Just like many other kids who tried to make money to buy toys. I was no different. When I was only 10, I would buy some popular toys (like fidget spinners) from my home country and try to sell them to my friends in Dubai. Due to the low value of the Iranian currency everything was much cheaper there, making it a profitable business.
Selling each one of the toys would take so much convincing from my side, building salesman skills into me from a very young age. I remember it would take days of speaking until I would sell a toy, kids would promise to buy the toy but obviously they would go home and their parents wouldn't allow them. I would be promised at least ten sales before a successful one, which gave me a very valuable lesson. I would never rely on one person for selling an item because experience had taught me that he's likely to flake.
In order to increase my sales, I started offering my friends a commission if they sell my products. Not so long after, I had a bunch of ambassadors going around trying to sell the most random toys I’d get from Iran. This had become a regular thing I’d do everytime I would go on a holiday back to my country.
After some time of doing that, my friend came to the idea of making some character cards, an idea inspired by Pokemon, which was very popular at the time. For the graphical design of the cards we got one of my brother's friends, who studied computer science, to design the cards. However, since we didn't have money and would rather keep our risk at minimum we offered him a share of our business, rather than paying money.
After our cards were designed, we got them printed at our local printing store, with the material normal cards were. The minimum quantity which the printing store would accept was quite high, therefore we pitched our ideas to our parents and got them to invest equivalent to around 550$ each. We had hundreds of cards printed and our next step was to sell them. Selling them didn't go quite as planned, we tried selling them to schoolmates and kids in our neighborhood but we didn't get enough sold. We had made a loss but it didn’t stop us, our parents were so supportive and would yet encourage us.
Although the business didn't go well, it taught me to start selling items before we store them. Therefore, getting me into trying to sell stuff from the facebook marketplace to kids in school. I would spend lots of time finding fortnite accounts online and bargaining with sellers and after that I would try to find a customer for it at a profit. After lots of time which I kept in, I only managed to sell a few items. Even though I made some profit, It was not a good business idea.
Meanwhile, as Fortnite was a very popular game at the time, I came up with the idea to start a Fortnite tournament in my community. I started printing advertising leaflets and keeping them around my community. In order to participate, gamers had to pay a fee of around 14$ with cash prizes for the top 3 winners. I got 16 people participating and gave out around 100$ worth of prizes, leaving me with some profit. This was a successful business but it came with lots of hard work, finding 16 participants took lots of time and effort.
As you may have noticed, I tried lots of different small business ideas resulting in failures as well as successes. Although little money was made I would call them the biggest steps of my entrepreneurship journey. This is the stage where the seed to my entrepreneurship journey was planted. I started noticing the different mindset which was evolving in me. I was no longer the child begging my parents to buy me toys. Money became so valuable to me, which was the best lesson I was ever taught. Something I would never learn in school or learn if my parents had told me but something my parents let me discover for myself. I think that was the best way to learn such an important lesson, at an age where everyone around me was building the habit of wasting money on toys they would use a few times and then stack on their shelves.
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