About — Carmen Lee

The Frog Business

I was seven. Every morning, my dad stopped at a fish shop on the walk to school to buy baby frogs for our arowana, tiny things, maybe a centimetre long, translucent, barely visible, thirty of them in a plastic bag for fifty cents. We'd pass by, he'd grab a bag, we'd carry on. Normal Tuesday.

One day I tucked one frog into a takeaway container, added a stick and a leaf I'd picked up off the ground, and brought it to school. My friends completely lost it. They crowded around that container like I'd carried in something from another planet. Could they have one? Could I bring more? How much?

That evening, something clicked.

Next morning: spent my entire fifty-cent allowance on a bag of frogs. Talked a hawker stall auntie into giving me ten plastic containers. Two frogs, one stick, one leaf in each. Sold them to friends for one dollar a pop.

50¢ in → $10 out.
At age 7. 🤑

Young Carmen in school uniform — P1, class photo 📸

Ran it for a week. Sold two whole packets. Spent every cent at the school bookshop on notebooks and stationery. (Some things about me have genuinely not changed.) Then my teacher noticed frogs had somehow colonised the entire P1-to-P3 cohort, traced the supply chain back to me, and that was that. Scolded at school. Beaten when I got home.

The very next year I was back. "Magic Cooling Gel," hand sanitiser I'd decanted into small containers, marketed as something that "melts in your hands." Different product. Same instinct. I didn't stop being entrepreneurial. I just upgraded the SKU.

Carmen and sister in P3 PE uniform — P3, with my sister 🤍

Dropshipping at 16

Carmen with secondary school best friends — the best friends 🤍

League of Legends shirt — the actual product 😂

Everyone in secondary school was obsessed with League of Legends. I found LoL shirts on Qexpress. Spent a lot of evenings Googling how to get a debit card linked to my allowance savings account.

completely unhinged research for a 16yo 😂

Started a blogshop. The model: order comes in, buy from Qexpress, SingPost normal mail. That was literally it.

Ran it through secondary school until the O Levels forced my hand. Closed it voluntarily to study. No drama, no regrets.

The lesson wasn't about shirts or dropshipping. It was simpler than that. You don't need much to start. You just need the courage to take the first step.

Everything I Was Going to Be

When I was seven or eight, the police came to our house. I didn't understand what was happening. I was scared, the way kids get scared when something serious moves through the room and nobody explains it to them. But one of the officers noticed me standing there. He knelt down and showed me every single tool on his belt. Named each one. Explained what it was for. In the middle of something that had frightened me, he made me feel completely safe.

I wanted to be that person for someone else. Wanted to be a police officer for years after that.

Then I joined NPCC in secondary school. Let's just say it was not a good experience, and leave it there.

Psychology found me through my mum's old books, cracked spines, someone else's pencil underlines already in the margins. Fell completely in love. If you understand why people do what they do, you can actually help them. I studied hard for the psychology diploma cut-off. Needed an L1R4 of 9.

Got 10. Missed it by one point.

1
point.

Child Psychology and Early Education was next. I was genuinely excited. Kids made sense to me in a way a lot of things didn't. Gunned for the scholarship and got it. Spent three years as an early educator making activity materials by hand, staying late for kids whose parents were slow to pick them up. It wasn't just a job. It was the closest I'd gotten to that thing I'd wanted since I was seven, to make someone feel safe.

Carmen with kids in classroom — the classroom era 👧🏻

Then I broke my ACL at a martial arts lesson. You cannot manage twenty-five four-year-olds while limping. Full stop. Transferred to HQ as an office assistant.

At HQ, the pace was different. Quieter. I had gaps in the day I didn't have before, and I filled them helping a friend build a website for her online electronics shop. Just a side thing. But somewhere in there I fell in love with it: the learning, the problem-solving, the business side of things, the specific satisfaction of seeing something work that didn't exist an hour ago. Quit teaching not long after. Job-hopped for a while, following whatever pulled me. Turned out the pull had a direction the whole time. I just hadn't zoomed out far enough to see it.

Paradrop: My First Real Business Venture

Circuit breaker, 2020. Freelance gigs, stuck at home, watching friends launch online shops and quietly lose their minds waiting three-plus weeks for local couriers to do anything about it.

