My First $10 Online. Why I Still Think About It Ten Years Later.

I want to tell you about the least impressive number in this whole story.

Not the 150 fonts. Not the months of making a font every single day. Not the revenue targets I set and missed, or the ones I eventually hit. Not any of the numbers that sound like they belong in a case study or a growth chart.

Ten dollars. My first ten dollars made online as a designer. That's the number I still think about.

Before There Was a Plan

At seventeen, I did not have a direction.

I know that's common. Most seventeen year olds don't. But I want to be specific about what it felt like from the inside, because I think there's a difference between not having a plan yet and genuinely not knowing what you're capable of. I was in the second category.

I was in my final year of high school. My assumption about my own future was simple and somewhat depressing in retrospect: I would finish school, enroll in university, study something, get a job that looked like the jobs the adults around me had. Not because I had thought carefully about it and concluded that was what I wanted. But because I hadn't thought about it at all, and that path was just the path that existed if you didn't choose something else.

Then something happened. I won't go into what specifically. But it was the kind of thing that forces you to take a hard look at where you're going, and I didn't like what I saw.

So I looked for something I could actually build on.

Drawing Until Midnight

The thing I found was drawing.

Not because I was naturally talented at it. My grades in art class at that point were about a two out of ten, which is a very specific and humbling number to remember. But it was the thing that felt most like mine. The thing that when I was doing it, I wasn't watching the time.

So I started practicing. Every day, and then some days, every evening too, and then some evenings, past midnight. I was not following a curriculum or a YouTube series or a structured plan. I was just drawing, getting slightly better, drawing more, getting slightly better again.

In a few months, my grade went from a two to a seven. That's not a small jump. That's what happens when someone who hasn't been trying starts trying, yes, but it's also what happens when someone finds the thing they're willing to work at past the point where it's comfortable.

I found DKV. Visual Communication Design. The major felt like the closest thing to what I wanted to do, which at the time was making comics. I had this image of the future where I would study design, learn to tell stories visually, build something from that, live well from the work.

I got into university. I started studying. The image of the future shifted almost immediately.

The Guilt That Became a Driver

University in Indonesia is not cheap. Not for everyone. My family was making it work, but I was aware, maybe more aware than I needed to be at that age, of what it cost. Every semester was a number I could see in the background of everything else.

I didn't want to be a burden. That's the simplest way to say it. I wanted to at least cover my own additional expenses. Not the tuition, not the housing, just the small things that add up when you're a college student trying to exist in the world.

So I looked for a way to make money with what I was learning.

This is where necessity becomes the most effective teacher I've ever had. In class, I was learning design because it was the curriculum. Outside of class, I was learning design because I needed to sell it. Those are different relationships with the same material, and the second one is more serious in a way that's hard to fake.

I started selling design assets online. Began building what would eventually become the first version of what Phoenix Dungeon is. Made things, listed them, waited to see if anyone would buy them.

Ten Dollars

The first sale came. Ten dollars.

I want to be clear about how small this is in absolute terms. Ten dollars is not a milestone by any objective measure. It's not enough to cover a week of meals. It's not a proof of concept in any business sense. As a data point, it means almost nothing.

But it meant everything to me at the time, and I've been trying to figure out exactly why ever since.

I think it's because it was the first external confirmation that what I was making had value to someone who didn't know me. Not a teacher grading an assignment. Not a friend being supportive. A stranger on the internet who found something I made and decided it was worth ten of their dollars.

That's a completely different kind of validation. It says something that grades and encouragement don't say, which is that the thing you made exists in the market as a real thing. Not as a student project. Not as a hobby. As something someone chose to pay for.

From a two in art class to ten dollars from a stranger. That's the arc I was living in, and the second number made the first one feel like it had led somewhere.

Everything After Was Built on That

I'm aware that origin stories can get romantic in a way that isn't always honest. So let me be careful here.

The ten dollars did not unlock some new version of me. I didn't immediately know what to do with the confidence. I didn't go from that sale to a clear plan. What it did was narrower and more specific than that: it made me feel capable. Not talented, not special, not destined for anything. Just capable. Like the gap between what I could make and what the market was willing to pay for was closeable.

That's enough. Feeling capable is actually enough to keep going.

Everything that came after, the design asset studio, the font work, Phoenix Dungeon as a proper brand, the hundred and fifty fonts, the pivot to pixel fonts, the new site, all of it traces back to that ten dollars in the sense that without that first proof, I probably would have given up somewhere early and returned to the idea that I was just a student in a major, not someone actually building something.

I wrote earlier about what it cost to make fonts almost every day, and about why some studios win in creative markets and others don't. Those pieces are honest about the harder parts of this journey. This one is about where the journey started, and where it started was with a number so small that most people would be embarrassed to mention it.

I'm not embarrassed. That ten dollars is the foundation of everything I've built in design since then. Phoenix Dungeon exists because of it. The fonts we make, the catalog we're building, the pixel font focus we've committed to, all of it started with a seventeen year old who found drawing past midnight and eventually found a stranger willing to pay ten dollars for what he made.

What I Actually Learned About Starting

The lesson from all of this is not "start small and think big" or any of the motivational shorthand that gets put on posters.

The lesson is more specific. It's that the most important thing early on is not the quality of what you make or the size of the audience or the clarity of your plan. It's finding the first proof that you're capable of closing the gap between making something and having it valued by someone outside your immediate circle.

Everything before that proof is preparation. Everything after it is iteration.

I prepared by drawing past midnight when I was seventeen. I found the proof with ten dollars when I was eighteen or nineteen. I've been iterating ever since, sometimes well, sometimes badly, but always with that original proof underneath it.

The dreams changed. The comic idea didn't survive contact with the reality of what I was actually good at and what the market actually wanted. DKV became not just an academic path but a professional one. Design assets became fonts. Fonts became, specifically, pixel fonts that I make because I genuinely enjoy making them more than anything else in the category.

But the foundation is the same. A kid who didn't have a plan, found the thing he was willing to work at, and made ten dollars from it.

That's how this started. That's why I still think about it.

If you want to see where it's going, the shop is probably the most honest answer I can give you right now.