What was the first business you ever created?

I used to sell diskettes with porn pictures at my highschool. LOL! It was not that easy to get them as it is nowadays so there was a business.

Fun fact: I've never said this online until now. This was 22 years ago, I was 13 years old!

Mine was called "Weed Whackers" and it was a neighborhood lawn-mowing business when I was 12 - 15 years old.

No website was created but we were guerrilla salesmen.

Rather than leave fliers at folks' doors, my dad insisted that I knock on people's doors to ask them if they need their lawns mowed. If they said no, I would offer a free lawn mowing to prove my worth. Most people were impressed or felt guilty enough to pay me anyway. I ended up "bringing on" 2 neighborhood friends and we had several sweaty summers of earning our own way.

If you want to go wayyy back, when I was a teenager in the '90s, BBSes were a big thing. If you're too young to know what those were, they were basically how people on computers socialized with each other before the internet got big. I made a few games for those systems.

I wrote the games as "shareware" and people would mail me checks to unlock the games to get more content and remove nag screens.

Here's info on one of those games: https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/enigma-of-ashrella

I still have the first $10 bill I made from my first game. I was lucky that it was an actual $10 bill and not a check. I need to find that and frame it. :)

What did I learn? I learned that I loved building things and having people enjoy what I built.

I ended up making the game engine open so that people could write their own mods using a custom scripting language. So, I also learned that making things customizable takes a ton of work. You have write documentation, tutorials, and support people who use those features. It's a lot of work for one person, especially if you're a teenager!

I had lots of small money-making endeavors as kid including braiding keychains and selling them at school. But the one that I'd say was my first memorable "business" was a service designing flyers for real estate agents.

Real estate agents would give me a technical data sheet about a property and I would create a nice layout from it. (Anyone remember "Print Shop Deluxe?"). The listing agent would give these out at an open house. There was a viral component to it because my info was mentioned at the bottom. The buyer's agent would see this flyer that was way nicer than their own and would then have me design flyers for their own listings.