I’m Matteo, 24, and I’ve been an entrepeneur for almost 4 years. Here’s how I started: In early 2023 I was working full-time for a boss, and I wanted more out of life: the freedom to set my own schedule and live on my own terms. So I started selling on bol.com, basically the Dutch version of Amazon. Dropshipping wasn’t an option there because you had to hold stock in the Netherlands. So I put €30,000 of my own hard-earned money into inventory. It was a disaster. The product quality was poor, and bol.com lets customers return items for free. In total, I lost around €10,000. That was a lot of money for me back then. The upside: I still had my job and lived with my parents, so I could keep saving. In the summer of 2023 I quit my job and went all in on e-commerce. Around the same time I joined a dropshipping course, without really knowing what dropshipping was. For the next six months I tried everything: - Fashion dropshipping - Dropshipping in my own country - Every niche I could think of - Shopify stores - ABO testing with interest targeting Then I found Samuel Ecom’s YouTube channel and discovered health and beauty dropshipping on Funnelish That became my main lever to the next level, about a year after I started. Afterwards I joined his mentorship, and it was amazing for me. Before that, my record day was €1,000 in revenue. Within 3 months of joining, I scaled to €10,000 a day, with profits I had never seen before. That was life-changing: for the first time, I could fully live off what I earned as an entrepreneur. In the summer of 2024, with the knowledge I’d gained and the team I’d built, I really grew as a person and as a leader. At our peak we did around €20,000 a day, and I had a team of 20 people. In half a year, I went from nothing to that. That might sound scary, but it didn’t happen overnight. It’s not like I had nothing on day one and €20,000 a day with 20 employees on day two. It came gradually, and you grow into the role: - You learn to take responsibility - You learn to run team calls - You learn to communicate your vision to your team - You learn what your quality standards are - You learn how to train people - You learn how to make sure everyone in the company understands the plan One lesson that helped me a lot: hire slow, fire fast. Take your time hiring, talk to 10+ candidates, and if someone turns out not to be trainable, let them go as soon as possible. We hire based on personality rather than past experience. Someone open and eager to learn is far easier to train than someone with a fixed mindset who isn’t interested in learning anything new. Back to the story. After that summer, the payment processor bans hit. Everyone in dropshipping knows how that goes. By the fall of 2024, around 99% of my net worth was on hold. My last money was in one bank account, and then that account got blocked too. I had to borrow money just to pay my team and my bills. At the same time, I was moving from the Netherlands to Portugal, so everything was crazy and hectic at once. Borrowing kept my head above water and gave me time to fix the problems. In the spring of 2025, most of the money on hold was released, and I rebuilt the business. Around then I also partnered with two other entrepreneurs. That summer we broke records again: around €40,000 a day, with a really good profit margin. That was when my life truly changed, and I got to enjoy the fruits of my labour: lots of holidays, partying, nice restaurants and nice hotels. I really enjoyed the luxury life. But I quickly found out it isn’t fulfilling. If you can’t fill the empty voids inside yourself, a luxury lifestyle won’t do anything for you. Those good feelings are built on emptiness. It sounds cliché, but money doesn’t buy happiness. If things aren’t right on the inside, money won’t fill that void. That’s why it’s so important to stay in touch with yourself: know what you’re feeling, reflect, write a lot, read a lot, and keep working on your mindset. Know who you are. If you build on a fucked-up foundation, what happens to many people when they make money (me included) is that, slowly but surely, that lifestyle wins and devours you. After the summer of 2025, we hit another dip: more payment processor bans, and I split with my business partners. Meanwhile, I starting building a brand, because I was done with health and beauty dropshipping and wanted to build something sustainable. I teamed up with a new business partner, and at the start of 2026 we launched a titanium cookware brand. It went really well, and we put all our marketing knowledge into the brand and everything around it: - Setting up Facebook and Instagram accounts - Keeping a consistent brand tone everywhere - Getting customer service fully dialled in - Making the website fully branded - Investing in packaging - Investing in product development After almost 7 months, we decided to sell it. With that money, we started a new brand and a coaching program. Now we’re fully in learning mode, and that’s my biggest takeaway about entrepreneurship: the more you learn, the more you realise how much you don’t know. That’s the challenging part. Being an entrepreneur is special. Nobody understands what you’re feeling or going through, except other entrepreneurs. If you don’t talk to many of them, it can get very lonely. You’re behind your laptop 7 days a week, your team is online, every call is online, and every day, week, month and year can start to feel the same. As you grow into that role, you also discover there’s more to life. You get into meditation, writing and developing your mind, and you start noticing how closed off most people are. You see the difference between yourself and your parents, your family, even your partner, and how fixed everyone’s mindset is. That’s lonely too. Most conversations are about the weather or last weekend, while you’re constantly thinking about growing your business, where to take it next, and how your team is handling everything you’re responsible for. That can feel isolating. Anyways let’s end on a positive note. On this account, I’ll share the lessons I’ve learned and the things I’ve been through in my journey.