<p>I’ve read stories about teens starting incredibly successful companies…</p>
<p>Where, as a teen, do you start when forming a company? What types of companies are successful?</p>
<p>This is just a general discussion… I’ve always thought about starting a company… I just don’t know where to start!</p>
<p>what’s easy is buying stuff online. and reselling. and buying more stuff. and, you guessed it, reselling it. </p>
<p>this is the first or sometimes second idea that any eager child trying to make a buck has. buy the stuff that other people already made and resell it to someone else.</p>
<p>and who doesn’t like the feeling that comes from bidding on and winning ebay auctions, and from getting stuff in the mail everyday when you get home, and from opening it, and inspecting it, and then also the satisfaction on the flip side from making listings and getting buys, and keeping track of your profits, and from finally saying good-bye to the thing you bought when you slip it in the mail from whence it came.</p>
<p>Successful companies are (generally) those which provide a product or service at a high quality/price ratio – IE, those that provide maximum value.</p>
<p>Process:</p>
<ul>
<li>Pick an area of operations </li>
<li>Pick a target market</li>
<li>Analyze the market – SWOT analysis, barriers to entry, etc.</li>
<li>Come up with a business plan and pro forma financials (pro-formas are basically BS, since you cannot tell the future… but do your best to support your figures)</li>
<li>Secure funding, whether you’re going to bootstrap it (that is, fund it yourself), try to get a bank loan/investment banking funding, or secure angel funding</li>
<li>Make your product irresistible to your target market through product quality, price, availability, convenience of access to the customer, and promotion/advertising (the five Ps: Product, price, promotion, place, person)</li>
<li>Hire people whom you esteem as associates, those who can do the work with you. Make them comfortable through a positive work place, strong benefits and pay, etc. (HR stuff)</li>
<li>Instill and manage Continuous Quality Management (CQM) – this means you are constantly measuring your company to identify areas in which you can improve, and implementing improvements.</li>
<li>If it’s a public company, you’d better reward your investors; if they sell their shares, you’re in trouble. If you are able to keep your company relatively successful, they <em>should</em> stick with you, providing your funding for product advancements through R&D, consumer research, etc. </li>
</ul>
<p>So if you think you can handle these things while being a student – or if you can afford to hire others to handle these things for you – go for it.</p>
<p>It starts with an idea, requires a great deal of passion, real work and risk and innovation (and the ability to produce and reproduce that innovation) – it can bury you or make you a millionaire/billionaire. And produce any outcome in-between.</p>
<p>Having worked in corporate America for a decade, I can tell you that it can really suck, at times, to work for someone else. You are taking on big-time risk in starting a company… but it <em>can</em> turn out peaches. Ultimately, it’s up to you if you are willing to take on the risk… and if you can receive the requisite funding, assuming you cannot finance the venture yourself.</p>
<p>I don’t have advice, sorry, but I do have a fun, related anecdote!</p>
<p>There was a kid at my high school who was really into government and politics. When he was a senior, he left early each day for an internship at the NSA. He basically used that as an excuse to wear a suit and reflective shades to school every day. His parents were both political advisors and he started officially working in their company as a political analyst that same year, though he’d been unofficially helping out for a while. About halfway through the year, one of his parents decided to retire and gave him half the company, and along with it the role of political advisor to two congressmen and a few local politicians. Awesome, right? So everyone expected him to take advantage of the fact that he now owned half a company so he could make a name for himself in the world of politics. But when he came to visit some teachers at the start of the next year, we found out that he had decided to let someone else take over his half of the advising firm.</p>
<p>Why, you ask? Because he and his friend (who had also just graduated from my high school) decided to become international arms dealers. I kid you not! They came back after the summer and my psych teacher asked the one how college was and the other how political advising was and they told him they thought a successful arms dealing company was a better plan for their futures… WHAA!!!
Anyway, I guess the moral of that story is that it is possible to start your own ridiculously awesome company as a teen, but it helps if you have some sort of connection (parents who are political advisors, acquaintances from your NSA internship, etc,) who will assist you… And if you wear suits to school, of course!</p>
<p>international arms dealing? holy cowbells that’s kind of cool.</p>
<p>Best example of a High School start up is Sean Belnick</p>