Story telling is fun and effective at making a point. Here’s my first story that was engineered on a Sunday (afternoon), approx 3 hours of work.

At the time I was in secondary school (8^th grade), I stumbled upon a problem – software protection. I had a dream of being like the big corporations, and having a professional software licensing system was one of the ingredients. But they were all very expensive, far too expensive for a teenager like me. So, I decided to create a system on my own – I had plenty of time. This felt exciting, and I was very engaged.

So, after several attempts, I managed to construct an open source system, which turned out to be very fortunate. This is where my journey began. However, although a very popular system, it felt really sad that I would no longer be able to make a living out of it. Users pushed me to, they requested new features – and I felt forced to work even harder. SKM was another attempt, although this time it could potentially generate income. But, it all got worse. It was still unprofitable, people around me did not get what I was doing, and even my closest friends thought it was a ridiculous idea, and that it would fail. Moreover, my parents constantly reminded me to focus on my studies. I felt lonely – depressed that what I was doing was not innovative enough. I almost lost the motivation.

But that changed. One day, I realized that I was, in fact, innovative. Customer base was growing – it finally became profitable. New ground was to be discovered, and I felt very confident that what I was doing was right.

Looking back, I’ve spent 6 years developing licensing systems. During this time, I gained experience in many interesting technologies and entrepreneurship. SKM has a customer base spread all around the globe. Moreover, my work has been acknowledged in the developer community – which I’m very proud of. It feels great that I never gave up.

Can you see the point, setting, complication, turning point, or resolution? If you have any feedback, please let me know! 🙂