Growing up is never easy. The average person has no idea where they’re going or what they’re doing until they’re at least in their mid-twenties. But by that age, most of these entrepreneurs were already there, and already doing it.
We took a look at some of the youngest, self-made successes in the world – and the paths they took to get where they are today – in the hopes of drawing out a few valuable lessons for the rest of us to learn.
Lesson 1: Set your goals
At the age of just 15, Adam Horwitz set himself a goal – to create a million-dollar company by the age of 21. After a large number of unsuccessful, self-funded start-up websites, he struck the right chord three years later with Mobile Monopoly, an online course that teaches people how to make money with mobile marketing. By the time he was 18, his business was taking more than US$1 million in revenue.
Of course, if you achieve your life goals at 18 – especially one as ambitious as Adam Horwitz’s – you’d better set some even bigger ones to follow them. To other aspiring entrepreneurs, he says: “Anything is possible now, just make sure that you take action and never, ever give up.”
Lesson 2: Do what you love
Fraser Doherty loved making jam from his grandmother’s recipes. He loved it so much that he started to sell it to his friends and neighbours in Edinburgh, Scotland. He loved it so much, in fact, that when business started to pick up, he left school at the age of 16 to make jam full-time. When he couldn’t keep up with the orders, he started renting a factory for just a few days a month. And when the high-street supermarket chain Waitrose wanted his product on their shelves, he took out a bank loan to make more jam.
Since then, his SuperJam has been stocked by a number of the UK’s biggest supermarkets, and in 2009, he took over a million US dollars in sales. “I can’t be preoccupied with the money,” he says. “I make jam because it’s what I love to do.”
Lesson 3: Don’t be afraid to expand and diversify
Jon Koon was a successful teen. By 16, he was already making millions with Extreme Performance Motorsports, an automotive parts business in New York. But he didn’t stop there. He took his business overseas: exporting to over twenty different countries worldwide. Taking advantage of his new-found international relationships, the young entrepreneur took a rather different turn by manufacturing clothing in both Asia and the US – with the result of producing one of the highest-selling urban brands in the United States.
He may have made his millions in car parts as a teenager, but it was a daring move into something new that made him a billionaire by 30.
Lesson 4: Always keep your business head on
In 2005, Andrew Fashion had dropped out of high school and was barely earning a living developing websites. But when the popularity of his website, MySpaceSupport.com, started to grow, so did its advertising revenue. By the age of 21, Andrew had made more than US$2.5 million – and a few years later had spent it all on cars, gambling and girls. Depressed and in debt, he soon picked himself back up, and has since already made a few hundred thousand in internet advertising – as well as finding time to write his autobiography, ‘Young and Stupid’. No joke.
Lesson 5: Don’t sell out as soon as you see a big number
Mark Zuckerberg isn’t just one of the youngest self-made billionaires in the world – he’s also one of the richest. When he founded Facebook from his college dormitory in 2004, he probably had high hopes and grand ambitions but he might have surprised even himself with the astronomical heights he achieved. Just four months after Facebook went live, a New York financier made an offer of US$10 million for the young company. In 2005, media giants Viacom reportedly tried to buy it for US$75 million – and the year after that, they made a subsequent offer of US$1.5 billion. Subsequent offers were made by AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft, but Facebook’s owners kept hold of their baby.
And they were right to. At its initial public offering in 2012, Facebook was valued at US$104 billion – a mere 10,000 times the value of the original offer they received eight years before.
Lesson 6: It’s not too late to become a high flyer
Nick Woodman grew up in California. After graduating from university in his early 20s, he founded a marketing company called funBug. It didn’t work out, so at 26 he decided to travel around the world and surf a lot. Faced with the difficulty of being able to properly film his surfing adventures, he spent two years working on a sports camera that was up to the task. In 2004 he started to see sales, which doubled every year. And by 2012, at the age of 37, he was a self-made billionaire and CEO of GoPro.
Of course, at 37, his high-flying days didn’t come quite as early as the rest of these successful youngsters. But as far as self-made billionaires go, he’s still one of the youngest – and he’s proof that you don’t need to be a teenage start-up prodigy to have a good idea and take it as far as it can go.
