Noa Mintz started her first business in 2008, running art classes for kids during the summer for a small fee. Two years later, she founded a children’s party planning business.  Today, the 16-year-old entrepreneur runs a full-service childcare agency in New York City called Nannies by Noa, that matches nannies with families in need of a caregiver. She vets candidates, handles customer service, and ensures background checks are conducted on each nanny.

When she started high school two years ago and needed more time for schoolwork, Mintz hired a full-time CEO with 25 years of industry experience. She has since hired two additional associates.

“The best part by far is the fact that I am a job creator and have been able to get so many people employed,” Mintz says. “It is rewarding and empowering.” Mintz says she has found nannies for hundreds of families in the New York area, and the primary referral source for her business is word of mouth.

13 year old Hart Main wanted to buy a $1,200 bike to compete in triathlons .  To get money, he started a company called MansCans that only sold “manly” scents in a soup can.

At age 20, William Zhou received inspiration for Chalk.com as he observed the administrative workload from his own high school teachers.  He noticed that teachers are overwhelmed with tasks such as lesson planning, assessment, and evaluation   Zhou created Planboard to help teachers plan their lessons easier. Planboard received $25,000 from the University of Waterloo Velocity Venture Fund in 2012.  By mid-2013, Planboard had gained significant users.  In 2014, Chalk.com, the parent company of Planboard, expanded into assessment tools. Today, Chalk.com is used in over 20,000 schools and has over 100,000 teachers.

Chalk.com is like Microsoft Office for teachers. It’s a suite of productivity apps for K-12 educators. Used in over 20,000 schools worldwide, Chalk.com solves the problems of lesson planning, assessment, and collaboration and eases teachers’ pain by facilitating personalized education and driving student success.

William Zhou, co-founder and CEO of Chalk.com, observes, “I had always thought that teaching is an easy job. I thought teachers taught from a textbook and got 3 months off in a year. It wasn’t until I visited my own high school teachers that I realized it’s not the case. They were struggling with an overwhelming amount of work, dealing with lesson planning, assessment, and attendance, in addition to fending off angry parents and bureaucratic administration. I told them I couldn’t help them with the latter two but I could help ease their daily tasks. That’s when I started Chalk.com.”

He’s only 7, but he’s already CEO of his own company and an entrepreneur.  Sebastian Martinez’s passion for collecting bright and zany socks turned into a business when his mother suggested he design his own. The result was a company called “Are You Kidding” which Sebastian started at age 5.  In 2014, Sebastian made $15,000 selling his specialty socks with the help of his director of sales and big brother Brandon Martinez.  Since January, revenue has continued to grow. “We have been able to already reach the $15,000 that we made last year and are on track to double and hopefully triple our sales this year,”  said Rachel Martinez, the president of the company and Sebastian’s mother.

Are You Kidding teamed up with organizations like the “American Cancer Society” and the “Live Like Bella Foundation” last year to raise more than $3,000 for cancer awareness. In April, the company partnered with “The Hue Studio” and donated 25 percent of all proceeds from its “Eye See You” sock sales to “Discovery Arts”, a charitable organization that brings art programs to children with serious illnesses.

Amy Norman and Stella Ma wanted to create an educational toy that would teach kids about world geography that they would send via snail mail.  After brainstorming about what they thought kids would consider fun, they came up with kits that included cardboard mini-suitcases, stickers, and souvenirs from imaginary child travelers named Sam and Sofia.

The Little Passports would be a monthly subscription based product  that would serve  6-to-10-year-olds for $10.95 a month.  They tested the product with 50 families on Craigslist and discovered that kids still get excited about receiving packages in the mail and wanted to continue receiving them.  However when they went to an investor conference to pitch their start up, they were shut down by 50 possible funders.  The feedback they received was harsh, one commenting “One of the founders is pregnant with a second child, and the other has a child already, there is no way these two can do this”

After all the rejections, they scraped together $25,000 each of their own money.  Eight years later, Norman and Ma have build Little Passports into a business beloved by all of it’s customers.  It’s 2016 revenue was $3o million, double what is grossed in 2015.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2016/11/02/little-passports-founders-desperately-wanted-vc-cash-luckily-they-got-zero/#33d5e2a12590