Editor’s note: This article was first published in April 2013, when Yahoo’s purchase of Nick D’Aloisio’s app Summly for $30 million was described as imminent; the ages and business status of each young entrepreneur are as of 2013. Ephren Taylor, presented in this article as a young entrepreneur to follow, was later charged by the US Securities and Exchange Commission and in 2015 was sentenced to prison for a fraud scheme that targeted church congregations.
For some time now I’ve been looking for recent cases of entrepreneurs who became millionaires with business ideas outside technology, and apparently they are impossible to find. The culture of the quick windfall has moved into the technology era, where the message is very clear: if you want to strike it rich fast, the internet can make it happen. If you’re looking for profitable businesses with little investment and great profit potential, take the plunge online.
The possibilities in this technological world are endless (read: The most profitable college dropouts). Bear in mind, though, that on the internet we usually hear only the success stories, while 8 out of 10 attempts end in failure. Here are some entrepreneurs who became millionaires even before turning 18, thanks to technology.
1. Nick D’Aloisio
This is the most recent case. This 17-year-old developed an iPhone app (a news aggregator that uses a natural-language and artificial-intelligence algorithm to quickly find information of interest), and Yahoo is going to buy it for $30 million. He developed the app when he was just 15.
2. Donny Ouyang
At just 17 he founded KinKarso Tech, a network that combines multiple activities: you can listen to music, interact on social networks and even shop. Today he is a millionaire who is still at university, combining his studies with his million-dollar creation. His achievement was succeeding after social networking giants such as Facebook, which shows that even when it seems everything has already been invented, there is always room for a new twist.
3. Ashley Qualls
At just 14 she founded Whateverlife.com to show off her love of design, where she used to upload video tutorials purely for fun. Before long, her website was getting more visits than some of the most prestigious magazines in the field, so she gave jobs to her family and friends. She is said to have received million-dollar offers to sell her website, although she has turned them down so far.
4. Jessica Mah
This young woman’s case is a mystery, since she created her business at 13, and it was none other than inDinero.com, a company that analyses businesses’ income, solvency and turnover and also provides advice. The information it sells is completely accurate, and so it has a very profitable advisory business. I imagine the secret of her success was surrounding herself with the right people to launch her platform.
5. Ephren Taylor
The story of this early entrepreneur is a curious one, and the truth is that the best businesses are often born this way. Because he came from a poor family, he had no money to buy video games. Instead of getting bitter and complaining, he made his own video games. He started by selling them to his friends, and before he turned 16 he began developing websites. His first big success was GoFerretGo.com, a site where big companies paid to post their job offers. Although the website is no longer what it was, it brought him a 7-figure income before he was 18. Today he is a benchmark in the United States when people talk about internet entrepreneurship.
And the truth is we could go on naming hundreds of young entrepreneurs who have found their gold mine in iPhone apps. Not all of them have received millions for their apps, but every week apps are bought for between $50,000 and $300,000, which is not bad at all.
Further reading
- 3.5 business ideas that would never have occurred to me
- 5 one-of-a-kind business ideas
- 4 business ideas worth $100 million
- Profitable business ideas as original as they are strange
Featured image: Heisenberg Media, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.