My dad had a car. I had an idea.

I reached out to home-based sellers on Instagram. Cold messages. Told them I could do door-to-door deliveries within three days. This was 2020 circuit breaker, when the big local couriers couldn't guarantee under two to three weeks. Eight of them trusted me on day one. Three hundred parcels by the end of week one. It grew faster than I'd planned for, which meant figuring things out in real time, almost every single day.

8merchants, day one

3days. as promised.

300parcels by week one

100k+deliveries total

158merchants

80part-time drivers

Halloween with Paradrop merchant — halloween with our merchants 🎃

We paid drivers immediately after each batch. Not monthly. Not weekly. The moment the batch was done, the money was in their account. A lot of our drivers had lost jobs during the circuit breaker. They were trying to feed their families. I wasn't going to let someone go home after a full day's work and wait for money that was already theirs.

I helped a few of them write CVs too. When they found full-time jobs and left, I was genuinely happy for them. That was always the point.

One of the promises I made to merchants at the very start was simple: I want to grow with you. They were new businesses finding their feet. I was a new business finding mine. A year later, we actually had. Together.

A few of those merchants started asking about custom t-shirts for their growing brands. So I figured it out. Got the tools, found the suppliers, learned the process. Paraprints started as a way to serve them, affordable as possible, fast as possible, honest as possible. Same merchants. Same promise. Just a second way to keep it.

Why I Walked Away

Studying at SUSS — never stop learning 📚

I started both businesses with zero experience and zero mentorship. The gaps in my knowledge didn't show up until something fell through one of them.

Bad drivers stole parcels. I had to pay merchants out of pocket. I didn't know business insurance existed. Operations were running on Excel and systems I'd cobbled together. I was twenty-four years old, managing eighty people, with a growing list of things I genuinely didn't know how to handle.

So I made a decision. Close up. Go back to work for someone. Enroll at SUSS to study marketing. Full-time work, part-time degree. Learn the things I'd been winging.

I don't see it as giving up. I see it as choosing to get better on purpose. The businesses taught me more than any classroom could. The classroom fills in what the businesses missed. And I compounded interest on everything, started doing it at seven, and I haven't stopped since.

"I don't see it as giving up.
I see it as choosing to get better on purpose."

Oh, and I Game.

I play them to think. There's a difference.

My library is a bit telling: hacking simulators, job simulators of every kind, a detective puzzle where you reconstruct a family tree from death notices and old photographs. And Big Ambitions, a business-building simulator I've sunk a truly embarrassing number of hours into.

The thing about simulator games is you end up accidentally learning real things. One day my desktop PC died. Instead of taking it to a shop, I opened it up, identified the faulty power supply, pulled one from an old PC I had lying around, and swapped it in. Worked perfectly.

I learned this from a simulator 😂
10/10 fully recommend.

PC with power supply removed — patient is open 🔧

The game gave me the mental model. The real hardware gave me the confidence. Most people play to escape. I play to prepare.

A Few Last Things

The games, the businesses, the frogs, the kids, the parcels, the websites. There's a pattern if you look long enough. I cannot encounter something without needing to fully understand it, and then go do it.

I begged my parents for two years before they finally got me a piano teacher at thirteen. Made it to grade 6 ABRSM. Picked up the ukulele at some point. Sing for fun. Currently dismantling my patience learning the guitar. And most recently, SSI Advanced Open Water certified.

(Turns out I'm great under pressure. The 30-metre, breathe-through-a-tube kind. 😝)

My friends call me a walking Wikipedia. The moment a "why" appears, I cannot stop until I've answered it. The answers accumulate and stay: logistics operations, child development theory, OAuth authentication flows, Singapore hawker culture history. All of it just lives in there, cross-referencing itself, waiting to be useful at the exact wrong moment in a conversation.

If there's a through-line to all of this, the frogs, the shirts, the van routes, the websites, the classrooms, the spreadsheets, the hacking simulators, it's the same thing it's always been. Understand something well enough to actually help someone with it. The medium changes. The goal doesn't.

That's what makes me good at what I do. I will always find a way, figure it out, and bring everyone along with me.

The curiosity never stops. Neither do I.

The FullStory.