A month after my wedding, I posted an ad to my new village's mailing list. I wrote it twice — once in the local language, once in English — because I genuinely didn't know which half of the community I was pitching.
"My wife and I are new here. We teach guitar, bass, piano and voice. If you're interested, call or WhatsApp this number."
One number. For both of us. We had one phone between the business and the household, because there was no line between the business and the household.
I was twenty-three, five weeks married, living in a village where I knew nobody. I already had a salaried job — account manager at an energy reseller, selling into the States — so this wasn't desperation. Reading the emails back, I can see exactly what it was: I wanted something that was mine.
That ad was the entire company. What happened over the next thirty days was the first business I ever ran, and I ran it badly, cheaply, and completely.
THE FIRST NO
Replies started the same evening. The first mother wrote: "You guys English speakers? How much do you charge?"
A hundred a lesson, I told her. Evenings.
She came back within hours with the counter every parent gives: "That's a little out of our budget. Any chance you can split the hour between a few children? Twenty minutes each?"
I said no. This is the first documented no of my working life and I'm still a bit proud of how I wrote it, on the morning of December 15:
"A 20 minute lesson is really not an option because it won't be taken seriously by the student as a class, and it wouldn't be long enough to really pass something over. What I can do is I can come for two hours and maybe give 40 min classes each. I think that would be better all around. I can understand that 200 might be too much, especially in the beginning, so I'll also bring down the price to 150 and we'll see how it goes."
No clients, no reputation, no leverage — and I refused the shape of the deal while keeping the deal alive. Held the standard. Cut the price. Closed with we'll see how it goes.
I didn't know at the time that this is the whole trick. I think I just didn't want to teach a twenty-minute guitar lesson.
Twenty minutes later I was negotiating with a different parent, in a different language, and I invented something I've used ever since. I told her: I charge 100 a lesson, but I bring it down to 80 here in the village, because it's more convenient for me in this area.
Read that again. It's a discount to her, framed as a convenience to me. I made it up on the spot, in my second language, on my third day of trading. Nobody taught me that. Selling teaches you that, and only selling.
THE DAY NOTHING HAPPENED
If you asked me when I became a salesman, I'd point at December 22.
Nothing happened on December 22. That's the point. Three prospects had gone quiet. So that afternoon, inside sixty seconds, I sent all three of them the same email in three different registers.
"I never got a response and I was wondering if you were still interested in lessons?"
Four days earlier I'd used the older trick on a fourth prospect: "I'm not sure if my last mail sent or not..." — blame the mail server, and suddenly the follow-up isn't a follow-up.
The answers came back mixed and mostly bad. One said the local school was probably running a class and her son would take it there. One hadn't discussed it with her husband yet. And the bakery in town, where I'd interviewed for an office job the week before, wrote: "Thank you so much for coming in. We have filled the position and wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors."
Three noes in three days. I've gone through that week's email twice now and can't find a single line where I sound discouraged. I have no idea whether I was. The record only shows what I did next, which was keep sending.
THE RECEIPT
On December 28, at 9:35 in the morning, PayPal wrote to tell me I'd been paid.
Advanced Guitar, you received $25.00 USD.
Twenty-five dollars from a mother in a suburb halfway across the world, with a one-word note: her son's name. Fee, $1.28. Net, $23.72.
Two things about that email have stayed with me for years. The first: my PayPal account was registered under a business name. I had named the company before I had the company — and honestly, that's still how I think. The second: while I was walking around my village haggling over eighty a lesson, my only paying customer was six thousand miles away. I'd built a local business and made my first money internationally without noticing. The geography was sitting right there in the receipt.
Twenty-three dollars and seventy-two cents. First money I ever earned from something I built rather than something I was hired into — landing in the middle of a month where a bakery had turned me down for admin work.
THE CLIENT I GAVE AWAY
Then the holidays, and the month turned.
The first mother — the one who'd counter-offered, gone silent, been chased twice — finally came back: "So sorry it's taken me so long!!! If your offer is still on, we would love to get started!"
And then: "I was wondering if your wife would be available for the lessons, as it will only be for girls and I have a hunch they'd feel more comfortable with a lady."
Seventeen days of work, and the client I finally landed wasn't mine.
I wrote back that night, mid-holiday: "It's no problem at all, she would love to teach them. What instruments did they want to take? And what days are best for you?"
Not a flicker of ego in it. Reading it back years later, that's the sentence I'd point my kids at — not the pricing trick, not the follow-ups. One ad, one phone number, two teachers. The lead was never mine to be precious about.
A week later she wrote with the details and asked to move to WhatsApp — and the email trail just stops there. Which, if you know how these things go, means it worked.
WHAT IT WAS WORTH
Somewhere in my Drive there's an untitled document from that winter. It has no sentences in it at all. It reads, in full:
Scale excersizes. 4 – one position. 3,2 – 7 positions. Diatonic triads on four sets of adjacent strings. Diatonic intervals. Rules for voice leading.
That was my curriculum. Six lines and a spelling mistake. Alongside it: a price list I invented mid-negotiation, a salaried job I was quietly trying to leave, applications out to offices and bakeries and a currency-trading firm, and a company that earned twenty-three dollars and seventy-two cents in its opening month.
Everything I've built since — the sales roles, the agencies, the companies — runs on things I learned in those thirty days. Price is a story you tell, not a number you publish. A no is a shape, not a verdict. Silence is a question, not an answer. And the lead you fought hardest for belongs to whoever can serve it best, even when that isn't you.
I'd do the whole month again exactly the same way.