Everything I tried led here.

It started with a pair of Yeezys.

December 16, 2017. My brother Nick, who is 15 years older than me, had been into sneakers for years. He spent a lot of time waiting in lines for Jordans and knew the culture well. One year when he came home for the holidays, he introduced me to the online drop world for the first time. Yeezys at that point were absolutely insane. Kanye West's notoriety had supercharged the adidas collab, making the 350 V2 one of the most coveted sneakers on the planet. The Blue Tint dropping that day was one of the biggest releases of the year. Hundreds of thousands of people were queuing simultaneously, with pairs selling out in literal seconds.

We set up every device we could find. Multiple laptops, multiple phones, multiple browsers, all queued at the same time. We sat there for hours. Refreshing, waiting, getting knocked out of queues, jumping back in. Six hours in, we finally got through on one. The rush in that moment was unlike anything I'd felt. Just pure adrenaline. About 30 to 40 minutes later we managed to land a second pair. The feeling of securing something that almost nobody could get, after hours of trying, with a strategy — it just clicked for me immediately. I knew I wanted more of it.

A YouTube rabbit hole changed everything.

I started going down YouTube rabbit holes about botting. How people were using software to buy multiple pairs at once, basically automating the queue. That led me to do a lot of research, which led me to Discord, which led me to cook groups — private communities usually run on Discord where members pay a monthly fee to get access to sneaker release info, real-time restock alerts, and tips on how to actually cop. It was like discovering a whole underground world that had been operating right beneath the surface of everything I was already into.

I started building relationships with people across the space. As I launched more companies and got more involved, people started to know who I was. I became a pretty recognized figure in the community, which opened a lot of doors. People still reach out today — clients from that era who remembered me years later and came back for development work. That community is still part of my network.

Three companies. Freshman year. 20–30 pairs a week.

The proxy company went through four rebrands. Proximity, Flame, Signal, Gravity. Each one tied to a bigger partnership or a better positioning in the market. In July 2019, I co-founded Galactic Pings with Abdullah (Rei), someone I'd met through Discord who was based in London. That was my own cook group. By August 2019, I expanded into residential proxies, hired developers to build a custom dashboard, and was doing $2–3K a month in revenue.

By early 2020, I was running three companies simultaneously as a high school freshman: Gravity Proxies, Galactic Pings, and Sneaker Seeker, a consumer app I'd started building out in November 2019. I launched Profit Gurus in March 2020, which was a social media PR agency I ran for sneaker brands. I was managing 10–12 accounts at $400–600 a month each, with other PRs working underneath me.

Peak sneaker reselling hit that spring. I was buying 20–30 pairs a week, all shipping to my apartment on the Upper East Side. To avoid getting flagged by retailers, we'd spoof the shipping addresses, intentionally scrambling them so no patterns could be detected. The side effect was kind of funny in hindsight: packages were constantly ending up at the wrong apartment. Neighbors were complaining, doormen were overwhelmed, boxes were stacking up in the lobby. I was 14, running a sneaker operation out of a New York City apartment building.

Sneaker Seeker ships. 15k downloads. Building nonstop.

Sneaker Seeker launched on the App Store on June 2, 2021, over a year and a half after I first came up with the idea. Sneaker Seeker was essentially the Expedia for finding shoes. We aggregated retailers and resale marketplaces — StockX, GOAT, Flight Club, Stadium Goods, and retail suppliers — so users could find any shoe at the cheapest price available, while also verifying authenticity to make sure they weren't getting scammed with fakes, which was a very real and widespread problem at the time. We got 15,000 downloads in the first three months and built up 20,000 Instagram followers. The marketing worked really well. The real-time price checker was the problem. It was inconsistent, had downtime, and I went through multiple engineers trying to get it stable. After about a year of really trying to solve the engineering side, we ended up shutting it down. That was frustrating, but I learned a lot.

In parallel I was building a lot of other things. DFOG, a dropshipping brand for anti-fog glasses solution during COVID. Giveology, an Instagram giveaway business I ran with Resellology. Blackbeard, an NFT analytics desktop app I built and had equity in. Bluff, a prediction market and online casino. Then Resellology+ launched in July 2022, a premium subscription community and mobile app built on Resellology's 300k audience. We hit $50–60K in under six months. The sneaker reselling market started declining post-COVID though. Fewer releases, less hype, shrinking margins. We decided to wind it down rather than keep members paying into something that wasn't delivering for them anymore.