How A 19-Year-Old Built A 4-Figure Business From Scratch With Less Than $1000 To Start With, A Founder’s Story with Reuben Lim

Reuben is the founder of Fishing Sensei. When he’s not fishing, he’s searching for new gear and better ways to fish. Aside from fishing, Reuben is also a foodie who’s always on the hunt for tasty food.

Tell us about your childhood and where you grew up

I come from a middle-income family and grew up in Singapore. Since young, my parents taught me to study hard for a bright future to get a high-paying job. Along the way, when I was in my teens, my parents also started telling me that I should learn investing as it was the way to financial freedom. I took their advice and started reading up on it while continuing to study hard, as I still needed money to invest, which could only come from a job. I always did well in my studies and was on track to NUS, a top-ranking university in the world. However, I’ve now decided not to attend university, as my only reason to do so was to get a degree to find a job.

How did you get started as an entrepreneur?

I’ve been a hustler since young. Even before I even learned about investing, when I was aged 10, I started buying and selling Vanguard cards. When I was 15 years old, I bought items from AliExpress and sold them on Carousell for about 300 percent profit margin each, about $6. This made me about 100 dollars per month. Since I was constantly searching for ways to make money, while I was doing Aliexpress and Carousell, I learned about affiliate marketing while Googling ways to make money online. I took an Udemy course and learned to run Microsoft Ads. That failed, so I moved to Facebook Ads. When that too failed, I moved on to MLMs. Finally, after losing about $5000 in testing all these methods, I started on websites, and here I am today.

What is one business lesson you would tell a startup founder?

Keep trying and plan well. All startups are uncharted territory, so you never know whether you’ll succeed. You can, however, maximize your chances of success with detailed planning. It’s also normal to fail, but you have to keep trying different ideas because that’s the only sure way to eventually find a business that works.