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My First Business: Selling Jello (Then Eating It All Myself)
In the neighborhood where I grew up, every house sold something. One sold snacks, another sold popsicles, another homemade candy. It was completely normal to see a window with a handmade sign advertising whatever that family had to offer that day. And I had that same itch since I was a kid — I wanted to make money.
So one day I decided I was going to sell something too.
The Perfect Product (Or So I Thought)
I chose condensed milk jello. And honestly, it was a smart choice for a kid my age: it’s an easy dessert to make, way less complicated than other treats, the costs were low, and the profit margin was, for what I understood back then, pretty decent.
I made a bunch of plastic cups full of jello, put them in the fridge, and waited for people to start buying.
The Mistake I Didn’t See Coming
What I didn’t factor in was something basic: my house wasn’t on the street. I lived on the top floor, so the only people who walked by were the neighbors upstairs and a few tenants. Basically nobody else had a reason to pass by my door.
On the first day, if I remember right, I sold about two jellos. The rest just sat there in the fridge, waiting.
And Then the Inevitable Happened
Every time I opened the fridge and saw those jellos just sitting there, unsold, I did what any kid my age would do: I ate one. Then another. Then another. Until my entire “inventory” disappeared — not into customers’ hands, but into my own stomach.
I laugh a lot thinking back on this, because technically I became my own best customer. The business didn’t fail because of bad quality or bad pricing — it failed because of location, which is, as I know now as an adult, one of the very first things any business has to figure out before it even starts producing.
What That Kid Didn’t Know He Was Learning
At the time, I was just a kid who wanted his own money. But looking back, that failed little jello business was my first real lesson in business: it doesn’t matter how good your product is if nobody can see it or reach it.
Years later, that same itch to build something on my own led me to build websites, open my own online store, and understand that today, with the internet, the “location” problem I had as a kid doesn’t really exist anymore — anyone, from any floor of any building, can put their product in front of the entire world.
If you also feel like you have a great product or service but nobody sees it, that’s exactly what building a proper online presence solves. It’s the modern version of moving your jello window out to the main street.
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