In the midst of all the hype, glamour and noise depicted of entrepreneurship, the reality is building a start-up is very difficult. If being an entrepreneur is hard than being a teenage entrepreneur is even harder. As an entrepreneur you need to be a marketer, sales person, product developer, fund raiser, adaptable and flexible and the list goes on. With comparatively lesser experience than a competent elder entrepreneur, young founders must be prepared to do all of the above. Also they have to do this sitting across skeptical business experts, investors and potential customers. Young founders working on ambitious problems face tremendous odds. However, the successful ones will aid in building a better future. Let’s read about entrepreneurs who made it big before 20!Be it brains, power or millions of dollars they have them all.
Nick D’Aloisio
D’Aloisio is a computer programmer and an internet entrepreneur. He started writing applications especially for iOs smartphones at the age of 12! His first successful venture was an app named Trimit which would compress long articles into a 1000, 500 or 140 characters summary. Apple featured Trimit as one of the Features Apps on the App Store which put D’Aloisio’s name on the radar. He received $300,000 for Trimit by a Hong Kong based billionaire. He used the feedback and redesigned Trimit and re-launched it as Summly which he sold to Yahoo for a fancy $30 million which has made him one of the youngest millionaires in the world!
Adam Hilderth
He set up a UK based social networking website known as Dubit in 1999. It gained popularity and was an instant success. It put Hildherth on his way to success and earned him millions of dollars in the process. Dubit Limited then started working as a ‘Youth Marketing Agency’. By 2005 Adam’s net worth was $4 million. His latest venture is Crisp Thinking which developed software to protect people from online predators, online harassment and spamming. His company is worth almost $40 million now.
Tyler Dikman
He displayed entrepreneurial skills at the age of 5! He sold lemonades and made $15-20 an hour. When the internet was still picking on in 2000, he started Cooltronics whose main purpose was to provide tutorials on how to get rid of viruses and upgrade your PC he was just 15 then! He further branched out Cooltronics into selling, setting up and delivering computers to his customers. His enterprise and website’s subscription and advertisement brought in millions of dollars for him. He also co-founded Redux and is currently working on his latest venture LoungeBuddy. His net worth is $3.7 million.
Ashley Qualls
She is an American entrepreneur who made her first million when she was 17! She with an $8 loan from her mother launched a website, Whateverlife.com where she displayed her designing skills. She provided MySpace layouts and HTML tutorials on this website. All her tutorials were free and she earned solely via advertisements. Her website gets 7,000,000 visitors every month which goes on to earning a lot of money for Ashley through advertisements. Her net worth is $8 million.
John Magennsis
This entrepreneur started his web designing business back in the 90s when he was 14. He self-taught himself how to design websites and started selling them on internet for a few bucks. His work got so popular that he went from developing sites for $15 to as high as $30,000! He became a millionaire by the time he turned 16. He designed websites for fortune-500 companies during the dotcom boom of 90s. Today he’s a professional speaker and an entrepreneur. He has also worked in development, casting and production of reality television production.
Jon Koon
This boy is one of the youngest entrepreneurs and is making millions of dollars since he was 16. He is a classic entrepreneur who took his love for automobiles into his business. His simple idea was to purchase car parts from Asian auto-part suppliers at wholesale rates and then re-shape the car with upgraded parts, better engines and luxury finishing. He became a hefty supplier for MTV’s reality “Pimp My Ride”. In 2008 he ventured into fashion industry, by teaming up with rapper Young Jeezy. His net worth currently is over $80 million.
Cameron Johnson
In 1994, at the ripe age of 9 Cameron Johnson started his first business making greeting cards. By the seasoned age of 11, his skilled work made him enough money to form his own venture Cheers and Tears. At 12, the young entrepreneur smelled potential in selling Ty Beanie Babies over eBay. He started selling them on eBay as well as Cheers and Tears website. In less than a year he bagged over $50,000 for his next venture My EZ Mail which was a classified email forwarding service which made Johnson about $3000 a month via advertisement revenue. In 1997, he collaborated with two other teen entrepreneurs to create an online advertising company known as Surfingprizes.com which provided scrolling advertisements across top of user’s web browsers. Those who downloaded this software received 20 cents per hour for the inconvenience of having ads splay across their computer screens. All this made him worth more than $1 million before he even graduated high school.
Juliette Brindak
At 10, she came up with an idea of ‘Miss O and Friends’. She used her entrepreneurial instincts and with help from her parents she launched her website which mostly targeted teenage girls. The site is filled with celebrity gossip, games and quizzes where girls could also seek advice from the supportive community and play flash games. She also wrote books based on Miss O characters which have sold over 100,000 copies. This site ranked third largest girls-only website in 2011. Today, the website generates 10 million monthly visitors. Brindak remains the CEO of Miss O and Friends and her net worth is $15 million.
Farrah Gray
Farrah Gray, at 6 started out by selling body lotion. When he was 13 years old he founded Farr-Out Food which in just one year had received food orders of above 1.5 million dollars making him a millionaire at 14! He is the youngest person to have a Wall Street office and has a net worth of 20 million dollars.
If you are young and have an idea in mind, start as soon as possible. If you don’t do it, someone else surely will.
