My College Degrees Taught Me Nothing About Building Online Businesses

My 3+2 years of college taught me calculus, critical theory, and how to survive on ramen noodles.

What it didn't teach me? How to build an online business that actually makes money.

Not a single professor mentioned sales funnels. No textbook explained how to find your first thousand true fans.

Zero lectures covered what to do when your website crashes at 2 AM during your biggest product launch.

Everything valuable I know came from two places: the internet and the painful process of just doing the work.

I learned copywriting by writing emails that nobody opened. Then I studied what worked for others. I tweaked. I tested. I improved.

I figured out social media strategy by posting content that got zero engagement.

Then I studied the algorithms, adjusted my approach, and watched my reach grow.

Customer service? Learned it by getting angry emails from real customers who expected better. When I needed to understand payment processing, I didn't consult a textbook. I spent hours on YouTube tutorials and developer forums.

The internet became my real university. Blog posts were my lectures. Online courses were my labs. Twitter threads were my study groups.

But here's what most people miss: consuming content isn't enough. I had to build things that failed spectacularly. My first online store made exactly $0 in its first month. My second attempt made $50, but cost $200 to run.

My third business finally turned a profit—after eighteen months of constant adjustments. Each failure taught me something my degree never could.

Real-world feedback loops changed everything. This isn't to say formal education is worthless. But there's a reason Silicon Valley is filled with dropouts. Building things online requires skills that traditional education simply doesn't teach.

I'm not self-made. I'm internet-made. Every tutorial I watched, every forum I scoured, every comment section I studied—they all shaped how I think and work. Combined with the willingness to build imperfect things and improve them over time, this became my real education.

The internet didn't just give me information. It gave me a career path that didn't exist in any college catalog.

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