the long way round
the tidy version is above. this one has the parts that didn't work.
2019
I wanted my own money before I had anything worth paying for.
I was in 10th standard and wanted to earn something myself. YouTube was the only thing I could start without money, so I tried it. First a gaming channel, then comedy, then movie edits when the first two didn't work.
None of them went anywhere. Looking back, that was the first time I ran into the thing I now get paid to solve, which is that making something and getting anyone to see it are two completely different problems.
2020
My first dollar took months and never had a sequel.
During the lockdown I found a data annotation job and made exactly one dollar from it. Not one dollar an hour. One dollar, total, ever.
After that I tried survey sites and blogging platforms and pretty much anything that claimed it would pay. Most of them didn't. I kept going anyway because I didn't really have a better idea.
LIFETIME EARNINGS
- data annotation$1.00
- survey platforms$0.00
- blogging sites$0.00
TOTAL $1.00
2021
Studytonight paid me in pennies, and I spent every one of them.
This was my first proper writing job. Over fifty technical articles about languages and tools, a lot of which I was learning the same week I had to explain them. The money was almost nothing, but it was the first money I'd made from something I could point at.
I spent it on a domain and a Hostinger plan and started building WordPress sites. Those failed too. Same problem as the YouTube channels, except this time I actually went and found out why instead of moving on to the next idea.
2022
College started, and I kept taking jobs anyway.
I started my B.Tech in AI and Data Science at VIT Pune, and kept working the whole way through. First writing for freeCodeCamp, then Codecademy, where I ended up building four full courses, writing the Learn Java lessons, making the SkillShorts, and reviewing other people's work.
By the end of it I'd figured out something that took a while to admit. My friends genuinely enjoyed writing code. I enjoyed having built something, which turns out to be a different thing entirely.
i don't love coding. i love building.
took me three years to say this out loud
2025
Everyone had an internship. I got one off campus, then left it.
Everyone in my batch had an internship lined up. I got one off campus at CreativeScript as a front-end intern, turning Figma files into working sites. Five or six client projects in about two months, three of them full sites running past 20 pages each.
I left after two months. It wasn't a bad place to work. I just kept thinking about building something of my own instead of someone else's, and it seemed dishonest to stay.
2025
I built Reflaash, then admitted I didn't believe in it.
A speed reading app with a word mode, a sentence mode and background music that changes with what you're reading. It was finished and live, not a prototype.
Then I stopped believing it would work, so I dropped it. That was harder than building it and I still think it was the right call. It also made the next decision much easier.
dropped it.
no regrets, mostly
now
Trayve, from scratch, with a friend and no playbook.
A friend and I started Trayve with no traffic, no email list and nobody who had heard of us. I took the go-to-market side. A while in we got our first paying customer, and a few weeks after that the biggest one we've had.
I know that doesn't sound like much written down. It wasn't a huge deal in money terms. But we built every part of it ourselves from nothing, and that's the first time any of this has worked, so I'll take it.