10 of the Youngest Self-Made Millionaires Ever

10 of the Youngest Self-Made Millionaires Ever 1 John Koon You may have heard of John Koon – especially if you’re the type who is obsessed with cars. John was 16 when he began opening New York City’s first ever auto parts companies. Extreme Performance Motorsports in particular earned him millions and you can see plenty of that company’s work simply by watching any episode of Pimp My Ride, rapper X-zibit’s popular show on MTV. While some would be satisfied with this overwhelming success, John’s teenage thought was, “why stop here?” This led to him starting up a clothing company with famous rapper and personal friend, Young Jeezy, where he would go on to earn over $40 million. John is a few years older now, and has added an impressive list of successful start-up businesses to his resume – word on the street is that he will soon hit the “billionaire” mark! 2 Tyler Dikman Before he was even ten years old, Tyler was already willing to do all kinds of things to earn a quick buck, and he achieved it because he worked hard. He would mow the lawns, babysit for neighbours, set up lemonade stalls – he even performed as a magician at birthday parties for a standard rate of $25 per half hour (not cheap for a kid whose age was still in single figures!). So when he got a computer at 10, it was destined to be a moneymaker for him. And yet, pretty much the first thing he did was completely tear it apart and rebuild it. By doing this, he was able to learn how computers work. By the time he started high school, he was repairing computers for the school and charging $15 an hour to fix people’s electronic devices in his spare time – a bit of a pay-cut from his glory days as a magician, but hey. This high school student computer hardware-whizz wound up babysitting for Merrill Lynch’s Vice President, Malcolm Taaffe, who offered Tyler an internship involving “computer acquisition, setup, training, and troubleshooting”. A mere two weeks later, Tyler’s “internship” was a proper full-time job. The now-15-year-old launched a computer repair company called Cooltronics, purely as a hobby side-project. This company gradually expanded in its own right and Tyler found himself in Businessweek’s “Top 25 Entrepreneurs Under 25” list. 3 Adam Horwitz Before he was even a teenager, ambitious young Adam had vowed to invent a million-dollar company by age 21. At 15, he was launching all kinds of start-up websites in pursuit of that promise he’d made to himself. After the typical growing pains that come with start-up businesses, Adam finally hit a goldmine when he developed Mobile Monopoly, a sort of “Mobile Market For Dummies” app that has become the prime “textbook” any mobile market student is going to need should they want to succeed in the industry. But that wasn’t even the real goldmine (despite the six-figure profit it earned him). His true winner was YepText an app that allows businesses to advertise through texting – which might annoy the crap out of the rest of us, but I don’t think Adam the millionaire is too fussed about that small fact. “If someone says, ‘There’s no way, you’ll never make money online, everything’s a scam online, blah blah blah’, they’re lying,” Adam laughed. “You don’t have to listen to what other people say. Trust me, I went through that day-in and day-out with my friends and stuff. They did not believe that I could make money online, and then as soon as I did, I think their jaws dropped to the ground – so just go for it.” 4 Nick D’Aloisio Nick is arguably one of the more famous people mentioned in this list, and it was back when he was 17 that he initially found himself in the media spotlight. The reason for his attention in the news world is that Yahoo! had just bought an app off him for a casual $30 million. At 12 years old, Nick started learning the processes behind coding, a skill that is essential to creating an app – well, the literal creation of it, anyway. You can always develop the idea and then hire a coder, but by knowing how to code, you can launch the whole thing with minimal investment. And Nick’s app certainly launched… it launched so well that Yahoo! wanted it for their own news broadcasting applications. After the $30 million buyout, most 17 year olds would probably spend it all and be broke again by 19. Nick, however, invested his paycheck like the clever businessman that he is. “If you have a good idea, or you think there’s a gap in the market, just go out and launch it because there are investors across the world right now looking for companies to invest in,” Nick explained. 5 Sean Belnick Rather than some stroke of luck or miraculous coming together of fateful events, 14-year-old Sean Belnick simply decided that he wanted to make a website for people to sell things online. He had already been buying stuff online for a couple years and made the choice that he wanted to run his own website for the service also. He had about $600, which he spent on advertising funds and web hosting fees. The first few things he sold on the website were his own possessions from around his bedroom, simply to get acquainted with the process and start to get the ball rolling. After some tossing and turning, Sean wound up selling office furniture on the website, which he’d renamed Bizchair.com. Six years later, he had a staff of more than 75 employees and was worth about $24 million. He’s ambitiously striving to hit a net worth of $50 million now. “You have to desire to succeed and take risks to get there,” said Sean of his success. “It’s not for everyone. I love the excitement and the future growth prospects, as well as watching the company grow and prosper. You have to have ambitious goals.” 