How to Make Money as a Teenager: 6 Case Study of Startups

How to Make Money as a Teenager: 6 Case Studies of Startups

While the majority of youngsters work summer jobs or take allowances, some are creating multi-billion dollar businesses.



Some of the most well-known brands in their sectors were first established in garages or dorm rooms.



These are the most well-known businesses that were founded by teens, ranging from Facebook to Subway restaurants.



Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in his Harvard dorm room, when he was 19 years old.

In 2003, while Mark Zuckerberg was a first-year student at Harvard University, he founded a website called Facemash that pitted other students against one another depending on how handsome they were. Despite being shut down, the website inspired Mark Zuckerberg and a few of his pals to start The Facebook in their dorm room. These friends included Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, Andrew McCollum, and Chris Hughes. Students from Harvard were able to connect online thanks to the social networking site. Zuckerberg, who was only 19 years old, had just invented something that would forever alter the way people communicate.



With 1.59 billion daily active users, Facebook is one of the most popular social networking sites today, and Zuckerberg has a net worth of $69 billion, according to Forbes.



Michael Dell founded Dell Inc. at age 19 in his dorm room, similar to Mark Zuckerberg.

In 1984, while still an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin, Michael Dell began enhancing computers for profit. He made $80,000 in computer sales the same year and left college. Dell started dedicating all of his attention to his company, PCs Limited, at that time. He had just turned 19 years old.



His business eventually changed its name to Dell Computer Corporation, and ultimately to Dell Inc. It rose to prominence in the personal computer industry and is now valued at $45.2 billion.



The CEO of the parent business, Dell Technologies, Michael Dell, who has a personal net worth of more than $31 billion, is still in place.



At the age of 17, Fred DeLuca launched the first Subway restaurant business.

Fred DeLuca, at 17 years old, made the decision to start his own firm in 1965 because he needed extra cash for college. He asked his family friend and nuclear physicist Peter Buck for a $1,000 loan. In Bridgeport, Connecticut, they founded Pete’s Super Submarines together. A few years later, the business adopted the name Subway. The fast-food chain swiftly expanded throughout the US and took over as the biggest in the entire world.



There are currently 24,008 Subway establishments in the US. Until his passing in 2015 at the age of 67, DeLuca was an executive with Subway, according to the New York Times.



When Matt Mullenweg was 19 years old, he launched WordPress.

A straightforward content management system named b2/cafelog was developed in 2001 by Michel Valdrighi. When Matt Mullenweg voiced his frustrations with the system’s technical difficulties, he was running his own personal blog on it. Mullenweg created a new variation of b2/cafelog in response, which was later known as WordPress. Only 19 years old at the time, Mullenweg.



More than 409 million people access the approximately 20 billion websites on WordPress each month.



At the age of 16, Mike Kittredge founded the company that would become Yankee Candle.

In 1969, when Mike Kittredge was only 16 years old, he began selling candles he produced for $2 to his neighbors. As demand grew, Kittredge developed candle-making into a side business that he ran out of the basement and garage of his parents. Yankee Candle had its headquarters at a former paper mill in Massachusetts around 1973. Kittredge eventually sold the business for $500 million.



Kittredge founded the business when he was just a teenager, and it now has 500 locations with more than 19,000 merchants selling Yankee Candle goods.



At the age of 67, Kittredge passed away in July 2019.





When he was still a teenager, Palmer Luckey developed the initial prototype for his successful company, Oculus.

At the age of 15, Palmer Luckey developed an interest in the field of virtual reality games. When he was 17 years old, he created the PR1 VR headgear on his own. The first headset that was able to successfully deceive the brain into believing it was in another world was this one. This served as the basis for the prototype of his wildly successful company, Oculus VR. At the age of 21, he sold Facebook Oculus for more than $2 billion.


In order to launch a military technology startup on his own, Luckey mysteriously quit the organization and Facebook in 2017.