Entrepreneurship
Creating Bilow Industries LLC
The Idea
I didn't start a business without an idea first. I had been thinking of a product to bring to market ever since I was a senior in high school during 2017. My idea was simple and didn't have much competition in the market: a wooden computer case for custom PCs. I had made a prototype by hand back in high school, showing that it was possible, but it's one thing to build a prototype and another to mass produce a product.
Spring 2020
My original plan for the summer of 2020 was to work, live, and travel around Spain and the rest of Europe, but the world had different plans for me. COVID-19 saw me returning home doing the spring without much time to find an internship for the coming summer and with opportunities getting cancelled because of the pandemic. Keen to keep my hands dirty, I decided to do what many other people decided to do during the pandemic: hire myself. In other words, I decided to start a business.
Summer 2020
As a back-up plan, I decided to document starting the business on a YouTube channel. This turned out to be a great learning experience but a bad business practice since it distracted me from what was important: making the business. I was working alone and needed to design the product from the ground up. I worked through over 30 versions of the design over the course of the summer, but ended up building none of them.
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Nearing the end of the summer, I decided it was time to actually start looking at acquiring materials and registering a name. This took more time and effort than I would've liked even though I had the (honestly quite useless) help of my local small business association. But by the end of August, I had a business bank account, a registered LLC, and a machine to start prototyping on.
Fall 2020
So why didn't I end up with plenty of prototypes? Well, the answer is simple: time. Between school and making new friends, I didn't have enough time to prioritize prototyping the product. I'm a stubborn person though, so it took a while for me to accept that I couldn't be a student, a friend, and a businessowner at the same time. After all, there are only 24 hours in a day.
Sticks in a Bundle
Through my time trying to start a company, I learned that I wasn't all that limited by what I could do, but rather by if I would rather spend my time building the business or learning as much as I could from university. During my time at school, I decided that my education and social connections were more valuable, but in the future, who knows? Maybe I will return to this project in the future.
Evidence
Below is a series of videos documenting my experience with starting a business as well as some photos of the proposed product. The first video talks about official stuff like registration, the second talks about design, and the third talks about business finances.