May 2, 2026

Vex Hosting

Before most of my current ventures, when I was a freshman/sophomore in high school, I co-founded a company called Vex Hosting. Vex hosting wasn’t any rocket science, but it was a Minecraft server hosting platform that offered instant deployment for Minecraft servers at a super affordable price.

At the time, I didn’t really do much hands-on with any code, but I was more looking over the whole business, things like how to scale the actual platform itself and get people to actually use it, how to reach the correct audience and all these things that you might come across in launching a product.

Whether I consider it or not, Vex was definitely one of the most important times of my life for a progression of just generally my business mindset. It showed me what things work, what things didn’t. We really had a blow up on social media. We gained over 100 million views in total and so many other cool things. It also taught me how fast you can burn money, especially when you’re two 15 year olds bootstrapping a B2C SaaS.

It was pretty interesting to run this business because we had clearly never done anything like this. We didn’t know what to expect for users. Honestly, when we made everything and got it all working, everything from the landing page to the billing panel to the game panel. We just expected users to magically sign up for our platform, which is a pretty common thing that a lot of founders do.

After we quickly realized that no one was going to find our platform if we just sat there and did nothing, we hopped right on social media and started posting random Minecraft memes. We gained a decently large following, and we didn’t even plug the service. We just had it in our description. We figured that people who would view these types of videos would typically be interested in a service like this, so the odds that they click on our account and then look at our description are decently high. Honestly, it would be a higher conversion rate since these people are actively looking for a service rather than paying for SEO garbage or paid ad spend.

The specific moment we realized we were burning money too fast was when people stopped signing up for the service. We realized that Minecraft was like a two-week streak for a lot of people, and then we lost a good amount of users. Our cost to actually run the platform was more than what we were making, and burn kicked in very quickly. Everything from servers to subscriptions for the billing panel to domains to just a bunch of miscellaneous things just started adding up really quickly, especially since we had no mass upfront capital and were just bootstrapping.

In hindsight, we probably should have gone lighter weight on a lot of things. Lighter weight nowadays means go vibe code it and use that service yourself rather than paying for a support center. Just go make an HTML document hosted on your cell or whatever that would be a lightweight version of something and not costing a lot. When we were making Vex, it was a lot harder to do something like that when you didn’t understand how to actually do it right. Learning things now is just so much easier into getting them done coding with AI.

The actual platform is now shut down. It was just a great learning experience, but I’ve since pivoted my resources elsewhere.

I don’t really like hypotheticals, but if I could tell my 15-year-old self any piece of advice going into Vex, I would definitely say don’t waste money on things that you don’t think are going to work 100%. Obviously, you’re not going to know that things are going to work 100%, but if you have a pretty good sense that it’s not going to work, it probably won’t work because you don’t have the financial means to go make large risks on things that you’re not insanely confident on. Some people do that, but for me and my use case, it definitely wouldn’t work.

So, like, don’t go spend $300 on an advertisement that you don’t need. Go spend $300 on social media marketing that you know has been working for you, so stuff like that. Also, delegate work. Stop trying to do everything yourself. Just find people who you actually like and are confident in and work with them.

I probably would say that is my biggest piece of advice. I’d say everything else went pretty well, and from the resources that we had provided, we made it work.