Flame Software
At 13, self-taught Taylor started designing Web sites. He hyped his services, under the banner Flame Software, on Internet chat boards. Tech brokers never questioned his age because he had the proper certifications and a rather deep phone voice. Taylor initially charged just $200 per site, but he quickly upped the ante when he realized competitors were getting thousands for the same service. The contracts were typically handled by the brokers, and customers sent Taylor checks in the mail. "When I got a $3,800 check [from an online retailer of vitamins and legal supplements], my parents thought I must be selling drugs," he recalls.
GoFerretGo.com
Taylor crossed into seven-figure territory at age 16 by teaming up with friend Michael Stahl to build a job-posting Web site for high school and college kids called GoFerretGo.com. The duo didn't have much to spare on advertising, so they spammed local and regional reporters with a press release announcing their new business. Word got out, and soon the site had attracted 30,000 visitors. Again, Taylor sold himself short, charging a paltry $38 per job posting, until he realized that Sprint, Citigroup and Pizza Hut were willing to pay nearly 100 times that amount to find young talent. The youngsters eventually rented office space and even hired their former history teacher. The company dissolved in the 2001 tech bust but at its height was valued at $3.5 million.
Cheers and Tears
Cameron Johnson launched his first business, Cheers and Tears, at the age of 9. Using Photoshop in his Virginia home, Johnson began making greeting cards for his parents' holiday party, but soon received orders from their friends and colleagues as well. Within a few years, Johnson began using the money he'd earned from selling greeting cards to buy Ty Beanie Babies at wholesale prices from the company. He earned more than $50,000 selling the dolls on eBay and on his Cheers and Tears Web site.
At age 13, Johnson was back at it with My EZ Mail, a service that forwards e-mails to a particular account without revealing the recipient's personal information. He hired a programmer to flesh out his idea, and within two years My EZ Mail was generating up to $3,000 per month in advertising revenue.
In 1997, Johnson joined forces with two other teen entrepreneurs to create this online advertising company, which provided scrolling advertisements across the top of users' Web browsers. Those who downloaded the software received 20 cents per hour for the inconvenience of having ads splay across their computer screens. Users who managed to refer Surfingprizes.com to a new customer would nab 10% of that new person's hourly revenue. But Johnson wanted a piece of that juicy ad revenue too, so he partnered with the likes of DoubleClick, L90 and Advertising.com. These middlemen would collect 30% of any ad revenue sold, leaving the rest to Johnson and company. "I was 15 years old and receiving checks between $300,000 and $400,000 per month," says Johnson.
Certificateswap.com
Another Cameron Johnson brainchild, Certificateswap.com allowed people to buy and sell unwanted gift certificates online. While gift certificates routinely changed hands on eBay, the auctioneer charged a healthy fee--"up to 13% of the cards' value," says Johnson. "We took only 7.5%." Johnson sold CertificateSwap.com in 2004, when Johnson was just 19, for an undisclosed "six-figure" amount.
MyYearbook.com
In 2005, Catherine Cook, 15, and her brother Dave, 17, were flipping through their high school yearbook and came up with the idea to develop a free interactive version online. Soon after, the Cooks merged their social-networking site with Zenhex.com, an ad-supported site where users post a variety of homemade quizzes, more than doubling traffic to their site. By 2006, MyYearbook had raised $4.1 million from the likes of U.S. Venture Partners and First Round Capital. The business has since attracted advertisers such as Neutrogena, Disney and ABC; has grown to 3 million members worldwide; and rakes in annual sales in the "seven figures," says Catherine. How to compete in an industry dominated by MySpace and Facebook? Mine a niche. "[Our site is] specifically for high school students, and we really listen to the suggestions of our members," says Catherine.
Whateverlife.com
Conceived by 14-year-old Detroit native Ashley Qualls as a personal portfolio with pictures and graphics, the ad-supported site evolved to offer free MySpace layouts and tutorials for teens who want to learn how to do their own graphic designs and coding. Whateverlife.com, which Qualls owns outright, claims to nab 7 million individual visitors a month and counts Verizon Communications as an advertiser. In March 2006, Qualls reportedly received an offer (from an undisclosed buyer) for $1.5 million, but turned it down.
Dubit Limited
In 1999 Adam Hildreth of West Yorkshire, England, entered the business world at the age of 14 by starting this social-networking outfit. Companies like Coca-Cola used the site's members for focus groups to help market their products to young people. Hildreth served as managing director of the agency for almost four years, leading Dubit to become the most visited teen Web site in the U.K. Five years later, the British Broadcasting Corp. named Hildreth, then 19, one of the U.K.'s 20 richest teens, with an estimated net worth of 2 million pounds, or approximately $3.7 million.
In 2005, Hildreth founded another business, which developed software to protect children from "online groomers"--pedophiles trolling the Internet. According to a recent Cambridge University study, Crisp's software is 98.4% effective in detecting potentially dangerous conversations online.
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