Growing up, I read about famous entrepreneurs who earned their first pot of gold while still in school, then rode that momentum all the way to the top. After years of real-world experience, I’ve learned that making money is anything but easy – especially the kind of money those moguls talk about, millions or even tens of millions. For someone from an ordinary background like me, that felt impossibly far away. Still, ever since I was a kid, I wanted to find some way to earn a little pocket money. My parents, though, weren’t keen on business. They worried about losing money. For my mother especially, every yuan was hard-earned; losing it to a bad deal would be worse than losing flesh. So our family never had the entrepreneurial gene. The only business my parents ever ran was a coal yard during my middle school years – and even that only happened because I egged them on. It was honest, back-breaking work.

Selling Crawfish

Before college, I had virtually no business experience. My one brush with earning pocket money was pure accident. I was still in middle school, on break, bored, fishing for crawfish by the river. Half a day later, I had a full basket. That evening we had a feast, but there were still plenty left over. They wouldn’t keep well, so I decided to sell them at the morning market. The next day at dawn, I rode my bike to the market with a basket of crawfish.

In the bustling crowd, I found a spot and set down my basket. Before long, an older woman came up: “Young man, how much for the crawfish?” I had no idea what to charge. While I was agonizing over a price, I noticed someone else across the way selling crawfish too. A man handed the vendor 10 yuan and got about 2 yuan in change – roughly 3 to 4 jin of crawfish for about 7 yuan, so around 2 yuan per jin. I said: “2 yuan a jin.”

The woman picked through, selecting all the big ones – about 2 to 3 jin worth. Then I realized I’d forgotten to bring a scale. I borrowed one from a neighboring vendor, weighed her selection, and said: “2 jin 6 liang, that’s 5.2 yuan – just give me 5.” More buyers trickled in after that. The big ones were mostly gone by then, leaving only the small ones. A young woman came by asking the price. “These are the last ones – I’ll give you a deal, 1.5 yuan per jin. Actually, don’t bother weighing them, 4 yuan for the lot.” She walked away happy.

I counted the money: 37 yuan total. Minus the 10 yuan my mom had given me for making change, I’d earned 27 yuan. That was the first time in my life I’d made money on my own.

Selling Software

In college, right before graduation, a classmate who knew I could code came to me:

“Can you build a website? Our company wants one to showcase products.”

“What does your company do?”

“Jewelry.”

“Jewelry? Sounds fancy. What kind of website are you thinking? Can you be more specific?”

“Here’s my manager’s business card. Just contact her directly.”

I took the card, thrilled – finally a chance to earn money with my skills. I immediately called my buddy: “I landed a big job – building a jewelry e-commerce site. Want in?” He didn’t hesitate.

So I scheduled a meeting with the jewelry company’s manager. Honestly, this was my first time taking on a real commercial project and I was nervous. My school projects were all demo-level stuff, nothing production-grade. I brought my buddy along for the meeting since he had more social experience. He did most of the talking. After half an hour, we understood the real requirements – it wasn’t an e-commerce store after all, just a product showcase website with no online ordering. On our way out, we grabbed some product brochures and design assets, then headed back to campus to work on pricing.

Neither of us had any experience with pricing. We later learned through my classmate that the company was also getting quotes from other software firms. We panicked a bit, unsure if we could win this. After some discussion, we figured that to beat a professional shop, our price had to be low – we couldn’t compete on credentials. After asking around about typical website pricing, we settled on 100 yuan per page. We counted about 18 pages, so we quoted 1,800 yuan. We won the contract. We later found out the other firm had quoted 8,000. Suddenly our price felt like giving it away. But a deal is a deal – time to deliver.

Building a website meant we needed a logo. The jewelry company didn’t even have one. Luckily, I’d learned Macromedia’s web design suite, so I spent an evening drawing a logo in Flash, then sliced up assets in Photoshop. The two of us spent about two weeks finishing the site. The moment we got paid, we were ecstatic. That same evening we took a few friends to a restaurant near campus and spent about 300 yuan on dinner. We split the remaining 1,500 evenly. For me at the time, that was more than enough to cover a month of living expenses.

Years later, looking back on our first pot of gold, we sometimes wonder: if we’d scraped together a bit more startup capital and pursued other ventures, maybe we could have built something bigger. But for two kids who hadn’t seen much of the world, perhaps that was as far as our horizons reached.