The Honest Reason I’m Starting a Business Again (After My First One Failed)

By @itsKimika

My mission is to help you become financially harder to break. Check out this article next Why the 50/30/20 Rule No Longer Works — And What to Use Instead  it's about a new way of organizing your money.

Ten years ago, I started a business.

It failed.

And for most of the decade after that, I had absolutely no compelling reason to try again.

I liked the idea of eventually owning something of my own.

Sure.

But liking the idea of entrepreneurship and voluntarily signing yourself back up for websites, payment processors, customer service, social media algorithms, email funnels, and figuring out why one button on your sales page refuses to move three pixels to the left are two very different things.
I needed a reason.

For years, I didn’t have one.

Then these ideas started showing up.

First one.

Then another.

Then another.

And instead of politely leaving when I ignored them, they got louder.

They followed me while I worked.

While I drove.

While I was lying in bed.

I’d solve one piece and suddenly see three more.

Eventually, it felt like my brain had been struck by lightning after almost a decade of silence.

And at some point I had to admit:

Apparently, I’m starting another business.

Not because I woke up and decided I needed to become an entrepreneur.

Not because I think entrepreneurship is somehow better than having a job.

And surprisingly, not even because I wanted to make more money.

Although, let me be very clear:

I absolutely want to make money.

I would like this business to be extremely profitable, thank you very much.

But money wasn’t the thing that got me started.

The ideas did.

And once I started building them, I realized there were a lot of reasons I wanted this to work.

I want to know whether I can build something people genuinely value.

I want another revenue stream.

I want other women to experience the financial transformation I’ve experienced.

I want more choices for my family.

I want motherhood to remain an option even if my life doesn’t follow the timeline I once imagined.

And, in perhaps the least serious but still completely sincere category, I would also like to become whimsically wealthy.

We’ll get to that.

But first, the reason I’m back here at all.

This is probably the most honest origin story of the business.
Before the money.
Before the multiple-income-stream strategy.
Before any plans to post my face on the internet and hope strangers care what I have to say.
I had ideas that would not leave me alone.
Which is especially strange because I had already tried entrepreneurship once.
Back in 2016, I started a business.
It failed. (More to come on that in another post.)
And for almost ten years after that, I didn’t have some burning desire to immediately try again.
In fact, my tail has pretty much been between my legs ever since.
I liked the idea of eventually having something of my own.
But there was no big idea.
No product I couldn’t stop thinking about.
No “THIS IS IT” moment.
Nothing compelling enough to make me willingly sign myself back up for websites, payment processors, email funnels, customer service, social media algorithms, and all the other little delights of entrepreneurship.
But somewhere along the way, as my finances improved and my friends saw the transformation, they started asking me for help.
All of a sudden, I became the friend people came to talk to about money.
ME!
The woman who once had roughly $150,000 in debt, no job, and approximately $25 to her name was now the money friend.
Life is funny.
Then, somewhere around 2024, ideas started showing up.
First there was Serin, a sidekick for your finances, not entirely unlike the role I was starting to play for my friends.
And Serin kept evolving in my head.
Then came the Money Mapping Method.
Then the Smart Money Moves Sidekick.
Then Wealth on Lock.
And instead of one idea replacing another, they started connecting.
One helped you figure out what to do with your money.
One helped you make better decisions when real life inevitably came along and tested the plan.
One helped you actually do the little money actions you keep saying you’re going to get around to.
And eventually I realized:
Oh.
These aren’t random products.
I’m building a whole way of helping someone get her money together and keep it together. A system designed to help women become financially harder to break.
And once I saw that, I couldn’t unsee it.
Now, I am fully aware that conventional business wisdom would probably have told me to calm down.
Build an audience first.
Talk to the audience.
Create one offer.
Validate it.
Sell it.
Then maybe, maybe, build the next thing.
Very sensible.
Very responsible.
Very much not what happened.
Instead, my brain essentially kicked open the door holding four product ideas and yelled:
WE’RE DOING ALL OF THEM.
Perhaps there is a little ADHD in that.
But honestly, it felt bigger than my usual tendency to get excited about new ideas.
These things were itching at the back of my mind.
I’d be working and thinking about them.
Driving and thinking about them.
Lying in bed and thinking about them.
I’d solve one piece and immediately see how it connected to another.
It felt less like I sat down one afternoon and decided, I should start a business.
It felt more like something had finally struck me after almost a decade of silence.
Like lightning.
And after a while, ignoring it started feeling harder than building it.
So I built.
Not because every business book told me this was the ideal way to do it.
In fact, several business books would probably like a word.
I built because I needed to know whether these ideas that had been screaming in the back of my head could become something real.
Could they actually help somebody?
Could I take what I had learned while transforming my own financial life and turn it into tools another woman could use to transform hers?
I don’t know yet.
That’s what I’m trying to find out.
But for the first time since my failed business ten years ago, I didn’t just want to have a business.
I had something I desperately wanted to build.
And that turned out to be enough to make me try again.

