My first business was 300 stickers

I was about twelve and completely into BMX. My friends and I were at the local skatepark most days.

Then I saw a video of people covering their bikes and scooters in stickers, and I wanted that immediately. I went looking online and found sticker packs on AliExpress for almost nothing. I had some cash saved up, so I asked my dad to place the order for me.

About three hundred stickers across a few different packs. Thirty shekels, which was roughly eight dollars back then. A tenth of a shekel each.

The package took weeks. When it finally arrived, my friend and I covered our bikes and rode straight to the skatepark.

I wasn't ready for what happened. Everyone wanted them. I still had the rest of the packs in my backpack, so we started selling on the spot at one shekel a sticker. By the evening we'd sold about a hundred and thirty.

We spent all of it at the mart down the road on candy, soda and chips. That part I remember perfectly.

We sold a few more the next day and ended up around two hundred, plus some we gave away to friends. Then it slowed. We tried buy one get one free and it didn't help. After a few days it was finished, because everyone had worked out they could order the same stickers themselves.

What it actually taught me

I never sold anyone on those stickers. My bike did. We rode in with the thing already on it, and the demand was there before I opened my backpack. That's still the only kind of selling I'm any good at: show it working, then get out of the way.

The markup was ten times what I paid, and none of it came from the stickers. It came from being the only kid at that skatepark who knew where to get them.

Which is also why it ended. What I had was information, and information spreads. The moment someone else thought to search AliExpress, I had nothing left to sell. I didn't lose to a competitor. I lost to everyone finding out.

The buy one get one free is the part I think about most now. Sales had already stopped, so I cut the price, and nothing happened. They still wanted stickers. They just didn't want them from me at ten times what they now knew they could pay themselves, and no discount was going to close that gap. Buy one get one free is half a shekel a sticker. That is still five times the AliExpress price.

None of this occurred to me at the time. I was twelve, but I felt rich for one evening.