It all started 13 years ago (2013), just stick with me here and I’ll come to the actual part after a bit of time. Feel free to grab a cup of coffee (and some snacks too, if you wish).
I was just 11 years old when I started learning HTML, CSS, and JS. It all started with a simple curiosity about how things are actually built on the internet. It was really a great story by the way, and I have already explained everything in this blog.
I’m really not a person who just buys a course, finishes 10% of it, and never opens the course again. The data shows that only 12% of people actually finish a course fully. And if it’s a free course, then it drops down to less than 5%.
So I took a different route than most people do. I just started doing everything by myself. Browsing through tons of websites, copying their source codes, pasting them into Notepad, playing around with the HTML code, adding and removing < > tags, etc. Yeah, it was a mess, but that’s how I learned.
And if you would ask me which is the best way to learn things, then I would always suggest learning by yourself. And keep in mind that it is not for everyone. Some people prefer learning in a structured way through courses, which is completely fine, but that’s just not my type.
I just like to learn by doing things.
After learning a bit about website building stuff, I started browsing through forums, social media, and groups. Facebook Groups were really popular back then. And you might be wondering how I got my Facebook account before turning 16. Well, it’s just like you faking your age on Gmail while creating an account. Even I did that too.
While browsing the internet, I came across one online forum called eMoneySpace.com (unfortunately it’s no longer available now 🙁 ). Over there, people used to post stuff about PTC websites (paid-to-click), which means there would be a bunch of advertisements and if we viewed the advertisement for a certain amount of time, they used to give us a very little amount of money. Just around $0.001 per click.
I used to join multiple PTC websites and click ads for a couple of months. Somehow, I made around $5.00 on one of the sites. And I was also referring people to join the site with my referral link, and the site used to pay me a small cut from the ads they watched.
So at that time, $5.00 was the minimum amount required to cash out, and I submitted a request to withdraw funds. But then I found out that I needed to have verified accounts on payment processors like PayPal, PerfectMoney, Payeer, AirTM, etc. (Yeah, I still remember these names because we can’t forget our roots.)
After waiting for some days, the payment arrived in my PerfectMoney wallet, which was around $4.6 after transaction fees. But the real challenge was how to get that into my Indian bank account.
So I did a bit of research and found a couple of online exchangers who could convert PerfectMoney USD to INR with a fee.
I trusted them and sent them my first income, and thank God, I got the money in my bank account within a day. I was so happy!!!
I know it’s very small, but that’s my first paycheck, if you can call it that.
So while managing my studies, I kept doing the same thing for around 2 years, and I was earning a bit more than $10–20 per month.
But while joining and earning from these PTC sites, I noticed one really big gap. Almost all the sites were using the same default template and there was no distinction between them. It was hard to navigate, images were all over the place, etc. It was chaos!
Since I was already learning HTML and CSS, I knew that I could fix these things. So I made a decision and opened a thread in the EMS (eMoneySpace) forum saying that I could design PTC websites for just $3 per website.
Yeah, I was charging way too little because I didn’t know how much it was worth. Although people used to sell designs for around $50–75 at that time, I kept my pricing low to get some work done and gain some experience.
And I was also doing some banner ads, posters, etc. in Photoshop and opened a thread for that too.
After 3–4 days, I got my first client!!!
It was like a dream come true moment for me, I just can’t explain that in words, hopefully you can understand that!
I needed to do around 10 banners and a PTC website design, but the client only agreed to pay me $3 for everything. I know that’s very less, but I said, let’s go.
And I finished the work in less than 2 days, and the client was so happy! So was I.
He paid me through PayPal, and I did the same exchange method and got my money. Used it for my internet bills.
Then I kept getting more orders, doing the work, building my portfolio, everything was going really well. And yes, I was charging a bit more than $3 of course.
After a while, I realized that I should have a brand name to make things look more professional, so I came up with a name that you’d probably laugh at if you saw it nowadays.
It was Designz5233.
(You can laugh. Even I laugh whenever I remember this name. But hey, I was just around 13 years old at that time.)
Even though it was a bad name, I was still getting work because of my good portfolio, honesty, great design skills, and of course lower pricing than competitors.
But after a couple of months, I decided that I really needed a brand name that was easy to remember, explained what I do, and was basically a good one.
After a couple of days, I came up with this name: UnikBrushes.
“Unik” in terms of uniqueness, and “Brushes” representing designing.
I went ahead, registered the domain, and started working on my WEBSITE!
For all those days, I was building websites for others, and now it was MY TURN.
Took some time, did some HTML and CSS magic, and launched my website.
But till then, I was still active on the EMS forum, and I changed everything over there to match my new brand name. And to my surprise, the rebranding worked. I started getting clients from the forum, through email, and social media.
I got so busy with client work that slowly I stopped getting time to focus on PTC sites and the EMS forum.
And while I was doing great alone in the business, my sleep schedule, time management, etc. were totally messed up. And I knew I couldn’t sacrifice my health forever.
So at that time, a new person joined UnikBrushes, my co-founder.
Time went by, and till 2020 we were mainly doing website-related work. But then I noticed that doing only website development and signing off with clients wasn’t really a good long-term business strategy.
So I went into research mode and started learning about SEO and other parts of digital marketing.
And man, I was so glued to this new niche.
I genuinely enjoyed browsing through different articles and learning new things.
If you’re wondering about my age, I was around 17–18 at that time.
And it was during the corona period, so I had all the time in the world to make good use of it. And in my opinion, I did the right thing instead of doomscrolling on TikTok.
After a while, I offered my SEO services to one of my best clients ever, and we brought really good results for them.
And slowly we expanded into social media marketing, paid ads, emails, etc.
So yeah, that’s how we expanded our service offerings.
After a couple of years, the next big boom happened, which is that one AI tool everybody knows: ChatGPT.
So we thought, yeah, AI is the new revolution and we can’t get left behind.
We went deep into the AI world, and we started automating a lot of things with AI, and it’s saving a lot of time for us.
And we also started hiring more people into UnikBrushes, and we slowly went into scaling mode.
So yeah, this is where we are currently standing right now.
And the cool part is, yesterday (May 8th) was the date I started UnikBrushes.
And it’s been 11 years since I started it.
And May 8th is also my mother’s birthday.
Anyway, I think I should stop writing in this blog and keep something left for future blogs 🙂
If you’ve come this far in reading, then I know that you’ll definitely achieve something great in your life.
I know I sped up the UnikBrushes scaling part, but I’ll cover it more deeply in my next blogs.
Till then, stay strong and keep learning.
– Rocky