This is the part that scares me a little.
I’ve spent my career helping build systems and products inside large companies.
But building something yourself is different.
There’s no giant company name behind you.
No built-in audience.
No “someone else will figure out the marketing” department.
It’s just you, your idea, and eventually a person on the other side of a checkout page deciding:
Is this actually worth my money?
Terrifying.
Also kind of thrilling.
Because these ideas have lived in my head for so long that, of course, I think they’re useful.
I built them around problems I understand.
Problems I’ve had myself.
Problems my friends have talked to me about.
But there is a huge difference between thinking:
This is a really good idea.
And another human being saying:
This is useful enough that I will exchange actual United States currency for it.
I want to find out if I can do that.
I want to know whether I can understand a problem well enough to build something genuinely valuable around it.
Not something people buy because I figured out how to write a clever sales page.
Something they actually use.
Something that makes managing their money a little easier.
Something that helps them make a better decision, finally take an action they’ve been putting off, understand what they should do next, or feel a little more in control.
I want someone to use something I made and think:
Oh.
This actually helped me.
That’s the part I want to prove to myself.
Can these ideas that wouldn’t leave me alone become products that genuinely make someone’s financial life better?
We’ll find out.

And now that we’ve gotten the lightning strikes, purpose, and product-building portion of the story out of the way...
Let’s talk about money.
Because I also want this business to make money.
Real money.
Not “I made $47 online this month, therefore I am technically a CEO” money.
I want to build something profitable.
And I don’t think admitting that makes any of the reasons above less genuine.
In fact, I think two things can be true at exactly the same time:
I can desperately want to build something useful, and I can want to be paid well for building it.
The money matters.
Partly because I want to prove that despite making a spectacular number of financial mistakes earlier in my life, your financial story can still completely transform.
I was bad with money.
Like, legitimately bad.
And I don’t want to rewrite history now that I’m on the other side and pretend there was always some financially savvy woman hiding inside me who just needed the right spreadsheet.
There wasn’t.
I learned.
I changed.
My habits changed.
My knowledge changed.
My career changed.
And eventually, my financial life changed.
Dramatically.
At 28, I had roughly $150,000 in debt, about $25 to my name, no job, and had moved back home with my parents.
I was not giving “future personal finance blogger.”
I was giving “please let this debit card transaction clear.”
Over the years that followed, I paid off the debt.
I learned how to save.
I started investing.
I made better career decisions.
I bought property.
I eventually crossed $500,000.
And I didn’t do it because I quit my job to become an entrepreneur.
I didn’t sell a course.
I didn’t go viral.
My job and my paycheck were central to the entire transformation.
I’ve already seen how far that transformation took me with income from my career.
Now I want to see what happens when I add something I’ve built myself.
How far can a former broke girl and financial late bloomer actually go?
I genuinely don’t know.
But I’d really like to find out.

I have a good career.
My job has been an enormous part of my financial transformation.
And I have zero interest in pretending employment is somehow inferior to entrepreneurship.
A paycheck helped me rebuild my entire life.
But I also understand something now that I didn’t fully appreciate when I had $25:
Financial security gets stronger when more than one thing is holding it up.
Right now, my largest income stream comes from my job.
I’d like another one.
Not necessarily because I plan to dramatically throw my laptop into the ocean one day and announce that I have escaped corporate America.
Mostly because I like options.
If my job changes, I want options.
If I decide I want something different, I want options.
If a recession hits, I want options.
If I want to take a risk, take time off, help someone I love, or make a career decision without immediately calculating how many paychecks stand between me and disaster...
I want options.
That’s what additional income means to me.
Not hustle for hustle’s sake.
More ways to keep myself financially harder to break.

There is a very specific feeling that comes when your money finally stops terrifying you.
I wish I could bottle it.
It’s not even about feeling rich.
It’s the first time an unexpected expense happens and your stomach doesn’t immediately drop.
It’s paying a bill without doing mathematical gymnastics first.
It’s realizing you could survive losing your job for a while.
It’s watching your investments grow.
It’s knowing you have choices.
It’s buying something you genuinely want without that little voice whispering, You probably shouldn’t have done that.
It’s going from money controlling your decisions to money supporting them.
That transformation changed more than my bank account.
And I want more women to experience it.
Especially women who are looking around in their 30s or 40s thinking:
Did I start too late?
Did I mess up too badly?
Shouldn’t I have more money by now?
Everyone else seems ahead of me.
I know that feeling.
Which is exactly why I think I have something useful to contribute.
I don’t want to help women become perfect with money.
I want to help them become financially harder to break.
There’s a difference.

