At 17, I had a business. At 20, I shut it down. Here's what happened.
Like every curious 17 or 18-year-old, I wanted to try. To create something. To figure life out before it figured me out. But unlike most commerce students, my fascination wasn’t with accounts or economics - it was with machines. Since childhood, I had this thing for electronics. I’d open up radios, unscrew CPUs, peek inside remotes - not to break them, but to understand them. That curiosity led me to pursue a diploma in Computer Hardware & Networking while I was still in 11th grade.
That diploma, paired with a part-time job at my cousin’s firm, taught me more than textbooks ever could. By 17, I was obsessed with machines - how they worked, how they broke, and most importantly, how they could be fixed. So I launched a tiny local venture: Nanotech Solutions. No office, no team - just a toolkit, a backpack, and a bunch of neighborhood clients whose systems I would fix, upgrade, or troubleshoot.
Was I making crores? No. But I was making enough to feel like I was building something. Enough for people to say “Itna chota hai, but so hardworking!”
But here’s what they don’t tell you when you’re 17 and start a business: Passion is fuel, but consistency is the engine. And I had only one of those.
College began. Academics piled up. Submissions, exams, presentations - and slowly, Nanotech stopped getting time. I would delay client calls, miss follow-ups, or simply not respond during exam weeks. Eventually, I paused the work - thinking I’d return after my semester. I never did. And that was my first “failure” as a founder. No dramatic crash, no angry investors. Just a slow fade-out of something I once loved. But here’s the part I only understood much later: I didn’t fail because I wasn’t good enough. I failed because I was meant to pivot.
That journey of being independent, solving real-world problems, dealing with clients gave me clarity and confidence. It built my mindset. It taught me structure. And when I eventually discovered design, I carried that same mindset forward.
Today, as a graphic designer, I still rely on the things I learned back then:
✅ Solving real problems for real people
✅ Working solo and being accountable
✅ Loving the “technical” side of creativity
✅ And most of all, starting, even when it’s imperfect
Full Circle.
So no, I’m not ashamed of that chapter. Because sometimes, the ventures that fail aren't actually failures.
They’re just redirections. And I’m grateful for mine.