The Stupid Story of How I Created an Unprofitable Business When I Was 15
When I was in high-school I was a big fan of Japanese anime. I know that’s not the most compelling first line for an article, but hang in there that the story will get more interesting, I promise. To give some context, I was born and raised in Brazil, state of São Paulo, in a mid-sized city 1-hour away from São Paulo capital. Both my parents have pHDs and pretty decent jobs, and we were considered a mid-high class family in Brazil. Around 2000 we bought our second computer at my house (the first one was an amazing Compaq 486 all-in-one! ⭐️) and somewhere between 2001 and 2003 we finally upgraded our dial-up internet connection to broadband.
While my mom used the newer computer to do research and write her thesis, I used to share the older computer with my two older brothers. Even before we had a decent broadband connection, we were already fascinated with the possibility to download stuff off the internet and we used to take turns to use the computer, leaving it connected to the dial-up the whole night (only paid for 1-pulse overnight, right?!) downloading our favorite music from gold old Kazaa and eMule.
As I mentioned, I was a fan of Japanese animation and comic books. Yes, I used to watch hours and hours of Dragon Ball Z, Pokemon and Sailor Moon on Cartoon Network. I also had a huge collection of manga (Japanese comic books) that you could buy at newsstands in Brazil (was this a thing in other countries as well?). But my interest in anime and manga went deeper than what was commonly accessible through TV and bookstores. In fact, my favorite genre was called “Yaoi”, that is a term to refer specifically to anime and manga that contains/focus around gay romance (yes, my mom had so many questions…). Anyways, all that to say that the type of anime and manga was really into was considered extremely niche/underground at that time, and because of that, the shows and the comic books were significantly harder to get access to (e.g. the vast majority of them had never been aired or published outside of Japan).
But, as the internet and I already had a relationship, and my English was slightly better than terrible, I found my way through layers of search engines and weird tutorials available on the internet in 2004. I found out international communities around those animes and that people were sharing digitalized versions of the episodes with fan-made English subtitles, as well as fan-translated comic books. So I learned how to download all of that through brand new peer-to-peer platforms like torrents and IRC channels (can you believe mIRC still exists? ❤️).
Then, the more I talked to people about the stuff I watched, the more questions I got about “how do you find this stuff?”. That’s when I realized what I was doing was non-trivial (especially for the average non-tech-savvy non-English-speaking Brazilian teenager with a 30kbps dial-up internet connection).
In an impulse to help people, I found some free hosting services online (remember RapidShare and MegaUpload?) that I could upload the files I had and share a direct download link with the people that asked me. You can imagine that 1TB of Google cloud storage for US$5/month was not a thing at that time. Oh no, most file hosting services had limits like 100-300MB per file, and 5 file downloads per day on the free plan (not to mention the 45~60 seconds wait to reveal the download link). Good times.
Eventually I decided to create a blog to share the download links publicly. My blog never got too much attention, but I was mainly using it as a place to organize and share the download links with my friends, so I never stopped posting the new stuff I found. Eventually it had a significant amount of content that it started to catch some traffic and reach strangers online. Some of which were even engaged enough to leave comments there.
That encouraged me to add more and more stuff. From entire seasons of animes to one-off movies, music, translated mangas, etc. But soon enough I realized the blog format was not helping people to find the old content I had posted in the past. So I started tweaking the layout of the blog to try to make older posts easier to access. Creating side menus by categories or tags, or adding “Have you seen this similar title?” at the end of certain pages. But there was just so much I could do with a blog engine. At some point I had tweaked so much with the layouts that I had learned a lot of HTML, CSS and even some very simple Javascript. That’s when I decided to migrate the blog to an online portal.
Behold my incredible photoshop abilities applied to creating seasonal designs for the site lol
Again I found some free hosting services that would let me upload all the HTML files of the site and publish it with their weird domain names. At that point I learned a lot by comparing and trying out several different providers. Storage space, bandwidth limits, FTP upload/download, mirror domains, etc. At the same time, as people started leaving more and more comments on the site with all kinds of requests, I kept improving and increasing the content: adding Portuguese subtitles to the videos, compressing and converting videos to reduce the file size and optimize for slow connections, adding different types of content to the website, etc.
Part of the codebase for the site. I added a “funny” comment at the top of my index page saying “Snooping on someone else's source code? How ugly! I only forgive you if you're here to learn something. Go ahead!”
Suddenly I was running a pretty popular Japanese pop-culture portal in Brazil. People not only contacted me with requests for more content, but they started sending me their fan made stuff to publish there too. At some point the website had a gallery with more than 100 fan-made artworks, and a library with more than 20 fan-written novels, and I was publishing everything manually - I had no idea what a CMS was at that time.
Fan fictions were all hardcoded and formatted in the body of the page, and I manually created a new page for each chapter lol
Fanfics! I was surprised to remember I had a visitor survey and a “publicity” section on the side menu to advertise other sites
Later, I also started a “service” where, upon request, I’d make a physical copy of my backup DVDs with all the content of the website and ship it to people whose internet connection was not good enough to download the stuff online. I remember my dad being super confused about the fact that every week I had a shipment of DVDs to take to the post-office, and my mom never mentioned the fact that I got some random people to transfer money into her bank account to pay me for the DVDs (I don’t think she had time to check her statement that closely).
I was naive and my only goal was to help people (and maybe become “popular” on the internet), so I charged only exactly the cost of the DVD media and the shipping fee. And I was just happy enough that the money was going back to my mom's bank account, since she used to give me a monthly allowance (that I used to buy the blank DVDs and pay for the shipping costs). Such a missed opportunity to have started a gay-anime version of Netflix in 2005 lol
DVD selling section with instructions on how to order via e-mail and pay the shipping fee through cash deposit. I charged R$3,50 ($1.75 USD at the time) per DVD + R$2,00 ($1.00 USD at the time) for the shipping fee
At the time I never realized I was running my first unprofitable business. I even “recruited” and trained my first staff when two girls reached out to me in an online forum offering to help maintain the website. I wrote a bunch of HTML and CSS tutorials, including how to do everything behind the website and trained them through ridiculously long emails (it's a shame I no longer have access to that old email account). We were constantly talking through emails and dividing the tasks of updating dead download links, adding more official content or publishing fan-made content submitted by the visitors.
Now, this is the part where you expect me to say how much I learned about entrepreneurship or how I built a successful business after that. Well, none of that happened lol Eventually, like any other 15 year old, I got bored and moved on to other interests. One of the girls I trained kept working on the site for a while after I abandoned it. A couple years later, without any more maintenance, the site died.
There’s no “moral of the story” or enlightening conclusion. This is just the stupid story of how I created an unprofitable business when I was 15 years old, and that looking back now, I think it was kind of interesting.
