In 2019, I walked away from a six-figure investment banking job after binging How I Built This on NPR.
I was tired of analyzing businesses—I wanted to build one.
I had no plan. No product. Just a vague idea that eCommerce was the future.
Then, I stumbled onto Etsy.
I saw tiny one-man shops pulling in insane sales. These weren’t big brands or Amazon products.
They were weird, NICHE, creative products that people were obsessed with.
That’s when I had an idea:
What if I tracked this data, spotted niche trends early, and found winning products before they exploded on the internet?
The first trend we spotted?
🟡 Turn Yellow—a shop where people sent their photos, and a designer would redraw them as Simpsons characters.
It was weird. It was niche. It was printing money.
I figured, why not try it?
I threw together a basic Shopify store in two days—and then forgot about it for a month.
Then, I got an email:
“You will be charged $29 for your Shopify subscription.”
I thought, Great. I just wasted a month, and now I’m paying for something I don’t use.
I decided to give it one last shot and put $15 into a Facebook ad, expecting nothing.
Then… ka-ching.
My Shopify app made its first-ever sales notification sound. I thought it was a glitch.
Then, 15 minutes later—another sale.
Then another.
By the end of the day, I had seven orders.
I had no illustrators, no process, no plan.
I scrambled to hire artists on Fiverr, set up Upwork job posts, and figured it out as I went.