When I was 13, I had a side hustle building websites for local businesses. This was the 1990s. Building a site meant weeks on a dial-up connection, hand-coding HTML line by line, and breaking layouts because you missed a single character. If I made $2,000 in a summer, it was because I gave up nearly every waking hour to do it. My income was capped by how fast I could work.
Around that same time, my grandfather gave me advice that I still come back to: focus on building something people actually need. He had spent his life running a real business, serving real customers, and he had little patience for trends that didn’t solve a clear problem.
Years later, when I was exploring different product ideas, I ran them by him. Some were flashy. One was even sneakers. He listened politely. Then I told him I was thinking about air filters. He leaned in. Air filters made sense. People need them. They’re not exciting, but they matter. That reaction told me I was onto something.
Today, I run Filterbuy, a $260 million domestic manufacturing company that makes and ships air filters across the country. Looking back, that early experience taught me something most people still miss: effort scales poorly, but leverage compounds.
