When you are a little kid, you have all of these dreams and aspirations however, you
do not rush to achieve them since you are still a little kid, you have to grow up first.
You still have to complete your school and then go to college, graduate and then maybe
you might consider pursuing them. But some kids decided to take another path
and launch their business ideas while they were still teenagers.
take an example of Nick D’Aloisio
Nick D’Aloisio of Summly
He is no longer a teenager but he hit his million-dollar benchmark back when he was
still just 16 years old. Nick has developed a couple of really basic
apps back when he was much younger but his first truly successful app was Summly.
Initially, back in March of 2014, the app was finally ready to be launched, however,
it was named Trimit then. The idea behind it was simple, it used an algorithm to condense
text such as emails and blog posts into a summary of 1000, 500, or 140-character text.
With 100,000 downloads, the app was featured on the App Store. Shortly afterward, Trimit
attracted the attention of business magnate Li Ka-Shing, who provided 16-year-old D'Aloisio
with US$300,000 in venture capital investment. After gathering some feedback, D'Aloisio re-designed
the app and renamed into Summly in December 2011.
Summly aimed to solve perceived problems with the way news articles are presented on smartphones,
with the initial version of Summly being downloaded by over 200,000 users. He hired a team, including
a scientist, who specialized in natural language processing, to improve the app. With corporate
support, in November 2012, D'Aloisio received US$1 million in new venture funding from celebrities.
In March 2013, D'Aloiso sold Summly to Yahoo for approximately US$30 million and he didn't
even hit 18 at that time and joined Yahoo! as a product manager.
2. Robert Nay of the Bubble Ball App
The second millionaire on this list is Robert Nay who also has built his way to becoming
a millionaire in a very similar way. Back when he was a little teenager, he started
working on a simple physics puzzle game - Bubble Ball. It is a 156-level puzzle game with
puzzles ranging from very simple to really challenging. In December of 2010, the game
was ready so Robert Launched it and he was only 14 back then.
the expectations weren’t high since it was a really simple game and Robert wasn’t an
expert in this field. But sometimes that’s how the best ideas come to life. In its first
two weeks, the game did better than anyone would have expected, it generated 2 million
downloads from the app store alone in such a short period which is phenomenal.
the app started getting more and more attention quickly surpassing 16 million downloads and
at one point displaced Angry Birds from its number one spot on the list of free games
in the Apple app store.
3. sean Belnick
The third on our list has surpassed everyone else. He started a little bit later, he was
14, when launched bizchair.com. It wasn’t the best period to start an online business
since the dot com bubble crashed in 2001 and literally, hundreds of companies went out
of businesses. However, Sean believed in this idea and was confident it's going to work.
at the end of the day, he literally had nothing to lose except the 500 thousand dollars his
stepdad decided to invest in his company, he was just 14 and his entire life was still
ahead of him, even if it failed miserably, he would still gain the experience at least
of loosing 500 thousand dollars. but that’s not what happened.
The business took off like a rocket, what started as a little business from a bedroom
moved to 40,000-square-foot (3,700 m2) facility by 2004, earning millions of dollars along
the way and making its founder a multi-millionaire by age of 17.
In fact, BizChair.com reported $13.6 million in sales in 2005. In 2006, sales rose to $24
million. In 2007, total revenue was $37.5 million. And next year, he reached $42 million
in revenue.
4. Fraser Doherty
Our next hero is Fraser Doherty or Jam Boy as he is known. He started making sugar-free
Jam based on his Grandmother recipe and began selling them on a tiny scale to his neighbors
and local shops. But his ambitions didn't stop there, he wanted to grow and sell his
Jam all across the country (Britain). So he convinced his dad to take him to Waitrose
and pitched his idea to them. At first, they refused since labeling and pricing were wrong.
However he did not give up, after multiple attempts, he eventually got it right and they
agreed to put it on their shelves all over the UK. The jam went to become so popular
that it stocked in big chains such as Tesco, Sainsbury's, Morrisons and his business was
turning over a £1m a year. Making him eventually a teen millionaire.
5. next on our list is Ashley Qualls
who started whatever.com as a hobby back when she was just 14. The website was designed
to provide free Myspace layouts and HTML tutorials for people in her age demographic and supported
entirely by advertising revenue. She used the basement of her home as her office, employing
her mother and friends from school. She made 70 thousand dollars in the first months. But
that was just the beginning because she had earned over a million dollars by age 17, making
her a teenage millionaire.
She received multiple offers to acquire her company but Qualls has turned down all of
them including an offer for 1.5 million dollars and her choice of any car. That's a weird
option, I mean if she would choose ASTON MARTIN VALKRYIE, the car is going to be more expensive
than the amount they are offering for her website.
Shouldn’t you just add that up to your the deal you are making and that’s about it?
seems like it was a failed attempt to win over a teenager.
Gladly she did not accept the deal because the number of visitors kept going through
the roof. In 2007 her website had over 7 million unique visitors a month and generated millions
of dollars along the way.
6. Catherine and David Cook
When Catherine and David moved to New Jersey and were enrolled in their new school. they
looked through the yearbook and realized it was a terrible tool for meeting people.
Dave showed his sister a picture of a girl he wanted to date but through that yearbook,
there was no way to meet that girl and that’s when MEET Me was born.
They simply decided to make an online yearbook and add a tool through which members could
meet each other. However, they didn’t have the tools neither
they had the skills to turn their idea into a reality so they hired a development team
from India. In the first week, 400 people joined and slowly
it started taking off once other schools began to join.
in just under a year, the number of users grew to a million.
The teens were already making millions of dollars but the biggest boom came when they
received an offer from Quepasa to purchase MeetMe for a hundred million dollars, 18 million
dollars in cash and 82 in stock.
The number of people who earned millions of dollars while still being teens is way longer
than this video can possibly cover. But you get the idea, it doesn't really matter how
young are you. If you have an idea that truly inspires you or it seems like a possible business
idea that could work out. It very well might deserve a shot and if you are still a teen,
you will have way less to lose than when you grow up and have more responsibilities on
your shoulders. I can tell you that from my own experience. But most of you are adults
and there is no way to turn the time back, however, the message is it doesn't really
matter how old or how young are you! It's more about you and your dedication.
But before you start a business, you want some assurance that your business idea is
going to work, you don’t want to spend an enormous amount of time and money to start
a business and find out that you were digging in the wrong place.
it's true that, with the rise of the internet, opportunities are just endless, but the book
- will it fly by Pat Flynn - will teach how to test your idea before you go all in and
find out that it all was a mistake.
The great thing about it is that if it turns a mistake you can move on and start your next
venture without wasting so much time and money.
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