Michael Dunlop dropped out of high school after his dyslexia had teachers telling him he’d never be successful. In 2005, he founded IncomeDiary.com, which has led him to become very successful, earning at least a six-figure income.

IncomeDiary claims to provide the very best content for web entrepreneurs.  This content includes over 400 blog posts, 7 educational courses, and a software product available for purchase.  Some impressive accomplishments since starting include being a trending topic on Twitter, being featured in New York Times, Daily Mail, Business Insider, and more.

It is so encouraging to see that someone like Michael can brush off the negative things people told him, and become a major success in the business world.

Twenty-year-old Nick D’Aloisio is a computer programmer and achieved his success in internet entrepreneurship.  At the age of 12, Nick was already developing mobile apps and selling them for hundreds of dollars.  Summly, a tech summarization app, is what Nick is best known for.  Nick created Summly at the age of fifteen, not expecting for it to be this popular and successful.  This mobile app summarizes news stories for smartphones and tablets, making it easier for people to skim the news while still obtaining the vital information.

As a result of Summly’s prototype, Yahoo! agreed to purchase it for an estimated $30 million.  Nick has been recognized as the youngest person to receive a round of venture capital in technology.  He was also awarded “Innovator of the Year” in the Wall Street Journal for his work on Summly and at Yahoo!.  Nick has not been creating apps long compared to most, but he is already a multi-millionaire!  This story can encourage us to aim high and pursue our passions!

In 2008, at the age of eight, Madison Nicole Robinson had FishFlops already in the making.  She created a series of sea characters that eventually inspired her to make a line of flip flops featuring them.  With the first design, saying “Look, dad! FishFlops!”, her dad purchased the domain name and it only grew from there!

At the age of 15, Madison already had Nordstrom ordering her flip flops, was featured on Yahoo’s homepage, and sold out of all retailers.  She has now caught the eye of Fox and Friends, Inside Edition, Seventeen Magazine, ABC News, and many more.

The coolest thing about FishFlops is that Madison has donated over 20,000 pairs of FishFlops to various charities including: Shoes for Orphan Souls, Texas Children’s Hospital, Snowball Express Military Charity, and many more; and has impacted lives around the world in Costa Rica, Cuba, Guatemala, and Africa.  Finally, a portion of each sale of FishFlops will go directly towards helping protect some of the world’s most endangered animals.

ARE YOU KIDDING?

This business was started by a five-year-old, I’m not kidding.

Young Sebastian Martinez has been obsessed with socks all his life.  He loves collecting fun, crazy, cozy, and colorful socks and decided to share this passion with the world.  With the help of his mom and big brother, who is now Are You Kidding?’s director of sales, Sebastian came up with an amazing company that isn’t just all about socks.

Socks by Sebastian has partnered up with the Live Like Bella Foundation to make a difference.  Right now, 25% of all the proceeds go to the American Cancer Society.  This is only for a limited time though, so Sebastian can have different events like this for all types of organizations!  Are You Kidding? always donates money to different organizations like this to ensure they’re giving back to the community.

Another cool thing about the socks is that they all are designed by Sebastian and a good amount of them serve as awareness for different illnesses such as breast cancer and autism.  This is such a cool and unique aspect of his business!

Miss O and Friends

A website by the name of missoandfriends.com was created by a sweet ten-year-old girl, Juliette Brindak.  Miss O and Friends started out simply with doodles Juliette would draw during rode trips.  Without her knowing, Juliette’s mother would keep her doodles and later turned the doodles into characters on the computer with her design skills.  For a while, Juliette and her sister Olivia, also Miss O, would just play with the characters without sharing them.  That was until Olivia’s eighth birthday party, where their mom made characters for all her friends.  At the party, Juliette observed how her little sister’s friends were the middle school age where a lot of self-esteem issues and drama occurs for girls.  With that. . . MissOandFriends was born!

MissOandFriends.com is now a website where girls can both ask for and give advice in a safe environment to build girls up instead of the bringing down that typically happens in middle school.  MissOandFriends allows girls to interact with each other while getting through their middle school years.

The website now offers games, puzzles, videos, and more.  It is still a middle school-centered website for girls looking for support through these tough years and is continually expanding and adding new things!

The coolest thing about MissOandFriends is the story of how, even at such a young age, a girl can impact so many people with an idea to protect and support her little sister!

Based on the opinion that most candles smell pretty girly, thirteen-year-old Hart Main decided it was essential to make candles that appealed to men’s sense of smell.  Hart tells us that he came up with this idea when his sister was selling candles for a school fundraiser and thought, ‘why don’t people sell candles with scents that men like?’  And with that, ManCans was created.

Hart explains that he chose to use cans as the container for the candles because:

1. Glass jars are what everyone uses for their girly scented candles
2. Using actual soup cans sparked a whole new idea in his head

Before ManCans become candles, they are actually just regular soup cans that are bought at the grocery store. The greatest thing, though, is that ManCans actually buys the soup, donates it to local soup kitchens, and then uses the can after the soup has been donated.  How cool is that!   Therefore, when you buy a candle from this company, you are not only getting a nice manly scented candle, you’re also helping out people who wouldn’t otherwise get a meal that night.

I think the coolest parts of this company are how young the founder is, how unique his idea was, and how many people are actually benefiting from ManCans.  The website’s homepage even shows how many meals are donated, and the number has already reached 80,000.

Hart can be an inspiration for us, even though he is younger, because he had an idea and pursued it, which is what we should all do when we find something we love.