My first «business»
At 19, I was still doing ballroom dancing, but I was already interested in the topic of earning money, business, and investing. Almost all the big dance tournaments took place at Crocus Expo in Moscow.
I always had a huge endurance problem. I’m a good sprinter. I can explode fast. But keeping the pace over a long distance—just death. At one of the tournaments, I got so fed up by the competitions that lasted an entire day that I wasn’t even happy we’d made it to the next round. My muscles were groaning, hurting, and completely out of energy.
And I thought: if only someone could give me a massage right now?
The idea wouldn’t let me go. I had 15k saved in my piggy bank. I found an old used massage chair on Avito—somewhere in a car service on the outskirts of Moscow—for exactly 15k. I went, bought it, and on a Gazelle brought it to Crocus. Somehow, I managed to get it through the freight elevator to the second floor with a friend. It was ridiculously heavy...
There was also a broken terminal, and you could only order a massage for a hundred. There was no way to raise the average ticket technically. And it simply compressed you—that was basically the whole massage. It especially squeezed your calves, so hard that big tough men would bulge their eyes from the pain.
I arranged for a friend to set it up in the retail area during the tournaments, and then take it back and hide it in the storage room until the next weekend. That’s how it worked like a vending business for two months. Then the season ended, and tournaments stopped during the summer. I either had to sell it or pay rent for the storage space.
Result: over those 2 months, it brought in 15k in income in hundred-bill banknotes. And I also resold it on Avito to some other car service. I don’t know anything about what happened to it afterward. But it worked out to make x2 on the capital—damn it.
Think about where you have something hurting right now, but nobody is solving it. Maybe you could build a business on that.
At 19, I was still doing ballroom dancing, but I was already interested in the topic of earning money, business, and investing. Almost all the big dance tournaments took place at Crocus Expo in Moscow.
I always had a huge endurance problem. I’m a good sprinter. I can explode fast. But keeping the pace over a long distance—just death. At one of the tournaments, I got so fed up by the competitions that lasted an entire day that I wasn’t even happy we’d made it to the next round. My muscles were groaning, hurting, and completely out of energy.
And I thought: if only someone could give me a massage right now?
The idea wouldn’t let me go. I had 15k saved in my piggy bank. I found an old used massage chair on Avito—somewhere in a car service on the outskirts of Moscow—for exactly 15k. I went, bought it, and on a Gazelle brought it to Crocus. Somehow, I managed to get it through the freight elevator to the second floor with a friend. It was ridiculously heavy...
There was also a broken terminal, and you could only order a massage for a hundred. There was no way to raise the average ticket technically. And it simply compressed you—that was basically the whole massage. It especially squeezed your calves, so hard that big tough men would bulge their eyes from the pain.
I arranged for a friend to set it up in the retail area during the tournaments, and then take it back and hide it in the storage room until the next weekend. That’s how it worked like a vending business for two months. Then the season ended, and tournaments stopped during the summer. I either had to sell it or pay rent for the storage space.
Result: over those 2 months, it brought in 15k in income in hundred-bill banknotes. And I also resold it on Avito to some other car service. I don’t know anything about what happened to it afterward. But it worked out to make x2 on the capital—damn it.
Think about where you have something hurting right now, but nobody is solving it. Maybe you could build a business on that.