17-year-old businessman founded four startups

The story of the 17-year-old Australian web programmer Lachy Groom shows that entrepreneurship is a talent: either you have it from an early age, or you need to look for it for a long time in yourself.

This guy (he teaches student programming in photography) began to do business from an early age, as a child, he sold soda and dog walking; by the age of 11, his father taught him HTML and CSS. In 2008, at the age of 13, the boy founded the first startup PSDtoWP.com . By orders of customers, mainly from Europe and the USA, he created WordPress themes from Photoshop layouts. Nine months later, the site was bought by a large consulting company.

But the teenager still had a lot of ideas for startups. During a vacation in Bali in 2011, he read the bestseller of the time, “The Body in Four Hours,” which mentioned the original complex of PAGG substances (polycosanol, thioctic acid, green tea extract, and garlic). The businessman was immediately struck by the idea - and after a few hours, he registered the PAGGStack.com domain and contacted product suppliers. Within a month after returning from vacation, he arranged for the packaging and worldwide sale of “weight loss kits” for a fashionable diet.

Another startup, Leichi Groom, was simple. A friend sent an iPad from America to him as a fan of Apple technology, but on the very first day when the boy took him to school, a classmate dropped his iPad on a concrete floor, and the tablet crashed. “At that moment I had no projects, and my father advised me to launch some website that would generate passive income. I did so, ”says Leichi. In May 2010, he opened the iPadCaseFinder.com website ., a simple filter that showed offers for selling iPad cases from different sellers in the table. All outbound links were affiliate links. The business went well: a few weeks after the launch, the site registered 400 thousand visits, and Amazon generously paid for the affiliate program. It was a very successful project, and after a few months he also found his buyer.

Now Leichi is developing his fourth startup Cardnap (search and resale of discount cards), he created 15 jobs with an average salary of $ 79 thousand per year, probably the company has a turnover of more than $ 100 thousand per month. Not bad for a teenager who, by law, cannot even drink beer and vote in elections.

Leichi dreams of moving to the mecca of Internet business - Silicon Valley, but after leaving school in December last year, the entrepreneur still cannot get a work visa in the United States, because he does not have a higher education and formal work skills in his specialty.