41–50 of 82 posts
Age 12: Started a lawn-mowing business that paid approximately $2/hour
Age 15: Started http://www.AUsedCar.com that enabled me to quit my job 13 years later at age 28 (startups can take time! keep trying!)
In 1999 I worked for a startup and was about to go to college. I was asked by the CEO to drop out of school and get a huge salary - I opted not to take the option and go to school instead. Turned out to be the right choice as they were out of business 6 mos. later.
Hm. Going to school 6 months later, with a wad of cash in your pocket, would have been a bad idea?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hm. Going to school 6 months later, with a wad of cash in your pocket, would have been a bad idea?
Missing the first week of first year is a bad idea. 80% of college is meeting new friends. Initiation week (frosh?) is pretty awesome experience you will never get again. Money alone isn't everything.
Age 19: registered a company for custom software development, part-time
Age 24: got University diploma, quit my full-time job and went full-time in my company
Age 26: incorporated same business. http://ParadiVision.com/
Age 34: started a second venture in parallel with another guy. Didn't work out.
Age 39: co-founded third startup with 2 co-founders. Wife is in charge of first company. Now full-time on http://buyosphere.com/
My startup life: I made way more money doing consulting between age 24 and 30 but I'm now having way more fun building a consumer-facing company
At about age eight I did the lemonade stand thing, but quickly noticed that most people driving by my stand didn't purchase. So I took my lemonade operation mobile, in a red flyer wagon. By visiting a couple local parks I was able to sell easily 5x as much lemonade as I could staying in one place. It was a fun homeschooling project, as my parents gave me "investment money" and I had to keep track of my expenses and income and pay them back.
After that the next thing I would count as a startup would be Amazon Affiliate Script, when I was 19. It was basically a wrapper script for Amazon Affiliate which displayed products automatically based on page keywords and the visitors geographical location. It served nearly 10 million ads, and made about $500 dollars total, before Amazon adopted a similar feature and rendered my idea not very useful.
Currently, at age 21, I run BookFlavor (http://bookflavor.com), a book search engine that generally makes $75-$100 a month. It's a cool side project that I show off and which gets me 2-3 job offers a month.
However, I don't have much time for other projects or even my own projects these days as I am working full time for StoryDesk (http://storydesk.com), a startup creating a web authoring tool that helps sales teams create their own iPad apps using simple drag and drop, WYSIWYG editing without writing a line of code.
I started my first company at 22 back in 2006, building myspacesurveyfun.com into the pre-eminent site for those viral surveys that used to be passed back and forth over MySpace (and still do to a lesser extent on Facebook, blogs etc.) along with a few other related MySpace profile add-on sites. Although I wasn't able to scale it into more than just a profitable sole prop, I made a good chunk of change, learned product development & how to manage a team of freelancers. Plus I was able to leverage it into a full-time SEO gig and now a pretty healthy career in the business.
Now I'm 27 and setting the groundwork for something epic. But ultimately, ideas/execution are what win. Age is just a number.
Age 17 : Humour website, 30$/m
Age 21 : Facebook like website, 5000$/m
I'm 22 now, soon to be graduate in mathematics. But thinking about leaving math and launching a web start-up...
My programs displayed the upcoming shows and announcements. There was a calendar, a database, graphics, animation, a back-end menu. It was good stuff. Mostly BASIC but essentially had a lots of memory PEEKs and POKEs as well... It was delivered on cassette tapes. The payment was computer books, electronic components, tools (volt meters) & music. Good times.
I used the same database, Q&A, to track where I caught fish on the lake we lived on to figure out the best spots given time of year, temperature, bait, etc.