This might be the biggest one.
I’ve moved around a lot.
And as I’ve gotten older, being closer to my family has started to matter differently.
The problem is...
They live somewhere cold.
And I am not built for that life.
I don’t want to shovel snow.
I don’t want to scrape ice off a windshield at 7 a.m.
I don’t want the sun setting approximately seventeen minutes after lunch.
And if we’re being honest, I don’t think my parents want that anymore either.
But life isn’t always as simple as, “Well, move.”
My mom became the legal guardian of her brother, who needs ongoing support, and staying in New York currently gives their family access to resources that are important for his care.
So my parents stay.
And every winter, they get older while still dealing with snow, ice, driving, shoveling, and all the things that become a little less cute with age.
I think about that a lot.
One of my dreams is to make enough money that I can help create another option.
Maybe that’s a multigenerational home.
Maybe it’s two homes side by side.
Something where my parents have their independence, I have mine, my uncle has the support he needs, and I’m close enough to actually help.
Somewhere warm.
Ideally somewhere where a snow shovel is considered decorative.
I want to be able to help cover the things my uncle needs so my parents don’t have to choose between their own comfort and making sure someone they love is taken care of.
And yes, making that happen would require money.
Probably a lot of it.
That’s exactly why I want to make more.
Not to collect money for the sake of looking at a bigger number on a screen.
I want the bigger number because sometimes a bigger number gives the people you love choices they didn’t have before.

I would still love to find my person.
But I’m also at an age where I’ve had to acknowledge that I may have to make certain life decisions without knowing exactly how the romantic part of my story turns out.
One of those decisions is motherhood.
If I eventually decide to have a baby on my own, I want to be financially prepared to do that.
And children, as I understand it, are not known for being a low-cost hobby.
There’s childcare.
Healthcare.
Housing.
Food.
Activities.
College.
And apparently they keep needing new shoes because they have the audacity to continuously grow.
Doing that with a partner is expensive.
Doing it on one income requires an entirely different level of planning.
So yes, part of my desire to build more wealth is about creating that option too.
I don’t know exactly what my future family will look like yet.
But I don’t want money to make that decision for me before I even get a chance to.

Because regular wealthy sounds kind of boring.
Golf clubs.
Polo shirts with khakis.
Sad salads at business lunches.
No thank you.
I want to be whimsically wealthy.
Whimsically wealthy is having enough money to randomly decide:
You know all that seaweed that washes up in the Caribbean every time I finally book a beach vacation? I wonder if I could start a company that turns it into something useful.
And then actually going on that side quest.
It’s buying a piece of land and filling it with native plants, flowers, and trees so butterflies have somewhere to flutter around and bees have a little luxury subdivision of their own.
It’s opening an animal sanctuary because apparently at some point I became the kind of person who sees a three-legged goat on the internet and thinks, I could give him a good life.
It’s having a side-side quest where I expose corruption undercover like Batman, but with considerably more Catwoman energy.
It’s paying for all my little cousins to take a gap year before college because I want them to see more of the world before they decide what they’re supposed to do with their lives.
It’s quietly sponsoring kids from neighborhoods like the one I grew up in and being their mysterious independently wealthy benefactor.
No building named after me.
No giant check photo.
Just:
Somebody paid your tuition. Don’t worry about who.
It’s deciding that kids shouldn’t have to reach adulthood before somebody teaches them how credit works, what investing is, or why minimum payments can keep you in debt for years, and having enough money to help build financial literacy curriculum that schools can actually use.
It’s hosting a fairy-garden brunch at a vineyard for absolutely no reason.
Throwing a Bridgerton-themed party in an actual castle.
Funding some weird little idea because it sounds interesting.
Helping somebody because I can.
Seeing a problem and occasionally having enough money to say:
You know what? Maybe I can do something about that.
I don’t want wealth just so I can upgrade everything I already own.
I want wealth to make my life bigger, more generous, more curious, more useful, and considerably more ridiculous.
That’s the kind of wealthy I’m interested in becoming.
Anybody else trying to become whimsically wealthy?

This might be the strangest part.
Because building a business now increasingly means building an audience.
Which means posting.
Writing.
Recording.
Sharing your ideas.
Occasionally filming yourself doing completely normal things from six different angles so the internet has something to look at while you explain compound interest.
It’s weird.
And I’ll be honest, putting myself out there does not always come naturally to me.
But I’m doing it because I had ideas I couldn’t ignore.
I want to know if I can turn those ideas into things people genuinely value.
I want to make money.
I want another source of income.
I want to help women who started where I started.
I want more choices for my family.
I want more choices for my own future family.
I want enough money to occasionally go on a completely unnecessary but delightful side quest.
And I want to find out what happens when a financial late bloomer stops asking:
“Am I too far behind?”
And starts asking:
“How far can I actually go?”
There are more reasons.
I’m sure there will be even more as this business grows.
But those are the big ones.
And maybe that’s the real theme behind all of them.
I spent the first part of my financial life learning what it feels like when money limits your options.
Now I’m interested in seeing how many options I can create with it.
Not because I need to become internet famous.
Not because entrepreneurship is somehow more impressive than having a job. I built my first half-million while working a job, after all [Read post here].
And definitely not because I have everything figured out.
I’m building this because my financial life already changed once in a way I didn’t think was possible.
Now I want to see what else money can make possible.
For me.
For my family.
For the women who find their way here.
For a few butterflies and bees.
And, if all goes according to plan, perhaps for my future child.