6 David Cook & Catherine Cook 14-year-old Catherine Cook and her brother David had just moved to a place called Skillman in New Jersey, and found themselves sitting on the couch with a local yearbook, flicking through it and seeing if either of them recognized any of the faces as students at the school they had just recently started at. The brother and sister also share an older brother, Geoff, who was 25 at the time. “We were shocked at how useless the information was,” said Catherine. “That’s when we thought, what if we put the whole thing online? I’d always looked up to my brother Geoff. He’s 11 years older than me and had already launched a successful start-up. I thought if he started a company, I could too!” Pitching their idea – soon to be known as MyYearbook.com – to their older brother Geoff, he immediately thought it was a great idea. In fact, he was so confident in their success that he invested $250,000 in the idea to get the website launched and off the ground. After a not-so-slow start, the site had accumulated nearly a million members within 12 months, and membership has grown exponentially ever since, with a net worth around the $100 million mark. Big brother Geoff was quickly appointed CEO and the three of them continue to manage the business together. 7 Juliette Brindak Julieth probably wasn’t the only ten-year-old who drew fictional cartoon character girls, but she was certainly the first to stick with it until 16, when she turned her “Miss O & Friends” concept into a social networking site for pre-teen kids. Having one parent with graphic design skills and another with professional business knowledge, Julieth had the perfect business partners to help launch her idea right there under the same roof. It wasn’t long before the social networking site was getting hundreds of thousands of views (it now received over 10 million unique hits a month). Julieth allows ads on the site, which is where she earns her generous amounts of money, especially seeing how Miss O & Friends was the third largest girls-only website at the time of a 2011 survey. The site is now worth over $15 million and is forever gaining popularity among “tween” girls. 8 Cameron Johnson The Johnson’s were either too busy to design party invitations, or they just thought it would be a nice way to give their pre-teen a productive activity. Whatever the reason, it’s a good thing that little Cameron took the job seriously. Friends and neighbours were so impressed by Cameron’s intricate design work on the party invitations that he started getting paid to do various freelance design jobs in his spare time. At 11 years old, he had his own brand called Cheers & Tears and was earning thousands of dollars from making custom greeting cards for anyone who wished to order some. If you want to call that business venture more of a lucky streak than clever business strategy, you’d have to change your mind for what happened next. Cameron, still not even a teenager yet, grew restless with his greeting card business and launched an online company called SurfingPrizes.com, which made him anywhere between 300 and 400 grand a MONTH! Not even per year, per month! That, combined with his greeting card business, made sure that he was worth over a million bucks before he’d even finished high school. 9 Ashley Qualls Ashley Qualls is a perfect example of how effective “word of mouth” advertising can still be in the business world. Ashley launched a website called WhateverLife.com in 2004, at the mere age of 14. She had a couple years experience learning how to use HTML, and the site was her way of displaying her impressive design skills. The site had been up for a while and the visitor clock pretty much sat at 0. That is, until the day she offered to customize the layout of her school friend’s MySpace page for her… and then another class mate’s, and another’s, and another’s. Less than a year after Ashley initially launched WhateverLife.com, the traffic through her site was in the thousands and numerous people were contacting her seeking some awesome designs for their MySpace or other pages. Clever little Ashley decided to sign up for Google’s Adsense system, and so she started receiving profits every time someone clicked on one of the ads displayed on her website. Needless to say, the offers to buy her out kept rolling in – one of which included $1.5 million and any car she wanted (so long as it was under $100,000). It might be hard to believe that a 15-year-old could turn down that kind of offer, but Ashley has turned down every single offer to date, buying a $250,000 Michigan home the very next year and now her website attracts about 7 million visitors a month. She paid $8 for the site’s domain name in 2004, and so far that is all the website has ever cost her. 10 Fraser Doherty “I can’t be pre-occupied with the money,” said Fraser Doherty. “I make jam because it’s what I love to do. Success is pretty sweet too.” At 14 years old, Fraser started making homemade jam with his grandmother’s personal recipes from his family home in Edinburgh, Scotland. He would sell the jam to friends and neighbours, and word must have spread like jam across bread because by the time he was 16, he could barely keep up with public demand for his jam, which he had slightly modified so that it was his own jam rather than his grandma’s. He was now calling it “SuperJam”. He decided school was for chumps who couldn’t make money selling jam, so he dropped out and focused on his jam production full-time. At this point, he was approached by a very famous UK supermarket chain, who wanted to sell his jam in all 184 stores it had across the United Kingdom. He might have left school early, but Fraser wasn’t dumb. He said yes to the deal and took out a $9000 loan to help him expand operations and produce enough jam to keep the supermarkets well-stocked. By 2009, at just 18 years old, Fraser’s jam had made him $1.2 million. Since then, he has published a book on Amazon titled The SuperJam Cookbook.

6 David Cook & Catherine Cook

Murtaza Rangwala

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