Sunday is a good day. Beside wrapping up some random tasks that take too much hassle during the week at InfluAds, you can think and look back. I was recently talking with someone that sent me back to 1992-1995, when I had my first 2 projects.
Selling snails to buy a hot-shot mountain bike when (i was 12 or 13y old)
My first one was catching snails and sell them. For those who don’t know, in Portugal and a few other countries, people eat snails. In Portugal they are mostly small snails, most of times served outside of normal meals… It goes great with beer 
The objective was to get 55,000 of the old escudos (around 270€) which at the time would allow me to buy an awesome mountain bike.
That was my first biz and my first experience with scaling a non-scalable business.You usually catch them by hand. That doesn’t scale. A friend and I got a scheme where we would go to some small but deep hills full of high grass, where we would hit the grass and let the snails fall all the way to the bottom, where we had a big bag (somewhat like people do when catching olives). We would then remove any grass and small snails to get a high price for them. We rocked, and we would carry huge bags in our back to one old lady that would offer us cash for them…
Selling t-shirts on a motocross track (i was 16y old)
A few years later I spend 400€ (huge money for a teen back then in Portugal), to print 80 t-shirts themed “SuperCross 95″**.
I was an incredibly shy guy selling them on a motocross competition, with friends stopping by and all. I’m not a sales man and wasn’t back then. I ended up selling a few but came home with lots of them, selling them to friends & family which made turnover possible. Everybody on that family had a t-shirt like that, maybe even today 
One of the shirts had one guy in a motorbike, seen from behind, saying: “If you want to be second follow me”. Even today I love that shirt…. Gotta frame one of those to hang at the office some day.
** Note to self, back them: Don’t create a name that is bounded to one year 
