my history class lectures as a dread. However, that was not the case for my classmates. As we grew older, the reading we got assigned started to get more challenging and required an understanding of previous historical events, which due to their disinterest, they didn’t have.

But I did. So I figured if I could provide them with a product that would avoid the pain of having to read those 50+ pages readings, they would buy it. The product I offered was a study guide in a question-and-answer style. I offered it as a bundle–purchase one summary and get a free after-class lecture delivered by me. There, I will do a recap of all the most important events and characters for the exam, in addition to answering all their questions.

The social proof I’ve built over the years by excelling academically in addition to the undeniable offer of a free after-class lesson if you purchased a summary, and my marketing strategy: spamming the class group chat with snippets of my summaries and standing during recess offering my summaries help me sell all the summaries in a single day.

My business idea was a success, my customers were happy because they passed the test, and I made a small amount of money, which was a lot for me back then. That first taste of business success hooked me forever. Until then, I had worked hard throughout school, aiming to follow a traditional career path: study for my undergrad at an elite university, land a job at a reputable company, get promoted to a senior management position, and ultimately retire at 65 with a solid pension. But, thanks to the success I experienced selling summaries, I stopped believing in that path. Now, I knew I didn’t have to do all of that to become wealthy–which was my goal since little. I decided that, no matter how long it took me or how hard it was, I was going to be an entrepreneur. So, after graduating from high school, I didn’t wait long to start my first business venture in the real world.

In 2018, in my freshman year of college, I was scrolling through Facebook when I saw a video ad for a napping pillow named “King Eye Mask Napping Pillow”. It caught my eye because of how different it was from traditional napping pillows. Naively, I concluded that if it had caught my eye, it could have grabbed the attention of others too. I decided I was going to sell it.

Looking back, my process of picking a product was wrong. The product was not solving any problem, nor did I knew who I was going to sell it to or how. I was too fixated on finding a product that differentiated from the rest to avoid competition. Once I found this odd napping pillow I reckon I could manage to sell them.

I’ve always believed speed is important in business. After I saw the ad I ordered my first unit, I named the product “Somni” - the Catalan translation for “Dream” and created our Instagram page, which you can visit here. My dad gave me $200 to purchase the product and to cover importation expenses. Three weeks later, the napping pillow arrived at my house from Japan.

The price I paid to get one unit of a napping pillow was too high for me to sell it locally. Peru is known for its strong textile industry. A lot of clothing companies handle their manufacturing process here. Given that, I knew that if I could find a seamstress that helped me replicate the napping pillow I could reduce costs massively and sell the product with a good margin profit.

A few days after the pillow arrived, I went to the local garment district, Gamarra. I’ve never been there before so I didn’t know anyone. I started knocking on every single store asking for help to help me find someone who could replicate the product. Eventually, I found a seamstress that agreed to work with me. We agreed that I would pay her to tailor one unit, and if I liked the quality of the replica, I would order more units. She delivered gracefully, so I ordered my first lot.

After she gave me the first replica, I called a friend from high school who was good with cameras and asked him to help me do a photoshoot of the product. I used those photos for the Instagram page. I reached out to a graphic designer I had been referred to and asked him to help me with the logo design. I didn’t have much money so I asked him if he could do it for a discount, given how simple the logo was. He agreed to do it for free. I’ve received help like this on multiple occasions throughout the years to the point where I’ve concluded that you only need to ask for what you want and you may get it–even for free!

At this stage of the story, I had everything: a good replica, the pictures, the logo. Now, I only needed to sell it. But, how? And, to whom? The Instagram account served as Somni’s landing page. I promoted it on my WhatsApp group chats, but no one bought it. Days went by and I couldn’t comprehend what I had done wrong.

I’ve forgotten to answer the three most important questions of a business:

I didn’t make this mistake once, but I repeated it later in other ventures. I thought to myself that the reason I didn’t succeed was that the product was not the ‘right one’ or it wasn’t ‘good enough’, but that was never the problem - my marketing strategy was. My thought process was: Since the product is rare, of good quality, and I’ve spent a lot of time before launching it, people will find out about it, see the value in it, and buy it from me.

I felt entitled to get sales which caused me to get very sad when I didn’t sell any units having done all that previous work. That was my second mistake: becoming emotionally attached to the outcomes of a business. When emotions rule decisions, it blinds you from reality. Looking at things from an objective perspective is key to understanding what went wrong.

Two weeks went by with no sales and my mom, who is a natural sales-person, told me she would post the pillows on Facebook Marketplace, a venue I had never heard of before. She managed to sell them all and we split the profits. Even though I didn’t end up being the one who closed the sale, I realized I could make a good product on my own.

After selling all of Somni stock, I devoted most of my time to university for two years, from the beginning of 2019 to the end of 2020, but the idea of trying a new business idea kept popping up. To make money for my expenses, I worked on and off as a private tutor both independently and for a local agency. This experience will later be instrumental in building my first startup: Dudda.

During the summer of 2021, I worked delivering fried chicken at Pardos Chicken, a fried chicken franchise in Peru. After two years of focusing on university, I was already in the middle of the undergrad so I was close to being able to apply for an internship, but that summer I didn’t have enough credits to do so.

I told my parents I wanted to work. They knew a guy, Frank, who hired people to work as independent delivery drivers for restaurants. One of those restaurants was Pardos Chicken and they needed someone with a bike who could handle nearby deliveries during Sundays, when orders peaked.

They texted Frank and told him I wanted the job. I started that same weekend. My paycheck was around 100 PEN depending on the amount of orders I managed to deliver, plus the tips I received. My schedule was four hours only on Sundays. I was happy because it was enough for me to pay for my expenses.

During that summer, I learned the logistics of restaurant work, the importance of step-by-step procedures to make sure all my orders were complete, how to use a POS, how to handle an unsatisfied customer whenever an order got confused, and, obviously, how to pedal my bike uphill with three fried chicken family combos on my back in less than 15 minutes.

There, I met people who had worked as delivery drivers for their entire life. Few of them were young like me. My friends there were Valentino and Oscar, they always made work fun. This experience helped me realize the importance of having a plan for my life and to feel grateful for being able to have this job as an option and not as an obligation, like many of my peers did. It gave me a lot of perspective in life.

One day, my sister approached me and told me about a trendy female self-defense gear item she saw on social media. She told me that she wanted to sell it. She showed me Instagram accounts in other countries that were selling the product massively. I told her I was in if she needed my help and we started working.

The product was manufactured in China so we needed to find a way to import it to Peru. We didn’t know anyone so I figured I could maybe pay someone to help me find a reputable source and handle all importation matters. I looked for someone who fit this criteria on Fiverr, a platform for freelancers, and eventually found Jack.

Jack helped me find a manufacturer in China that fit our requirements. He was very helpful and was always available to answer any questions I had. I purchased my first lot with the money I had saved from Christmas of last year and waited eagerly to arrive so we could start promoting it on social media, this time I wouldn’t make the same mistake I made with Somni, I knew this product had already been sold in other places and had the potential to go viral.

Yet, that never happened. We purchased the products and when they were about to be delivered to Peru we needed to pay for import expenses because they contained electric batteries inside them. The fees were huge and even if we sold all units we would still lose money, which we couldn’t afford. The products ended up lost in a dispensary in China because we couldn’t afford to pay for the importation duties. It was very sad.

After losing money on this attempt, I started a non-profit a couple of months later, and this time I succeeded. If you want to read the story of that venture and the ones that came after that, visit here.