I Lasted Five Days at University. For a Year, My Family Thought I Was Still There.

Every morning for a year, I left the house at the time I would have if I were going to lectures. I said goodbye, picked up my bag, and walked to the library.

I wasn’t studying. I had left university in my first week. I was eighteen, sitting at a library desk with a question nobody in my family could answer for me: how do people actually make money online?

I had no plan worth the name. What I had was a stubborn certainty that I wanted to build something of my own, and enough patience to sit at that desk every day until I worked out how.

The route I was supposed to take

I’m a second-generation immigrant. In my family, university wasn’t one option among several. It was the plan: get the degree, get a good job, and never worry about money the way your parents had to.

My parents had worked hard for that security, and they wanted it for me more than they wanted anything for themselves. Telling them I had lasted five days was not a conversation I knew how to have.

So I didn’t have it. For a whole year.

Twenty-one, and $200,000 in debt

Over the next three years I built businesses that worked and businesses that failed. I built a few, sold a few, and learned most of what I know the expensive way.

Then I made mistakes that cost far more than late nights. By 21, I owed more than $200,000.

A short while earlier I had been the guy who had it all figured out. Now I was checking whether I had enough for gas.

I carried that debt for three years, and the embarrassment with it. Those years didn’t feel like a lesson at the time. Looking back, they gave me a kind of confidence I couldn’t have found any other way. Anyone feels sure of themselves when things are going well. Rebuilding asks you to show up every day while you’re embarrassed about where you are, knowing exactly how much you still have to learn.

They taught me something about attention, too. When your identity is wrapped up in looking successful, losing it hurts twice: once in your bank account, and again in front of everyone who was watching. I came out of those years with a rule I still keep. Never confuse being seen with doing well.

It suits me anyway. I’ve always kept myself to myself. Even in the good years, I was the one in the room listening, not the one holding the microphone, and I would still rather spend an evening fixing a checkout than filming myself talking about one.

Done watching

Somewhere in those years I noticed a habit in myself I didn’t like. I watched what happened with crypto. During COVID, I watched people build businesses around how fast the world was changing. Each time I thought about it, talked about it, and kept watching.

Hindsight makes every opportunity look obvious. What bothered me was how much of my life I had spent on the same conversation with myself, the one about what I could have done.

When the research peptide market caught my attention, I decided I wasn’t going to have that conversation again. I read everything I could find. I wanted to know how the businesses in it actually worked. How were these stores run? Where did they find suppliers worth trusting? Why would a customer order from one brand when a hundred others were a click away?

Retabionix

Retabionix is the research peptide brand we built to answer those questions, and we answered most of them the hard way. At one stage we had around $180,000 tied up for roughly six months because of payment processing problems. When that much cash is out of reach, a payment problem quickly becomes a stock problem, then a fulfillment problem, then a sleep problem.

We kept going and fixed one wall at a time.

Retabionix figures are our own business results. They are not typical and are not a promise of what any other business will do. Results depend on many factors, including your decisions, capital, costs and the market.

I’m proud of those numbers, given where I started. What I value more is what the walls taught us, because each one became part of the system we now build with other founders at PeptiCEOs. The full story, including what went wrong, is in how we built Retabionix.

That history shapes how we work. This industry rewards noise, and the loudest voices are often the first to disappear. You may have seen the pattern: big promises, bigger screenshots, then a website that stops answering emails. I would rather you trust us because you checked than because I was loud. So the terms are in writing, and you can read every word before you commit to anything.

What success means to me at 28

At 21, losing everything changed the way I saw myself. At 28, with a family of my own, what I want from success has changed too.

I think less about having a good eighteen months and more about what lasts: what we keep, what we can build on, and what this work could mean for the people I’m responsible for and the generation after them.

And I think about my parents. They wanted security for me so badly that I couldn’t bring myself to tell them I had left university. They’re proud of me now. I’d like to repay them properly for the choices they gave me, the ones they never had themselves.

When I say we take this seriously, that is what I mean.

If you’re reading this because you’re thinking about building something of your own, I’d ask you one question before you go any further. If the business worked, what would it actually change for you? Someone to look after, more say over how you spend your days, or simply something that’s yours after years of talking about it. Whatever your answer is, hold on to it. It’s the first thing we’ll ask about if we speak.