There's a version of this story where I talk about hustle. A scrappy 15-year-old who spotted a trend early, sourced product, sold it fast, built instincts that carried him forward.
That version is true. It's also missing the part where I'm dragging boxes of unsold powerbanks through a pasar malam at night, trying to offload dead stock to vendors at a loss because I had run out of options.
That part is where the actual lesson is.
It was the early 2010s. Powerbanks were new enough that carrying one made people look at you. Battery anxiety was real — smartphones had arrived but the batteries hadn't caught up, and everyone's phone was dying by 2pm. I saw the gap. Sourced units cheap, sold them at a markup, moved them fast.
First few weeks felt like what I imagined business was supposed to feel like. People wanted what I had, money was coming in, I thought I'd figured something out.
What I hadn't figured out: people only need one powerbank.
That sentence is obvious now. It did not occur to me once at the time.
I was thinking about getting customers. Making the sale. Moving units. What I wasn't thinking about was what happens after the sale — whether that customer would ever come back.
A powerbank isn't nasi lemak. It isn't prepaid credit. It isn't something you finish and need again next week. Once someone bought one, their problem was solved. I had confused a market with a customer base. Every sale I made was simultaneously removing someone from my potential pool. I was mining a finite seam — my school, my neighbourhood, the people I knew — and burning through it with every transaction.
When I exhausted my network, there was nothing left.
The mistake hiding inside early success
Early sales validated the product. They did not validate the business. Proving people want something and proving you have a sustainable way to keep selling it are completely different things. Confusing them is one of the more expensive early lessons you can buy.
I bought more stock than my real market could absorb. That's the whole story, really. Everything else was just what that decision looked like once it played out.
Stock sitting unsold. No new buyers. No plan.
I loaded the boxes and went to the nearest pasar malam. Not to find customers — to find vendors who might take the units off me.
The pasar malam at night is its own economy. Stalls packed tight, generators humming, grilled corn and fried kuih mixing with exhaust fumes. Vendors who've been doing this for years, who know their margins, who can read a situation from ten metres away. I walked up stall to stall making my case under fluorescent lights, surrounded by crowd noise, with boxes I needed gone before the night ended.
It worked. I moved the stock. I recovered some capital.
But I sold at prices I'd never have accepted two months earlier.
The moment you need out more than the other person needs in, the price reflects it. Every time.
That wasn't a strategy. It was a liquidation. There's a difference, and I felt it even if I couldn't name it at 15. What an inventory problem actually does is transfer leverage. I had none left. The vendors had all of it. The numbers showed it.
Here's what I know now that I didn't know then.
The business was broken from the sourcing decision, not the sales execution. I was good at selling. The product worked. The problem was structural — no repeat purchase, no way to reach beyond my existing network, no answer to what month three looked like when the novelty was gone and the early adopters were already sorted.
Before you source anything, before you invest in any inventory or product, one question has to have a real answer: will this customer ever need to buy again? If the answer is no, you're not building a business. You're running a sprint with a hard finish line baked in. That can work — but it demands constant new customer acquisition, which demands reach you probably don't have yet when you're starting out.
The second question is just as important: what does month three look like? Not month one, when novelty is doing half the selling for you. Month three, when the people who wanted it early already have it and you have to earn every new customer from scratch.
What to actually ask before you start
What is my total addressable market — and how fast am I consuming it? My school had a few hundred people. My realistic prospect pool was maybe a few dozen. That's not a market. That's a sprint with a fixed finish line.
A real income model needs either repeat purchases, or a consistent way to reach strangers. Without one of those two things, you're starting from zero every month. That gets old fast, and most people quit before they figure out why it's happening.
That night at the pasar malam — negotiating under the lights with boxes I needed to move before the stalls packed up — is probably the most useful night of my early commercial education. Not because losing is instructive in some abstract way. It's that it burned in a specific lesson no book would have landed the same way.
Every income model I've built since has one question sitting at the foundation of it.
What brings them back?
It started in a pasar malam, somewhere between the food stalls and the generator noise, with stock I'd bought too much of and a market I'd already used up.
Ascendant Collective
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