My Journey as a Teen Business Owner (January 2023)

In December, I believe I made a lot of progress with my business.

I've grown well in terms of experience. I am learning how to write here on Vocal and properly promote myself. It's a constant work in progress, but at least it's still work.

In terms of finances, I admittedly haven't grown much. The positive aspect was that I didn't have high expectations in this. I only made 10 cents in my first month on Vocal, but that's okay. 10 cents is greater than nothing, so even that I'm grateful for.

I'd like to start a ritual within this series listing off three major milestones in the month in terms of business. I'm going to use this as a staple for this series from now on.

So, here we go!

First, I purchased a membership to Vocal+.

I consider this a step in the right direction because I have never signed up for a subscription before. It was $50 due to the first-year discount.

I'm not trying to advertise Vocal+, but the perks I got when I purchased it were definitely worth it and I have no regrets.

I'm happy about this milestone. I bought it with money given to me over the holidays. I'm very optimistic about making enough money on Vocal to renew my membership next year with only my earnings.

Second, my reads are increasing slowly but steadily.

Although I haven't even been on Vocal for a full month yet, I have a little under 20 reads. It's not much, but it's pretty impressive to me.

I'm happy that my content is starting to catch on, even if it's not much. My next goal with this is to have one of my stories become a staff pick and/or top story.

I hope my content keeps this growth up so I can achieve my goal of remaining self-sustained here on Vocal.

Finally, I submitted to two Vocal Challenges using my membership with Vocal+.

The first one was the behind the last window Challenge, and the second one was the full moon Challenge.

For the behind the last window Challenge, the prompt was to start a dystopian fiction story with a certain phrase.

The phrase was this:

"The outside world was unknown to her, but she could see a glimpse of it through the window in his room."

You can read my submission, "Behind Closed Windows," here.

The second contest I submitted to was the full moon Challenge. The prompt for this contest was to write a poem about a crazy dream. I had two submissions to this contest, and both are free verse poetry. I've never experimented with poetry, so trying this for the first time was a lot of fun. I also feel like it uncovered some poet in me that I didn't even know existed.

One was titled "Through the Tide" and the other was titled "The Monochrome Dream."

Neither of these contests have shared the results yet, so all I can do is hope that it went well for me until then. I'll publish the results in the next month of this series. Even if the contests haven't finished, I feel like getting involved was a good step.

I am slowly finding a business/school balance. I write on Vocal when I have the time, and work on schoolwork when necessary.

As for my next steps, I'm going to continue entering contests and publishing stories. I hope my content sticks. Eventually, I'll make a website for blog posts and stories outside of Vocal.

Overall, my first month as an official business owner has gone really well. I'm excited to see what comes next.

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