I'm 17. I can't drive. I've never had a job. And I'm running a company.
The question I get most — from adults, mostly — is some version of: how did you know you could do this? The honest answer is I didn't. I just didn't know I couldn't, which turned out to be more useful.
The impatience problem
I've always been impatient. Not in a reckless way — in a why is this taking so long way. I'd sit in class and think about how the lesson could've been delivered in a third of the time. I'd look at a product and immediately see what was broken about it. That's not a skill anyone taught me. It's just how my brain works.
At some point I realized that impatience is basically a compass. It points at things worth fixing.
Nobody was going to give me permission to start. I just had to stop waiting for someone to.
The thing about being 17 is that school moves at school speed. If you want to learn something fast — really fast — you have to go outside the system. I started building because no class was going to teach me what I actually wanted to know at the pace I needed it.
What I actually did
I started with Roblox. That sounds like a joke but it isn't. Lua is a real programming language. Game economies are real systems. Real players give you real feedback — and they'll quit in three seconds if your product is bad. I shipped games, watched the numbers, iterated. That was the classroom.
From there I built a DMV automation tool in Python because I needed to pass the test and the official practice site was awful. Built it in a weekend. It worked on the first run. That was the moment I understood what "just ship it" actually means — not as a slogan, but as a principle. You can think about something for weeks or you can build it in two days and have an answer.
The DMV tool: Python + OCR + Gemini API. Fed screenshots of the practice test into the pipeline, got structured answers back. Passed the knowledge test on my first try. Probably the most useful thing I've ever built.
Then came 36.fyi. ACT prep is a $1B+ industry and most of it is genuinely terrible. Bloated platforms, generic content, zero personalization. I saw the gap and started building. Phase 1 is live. Full platform is in progress.
The actual advantage
People assume being young is a disadvantage in this. I think it's the opposite. I don't have a mortgage. I don't have a boss. I don't have a career to protect. The downside risk of shipping something and having it fail is basically zero. What am I going to lose — a weekend?
Most adults are building with one hand tied behind their back because they have real things to lose. I have nothing to lose, a lot to learn, and an internet connection. That's a surprisingly good starting point.
The downside risk of shipping something and having it fail is basically zero.
The other thing: I'm inside the problem I'm solving. I'm a high schooler building ACT prep. I know exactly what it feels like to sit in a library with a prep book that was designed in 2009. I don't have to do user research to understand the customer. I am the customer.
I don't know if everything I'm building will work. Probably some of it won't. But the reps are real — every line of code, every product decision, every time I had to figure something out by myself instead of asking someone. That compounds.
I can drive in a year. I'm not waiting for anything else.