The best time to start a business is while you are still a student, because the opportunity cost is lower than it will ever be again. You have more room to explore, more room to think, and more room to fail before the consequences become truly expensive. Business ideas rarely arrive polished. More often, they begin in an awkward, half-formed state and only reveal themselves through trial, embarrassment, repetition, and time. That is also the nature of business itself. It does not scale cleanly, and it does not reward effort in a neat linear way. It is not like sports, where 10% more effort gives you 10% more results, or like a job where one extra hour worked produces a predictable increase in income. Business asks for something more frustrating than hard work. It asks for patience. It asks you to keep going through long stretches where very little seems to happen, only for the small gains to compound quietly in the background. Then, five years later, people look at what you have built and call you an overnight success.
That is also why the student years are often the best years to do both. It is entirely possible to pursue a degree while building a side hustle seriously on the side, and to keep pushing that side hustle forward as you go. In fact, pursuing a degree, especially one that gives you a hard skill, brings benefits that are not always obvious at the start. It builds credibility. It sharpens the way you think. It gives you a foundation you may end up drawing on much more than you expected.
My partners and I all did some version of this during university, and we still came out with top grades, scholarships, and study awards. I want to be careful about how I say this, because I am not trying to suggest that running a business in parallel only works if you happen to be an exceptional student. What I am trying to say is that the two things are not as mutually exclusive as most people assume. For more people than you would expect, it is possible — provided they accept that other parts of life will have to bend.
For me, one of the earliest examples was KettlebellHIT, which ran from 2010 to 2011. I started it around the period between finishing National Service and entering NTU. It was a gym in Horse City, near The Grandstand, and at that time it was heavily focused on strength and conditioning, long before that style of training became fashionable in Singapore. It was a place for strongman work, powerlifting, tyre flips, sled pushes, and the kind of hard, unglamorous training that was still niche then. There were power racks, dumbbells, gymnastic rings, indoor training equipment, and a long outdoor stretch that gave the whole place a rawness commercial gyms did not have.
But as often happens in business, a good concept was not enough. The location was difficult. The market was not yet educated. The business model was not properly articulated, and because of that, it was never properly marketed. Rentals were unsustainable. The landlord was unpredictable. Management (including me) was not as strong as it needed to be. Even though there was a real community and a genuine appetite for what the place represented, the business did not survive. Still, it taught me far more than its short lifespan would suggest. Through that failure, I began to understand the fitness industry more deeply: what customers wanted, what equipment people were looking for but could not easily get, and where the gaps in the market might be.
That period also mattered to me for a more personal reason. I met my girlfriend not through university in the usual way, but at KettlebellHIT itself. She was a client, already working, and she took a chance on a student entrepreneur. That decision of hers — to bet on someone’s potential rather than his present circumstances — is something I have thought about many times since. It is a quality that matters enormously in a spouse, and also, as I would later learn, in a business partner.
The next business I started was 49orLess, which ran from after June 2012 to January 2013. It came after my exchange programme in China. While I was there, I realised how cheap it was to buy things on Taobao, but also how difficult it still was for Singaporeans to access those products directly. The ecosystem people now take for granted did not yet exist in the same way. So I saw an opportunity: buy products from Taobao and sell them to Singaporeans through a gift store anchored to a price point below fifty dollars.
In hindsight, the flaw was built into the concept from the beginning. Anchoring the entire brand to a price point sounded clever at first, but it also meant inflation would eventually start chewing into the margins, and the business would always be trapped beneath that ceiling. It is the same problem value retailers eventually run into. Once costs move, the business model must move with them, or the promise itself becomes the burden.
Even so, I gave it a real shot. I imported several large shipments from China, restocking through air freight via a forwarder, and the business reached perhaps 2k to 3k in revenue a month. It was not growing the way I had hoped. But within that broader store, I noticed one bright spot: the fitness subsection was doing disproportionately well. That mattered. It told me where the real signal was hiding.
That was where the transition began. Around September 2012, the market was already nudging me in a different direction. Ian Tan, whom I knew from my earlier gym days, was taking the first steps in starting Ritual and asked whether I could help source their first batch of equipment. Their order alone was enough to fill only about half of a 20-foot container, so I used the remaining space for a mixture of pre-orders and inventory I intended to stock. That container became the real foundation of Movement First, which I officially started in October 2012. By December 2012, we had delivered Ritual’s first batch of equipment to North Canal Road.
That moment mattered because it changed not just the category I was selling in, but the scale at which I could think. Half the container was effectively justified by Ritual’s order, and much of the other half was already booked for through pre-orders gathered via Facebook groups. I was no longer importing blind and hoping demand would appear later. I was beginning to understand how demand could be gathered before stock even arrived, how pre-orders could reduce risk, and how one meaningful commercial order could make a larger shipment viable.
