I'm 18. Vytella Isn't the First Thing I Tried to Build. It's the First One I Didn't Quit.

In 2024, I was 17 years old trying to start a real business — and found out I couldn't even accept a payment on Shopify yet. That didn't stop me. It just meant I had to find other ways to stay in the game while I waited. So I did. My best friend Corbin told me about day trading, and I got deep into it — staying up late watching TJR's bootcamp, taking notes like it was a class I actually cared about passing. Somewhere in there I even tried starting a car washing business. Never really went anywhere either. But looking back, that was the actual starting gun — the first time I let myself think 'I could build something,' even if I had no idea what yet. Corbin started freelance brand scaling around then too, and that's what put dropshipping on my radar for real. My first-ever store was a pet products shop. I used a tool called AutoDS, and it just handed me 15 random products to sell. I remember being genuinely confused about what I was even doing. I was 17, couldn't take payments yet, so I went back to day trading for a while and waited. Then I turned 18, and I went straight back at it. I ran ads for a handful of dropshipping products. None of them worked. Not one sale. If you've tried this yourself, you know exactly how that feels — pouring money and hope into something that just goes quiet. Right around then I gave wholesale real estate a shot too — one last detour before things actually clicked. Didn't go anywhere either.

Then I tried a drink supplement product, and it was the first sale I'd ever made online. Something about that hit different. I ran two more supplement products after that — only pulled one sale total between them — but I was hooked on the category by then, and it wasn't random. I'm genuinely into self-improvement, so a product like that actually meant something to me, in a way pet products and whatever AutoDS handed me never did. I also just loved the work itself — building the ads, testing angles, figuring out what would actually land. That part was fun in a way flipping random products never was. I knew going in that supplements are one of the toughest spaces there is to break into. People don't hand a brand-new brand their trust with something they're putting in their body — you need real social proof before anyone takes you seriously. I stuck with it anyway, because for the first time, it felt like mine instead of just whatever happened to be trending that week. That's also when I had to be honest with myself: I'd spent almost a year jumping from lane to lane — real estate, trading, dropshipping random products — every time chasing whatever looked like the fastest way in. None of it had legs, because none of it was actually mine. I wasn't building anything. I was just testing doors. So I decided the next thing I built, I was going to actually build. Something with real longevity. One brand, done right, instead of five half-efforts. That decision is where Vytella actually starts. Not the store. Not the label. The decision to stop chasing the next thing and go all-in on one.

I ordered real samples before committing to anything. I picked the name on purpose, not off a generator. I built the store myself, piece by piece. And I've documented basically all of it — the wins and the parts that flat-out didn't work — because I think people should get to see what actually building something looks like, not just the highlight reel. I'm still in it. Still 18, still closing shifts some nights just to keep this funded, and I'm not going to pretend there haven't been plenty of nights where sleep loses to figuring out why an ad isn't converting or why a page isn't loading right. This takes way more time than anyone expects going in. There's no version of building a real brand that isn't genuinely time-consuming, and I've felt every bit of that. Corbin's still right here through all of it, too — not really building Vytella day-to-day with me at this point, but on the sidelines the whole way. The guy checking in, the guy telling me to keep going on the nights it's hardest to believe that myself. And I do believe it. Not in a naive, ignore-the-numbers way — I look at what's actually working and what isn't, every single day, and change course when I need to. But underneath all of that, I believe this is the one worth finishing. I'm even running a public countdown on TikTok to buy my dream car using nothing but what this business earns, because I wanted a goal real enough that I couldn't quietly let it slide if things got hard. If any part of this sounds like you — trying, failing, trying again, refusing to just accept "that's not for people like me" — Vytella's for you as much as it's for me.