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This is the story of failure and bad luck I encountered trying to take the traditional path through school to a job and then success. Hopefully it will be inspirational to some of the others having difficulty with their startups. To start off, me at age 17, worked as a bag boy at a grocery store making minimum wage. This was 2007 and I used 90% of my weekly paycheck on a flight lesson. I had always wanted to be a pilot since I was a kid. Fast forward a year, I'm accepted into the air force academy! I get into a motorcycle accident that same year and no more academy, no more chance of becoming a fighter pilot. I decide to just continue in civilian flight school. Enter 2008 recession. No more pilot jobs. Pilots every $70000 in debt and moving lawns to get by. I decided that wasn't a very smart career path and I was devastated. Decided to just become an engineer and fly for fun with all of the money I would make. I began engineering classes in August of 2010. Classes were a breeze for me, I had always been really good at math. I finished my first year with a 4.1 gpa. Things were finally looking up for me for the first time in my life. I was going to be successful! Two months into year two my girlfriend was killed in a car accident. This was the lowest of low points in my short miserable life so far. Being the son of an abusive ranch hand, I was tough, but this was just more than I could cope with. My girlfriend had been 99% of my social life since course load kept me from really going out and making friends. I was away from home, socially isolated and in the worst grief imaginable. It was a viscous cycle that fed itself and tore me to pieces. I failed every class that year, lost my scholar ships and was suspended. If I had had friends at the time things might have been different but I was fully on my own and this year of my life fucked me up tremendously. I still have problems even feeling much emotion or keeping a regular sleep schedule even today. This led me into a new and shitty phase of life I'll call. "Being everyone's bitch for whatever pittance you will give me". I bounced around from shitty job to shitty job, trading my time for a small amount of money. A business model that won't sustain even a basic life worth living. I was slowly recovering from my girlfriends sudden death, and truthful I don't know if I ever did, it just stopped hurting so much all of the time. I was 23 when I decided to make my first startup. I had restarted classes again but with no scholarship I was footing the bill. $2900 for 5 books? Welcome to college! I was constantly working on my schoolwork at the time in addition to my job at a call center. I barely had time for classes let alone homework but somehow I managed to scrape by for two more years. I was in the middle of my first semester senior year when I was laid off. No warning just no job one day. In the economy back then it took my 3 months to find a job, I very nearly starved and I would have been homeless had my land lord not given me a huge break on rent. I was in debt, my credit ruined, my grades were barely c's and it wasn't even my fault. That's when I decided enough was enough. Fuck being someone's expendable wage servant, fuck having zero control of my destiny, fuck being taken advantage of by people and banks with more money than me because I was a broke college student. I wanted people to keep their hands out of my pockets while I'm barely getting by on beans and rice and ramen and they are eating champagne and caviar. I was never in it for the money. Flying I wanted to do because it made me happy and engineering I was in for the science. Being wealthy had never crossed my mind up until that point. The day I realized that money if he only real freedom in the world, not the bill of rights but money, allowed you to go on vacations wherever you wanted and have nice things and medical care. I had this apiphany the first time I was in the hospital to get a gash on my leg fixed. I couldn't afford the $100 co pay for a doctor visit. That's when I had enough. I went home and learned to suture and dress a wound as I realized I was still on my own and no one was ever coming to save me. I changed as a person that day. I was no longer the abused ranch kid or the bullied teen or grief stricken invalid or broke ass décolleté kid ripe for being taken advantage of. I was an educated and motivated maniac. I was here to slap your hands away from my food money and here to take yours by thunder! Obviously if it was that easy everyone would be doing it. Lacking the resources to finish the last 13 credit hours of my engineering degree, I dropped out and decided to build a business. I was going to work my ass off to make me money! Not some ceo or business owner who could give a fuck about how hungry you were or even what your names are. Fuck that! I decided to create wealth for myself. Working at the expense of my health and wellbeing for some shitty pay from a shady company wasn't doing it for me anymore. (Yes the chip on my shoulder was pretty good sized by this point in my life.) If I had some way of finishing school I could have gotten an engineering job but that was impossible. I didn't qualify for any more financial aid, I'm a white man and in ok health so there weren't many scholar ships, especially for stem majors. I could barely afford to feed myself let alone pay for a semester of tuition at a decent school. I was stuck. My first startup was a parachord bracelet company. It wasn't huge but it was very successful for testing the waters. I ended up selling it to a friend for a few thousand dollars so to me it was a raging success. I had created something and received money for doing so! I used the majority of the money to start a web design and marketing company which was semi successful. I was a great web developer and I was really good at making good looking and functional websites but that was in the days of Wordpress and build your own site gurus. It didn't help that I lived in an area where even if a client wanted a website, combining them to pay you even close to what one is worth would be met with laughter. People just didn't know the value of the product they were buying and informing them was met with skepticism. The company folded and I had to get a job selling furnituree just to survive it. I learned the biggest and most over looked lesson of business from that failure. Find a need and fill it. The markets could give less of a shit about you or your product/service if it doesn't fill a need or create value. You could have to coolest invention in history and you would starve to death if there was no one buying it. Ultimately I treated my new sales job as a learning experience instead of a wage slave gig that made the owner tons of money. Regardless I wasn't happy but this was a successful business, and I wanted to learn everything I could about business from this billionaire furniture store owner that I could because it's not like I was being paid well. I made him over a million dollars of sales but I only kept about 28000 in commissions the 8 months I worked there. It sucks but I managed to learn all about what it takes to make a successful business tick. I tried to more businesses, both abysmal failures and valuable lessons. I was a wage slave during the day the whole time. I hated it but at least I was trying. All that effort and hours of work and nothing to show for it. I would have quit but by this time I had a new girlfriend who was very supportive and even pitched in. It was the first time anyone has really ever supported me and believed in me before. Every other human being I had ever met up to this point had been trying to get something from me. I had trust issues before her because my whole life everyone was always trying to get a hand in my pocket, literally in the bullies cases, and figuratively in banks, land lords, everyone else's case. It was a new feeling, I didn't feel like a wounded calf surrounded by wolves and mountain lions constantly chewing on me, killing me bit by bit. If you're working on a startup, I cannot understate how important support is. It will keep you on task and believing in yourself. This is very important because a lot of failed ideas only failed because the person gave up on them and I've experienced that first hand. Finally in November 2015, I started my first succesful startup. One that I could create value with and stop being a wage slave. I had decided to put my engineering skills to work for me and started creating things. I made sure there was a demand and I made the perfect sales pitch for these things. I started selling in December and made a enough momentum to hire a machinist so I could produce stuff in house. Then in January I upgraded the website. And started a small marketing campaign. I was making just enough to pay the machinist, cover costs and build up a small pool of savings at this point.