It also changed my understanding of freight economics quite dramatically. Before this, I had been shipping goods by air — roughly seven dollars per kilogram. Once I discovered how to consolidate through forwarders in Guangzhou and Yiwu, that cost dropped to perhaps twenty or thirty cents per kilogram by sea. That kind of difference is not merely an operational improvement. It is the difference between a small business limping forward and a real business beginning to breathe.
It is also worth saying that these businesses were not operating in a vacuum while I was purely a student. I was still doing freelance work on the side — developing websites for clients, helping a friend manage his online store for Kettlebells.sg — while carrying academic commitments serious enough that I presented my FYP paper overseas in Puerto Rico. I am not saying this to brag. I am saying it to make a narrower and more useful point: it is genuinely possible to start businesses while still in school, even while carrying more than one serious responsibility at once.
By the time I graduated in 2014, Movement First was already able to pay me and my business partner something in the range of 3k to 5k a month. But we chose not to do that. For the first two years, we kept our salaries at five hundred dollars a month — enough to survive, but not enough to save meaningfully — because we wanted to redirect whatever profits we could back into growing the business. Our first employee, who was also my business partner’s wife, was handled differently. Since she had no equity, we made sure she was paid a fair salary based on her qualifications, and later, when the business stabilised, we backpaid her bonuses after two to three years of operations. That distinction mattered to us. When you build a business with other people, fairness cannot be just a slogan. It has to survive contact with real decisions.
The agreement I had with my parents, and also with my business partner, was quite simple. Once we graduated, if the business showed no real potential — not success, not certainty, but at least a reasonable sign of life — we would shut it down and go work for other people. That was not an irrational fallback. By then, the opportunity cost of staying in business was no longer low. It had become high.
It was also around that stage of life that I realised university had not only been a good time to experiment, but also the right time to find a suitable business partner, which I thankfully did. Good business partners amplify growth, challenge assumptions, and cover blind spots that working alone or hiring employees rarely can. A strong partnership does not merely divide labour. It multiplies judgment.
Are there sacrifices involved in starting a business as a student? Of course. You will not sleep enough. You will almost certainly lose large parts of your social life. You will have less time for your friends and less time for your family. Still, between using those years to build a business and spending them drifting through university life, I think the former often leaves you better prepared for the future. It tempers your emotional state. It confronts your ego. It teaches you how to absorb setbacks without collapsing. In that sense, learning business and people management is not just about outward capability. It is also about maturity — especially the ability to respond calmly, wisely, and emotionally well when problems arise.
When I started my business, I had to learn a whole cluster of skills that no formal training had required from me up to that point. Building an actual business meant learning how to use e-commerce platforms such as PrestaShop, OpenCart or Magento. It meant installing templates, troubleshooting broken sections, customising parts of the site for the Singapore market. It also meant learning photography — using a prosumer camera, taking product shots, editing them in Photoshop so the items looked credible before I uploaded them. Today, AI has made some of this easier, but in another sense, much harder, because the competitive intensity is far greater. Whether you are in e-commerce, dropshipping, services, or any form of digital business, the barriers to entry are lower, but so is the uniqueness of what you are doing. There are more opportunities, yes, but there is also far more competition.
So in the end, my point is this: if you are entrepreneurial, you should seriously think about starting a business the moment you enter university, or even during National Service if you are a guy and have the temperament for it. There is rarely a better time. Otherwise, the next realistic window may only come in your thirties or forties, after you have accumulated enough experience, savings, and professional judgment to reduce the chances of catastrophic mistakes.
When you are a student and you start a business, your mistakes usually do not destroy lives. No one is depending on your income. Your parents are not relying on it. Your wife is not relying on it. Your children are not relying on it. Your mortgage is not relying on it. You are allowed to be inefficient, naïve, overly ambitious, and occasionally wrong. But when you start a business as a young adult just after graduation, or within the first few years of working, the propensity to make errors is still high, except now the consequences are far less reversible. Those mistakes can affect not only the business, but the shape of your life.
That is why, in my view, there are two especially sensible times to start a business. The first is when you are a university student, when your mistakes still belong mainly to you and are not yet life-threatening. The second is when you are in your thirties or forties, when you have spent enough time in the working world to understand what skills you actually possess, what problems are worth solving, and what kind of business can be built on a deeper foundation than youthful energy alone. Both are valid. But if you ask me where the asymmetry is best — where the downside is limited and the upside is quietly enormous — it is very often in those student years, before the world starts billing you in full.
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