Even girls have learned how to make millions on online startups

Internet business has always been distinguished by the youth of those involved in it. The founders of Yahoo, Google and eBay are all recent students, guys in just over 20 years. But it seems that the age threshold is declining even more. Teenagers appear in America who founded a successful business and earned their first million at the age of 16-17.

For example, here is an interview with the American Catherine Cook, who at the age of 17 made the youth site MyYearbook . In just a year and a half, the site’s audience grew to 3 million people a month, advertising revenue - up to several million dollars a year. Venture investors have just appeared who have funded a $ 4.1 million startup.

The main audience of the site is Americans 13-22 years old who want to get to know each other and have a great time hanging out on the Internet. The site is suitable for this as well as possible: there is a dating department, puzzles and quiz tests, an online “glossy” UGC magazine (the number of comments on some articles reaches 3000), celebrity gossip and everything else that is so interesting to teenagers. Duel contests are very popular, where participants "clash" with each other in a battle for the best video. Spectators enjoy watching these duels, vote and leave comments. An adult would never have made a portal that would appeal to teenagers.

Over the next year, Catherine Cook with his younger brother Dave (he is the co-founder of the business) hopes to turn his site into the largest US teenage portal. Now it is the third social network in America after Myspace and Facebook.

In general, the idea to create such a site came when Catherine and Dave moved to a new city and went to a new school. They did not know anyone there, and at first it was rather hard for them. To make contact with classmates, they came up with such a great thing: the ability to publish their photos on the Internet, make acquaintances. At first it was just an idea. Then came the older brother Jeff, who invested $ 250 thousand of personal money in their project (he himself earned this money on an online startup in college). And so the real business began. Now you can hire Indians to develop templates, scripts and high-quality design. The entire site was created by specialists from India under a contract. It turned out to be very cheap and of high quality.

The first version of the site was very different from what it is now. New functions and sections of the portal (which are now the most popular) were suggested by classmates themselves during breakfast in the dining room and during breaks, as well as other visitors to the site. These were great ideas. For example, the function of contests-duels (battles) allowed to increase the attendance of the resource six times since February of this year.

At the age of ten, Katrick Cook realized that she could never work in the office, and being a boss and running her own business was much more fun. Now the teenager has 30 subordinates to whom she pays her salary. True, formally everything is controlled by Jeff, who holds the position of CEO.