Could you imagine making your first million dollars doing exactly what you love? Well for 9 year old Evan that is exactly what he has done. I remember at the age of 9 I was playing with legos, playing outside and not caring about a thing in the world. For Evan he was doing the same thing, however, he took this and turned it into a multi-million dollar business.

EvanTube is very similar to YouTube, however, Evan reviews toys and builds Lego sets online. To me this doesn’t sound like something that would make a lot of money, but I also don’t think i am Evan’s target audience. HE has almost 2.8 miilion subscribers to his channel, and has achieved over 1.9 billion views on all his videos combined.

Evan has done an incredible job of finding his target audience, and giving them what they want. Evan knows his target audience very well as these kids are just like him, and the same things he wanted to know about these toys are the same things his subscribers want to know.

I am overly impressed with the entrepreneurial mind and ingenuity of this young 9 year old kid. so many kids at this age are only worried about themselves and what they want, however, Evan defies the odds and began to think about what do other people need.

I got to ready this story about Amit, who was recently ranked the number 1 young entrepreneur in India. Amit did not grow up in a place where creativity was encouraged. From a young age he was told over and over to follow the script and work towards that 9-5 job someday. Amit had to travel 103 km each day to get to school, yes each day. Amit was a very self determined kid, he realized at an early age that he had a wandering mind, that wanted to view the world in a different and unique way. One day he was with his mom and they were at a hotel and she asked him to carry her bags up the stairs because she could not, and frankly it was tough for him too. At that point he wondered if suitcases had wheels to be moved on ground more easily why cant there be something to move it on stairs more easy. This is when the idea of “Up-Cart” was created. Up-Cart is used to put your luggage on it and then use it to pull it up stairs much easier.

Amit entered himself in different entrepreneurial competitions to be able to pitch his idea and get the word out there. These small and many competitions turned into something much bigger when he found himself in a competition to be named the top young entrepreneur in India. Amit had a fear of public speaking so this was a step out for him. However, he did come out on top of this competition and the young boy who had a wandering mind and the desire to do things different was now called the #1 young entrepreneur in India.

This is such a cool story to read! Amit did not let the early challenged and opposition he faced at a young age stop him from achieving his goals. It would have been easy for him to hear the outside noises that told him different than the voices in his head but he didn’t, he ran with what he believed and ended up creating and becoming something special!

I read an article about Cameron Johnson who started his first business at the age of 9. He was creating greeting cards for his family for special events, and before he knew it he had friends asking him to make some for them and they were willing to pay him for them. He used the money he made from that to buy Beanie Babies and then sell them on ebay. He was 12 years old when he started doing this and made his first $50,000. As Cameron got older he began to get involved in some other business ventures, things that required more technologically savvy people. One of which he ended up selling for six digits.

As I read about Cameron it was very clear to him that he had a knack for making money and selling things. An entrepreneurial spirit is not always something that is taught but an instinct you are born with. It appears to me that Cameron was born with this knack for selling things and making money. It is also cool how at such a young age he was selling to his peers. He was selling those beanie babies to kids his own age on the internet, it is just mind boggling to me that at such a young age he was selling to people the same age as him. It just goes to show us that we can be entrepreneurs wherever we are and to whoever is around us!

The creation of Mozilla Firefox, has a very cool story of how it came about. There used to be a browser called Netscape, you have probably not heard of this, that is because Netscape didn’t work or succeed well at all. So what Netscape tried to do, was do an open-source software, what this means is that they unleash this software on the internet and let the public work on it. In 2002 Blake Ross and a couple of his friends decided to create a new version of Netscape and they called this browser Firefox. The mindset they had when they created this browser, was to make is simpler, more stable and faster. They were not interested in the gadgets of the browser, but rather the functionality. Firefox blew up, web surfers were switching to Firefox at a rate of 7 million a month. Now Blake Ross is 25 years old and worth about 150 million dollars.

This is a great story of taking a chance and trying something new. Blake took advantage of an open-source software and tried making this new browser. He didn’t know if it would blow up or if nobody would care about it, but he was willing to take a chance on it. This is a great lesson for us in life as well. We need to be willing to take the chances without being sure of what the outcomes will be.

I read a story about a guy named Sean Belnick! Sean came up with the idea of an internet retailer website called bizchair at the age of 14. Sean started his business with an investment of $500 and ran this whole thing out of his home. As time went on he was able to move into his first warehouse in 2004 and then by 2009 he had more than 700,000 square feet to operate out of. Sean took this small idea in his bedroom to a business that has more than 58 million dollars in sales.

These stories just continue to baffle and amaze me. The difference between a normal person and Sean is that when we have an idea we quickly slide it under the rug, but Sean had this idea and he decided to act on it. He was not deterred by the lack of space he had, or lack of money, but he took his determination and persistence and decided he was going to make it happen. I am just amazed that he was able to take the $500 and turn into millions of dollars. I would love to be able to find out how he was able to market this website and get his name out there, because i am sure he is not the only one that is doing something like this. However, I am truly amazed and inspired by this story!

Have you guys ever had a 10 page article to read for class, and you forgot and now you only have 15 minutes before class. If you haven’t then well done but for most of you I am sure you have experienced this.

I read an article that was about a guy named Nick D’Aloisio, who created an incredible app at the age about 12. However, at the age of 9 he began using the software and computer to make apps and different things like that. I remeber at 9, I was no where close to a computer let alone coming up with incredible ideas for apps. He created an app that he called Trimit but is currently called Summly. This is an IOS app that takes long series of text and it will condense them for you to about 1000, 500, or 140 character summaries. Nick was just a kid that sensed a problem and was trying to find a solution. Nick got a lot of help in his journey when Apple featured Summly as on the the featured apps on the Store. He also received help when a Hong Kong based billionaire offered Nick $300,000 in venture capital to help him with his process. Nick used this money to basically start the app all over again and make it bigger and better. He wasn’t satisfied with where the app was and he wanted to see how he could make it better. He ended up changing the name of the app and eventually re-launching the app.  The craziest part of this whole story is that by the time he was 17, he had sold this app, for $30 million dollars to Yahoo. When you make something that Yahoo wants, you know you have made it somewhere.

This story is so cool to me because he saw a problem that a lot of us have experienced but haven’t recognized before. I remember having to read long articles for school and not having an adequate amount of time to do so. This app would have been vital to me and  I would definitely have spent money to have it condense the article for me in order to save time. Also it is crazy to me that he was able to create the software to make the app and design the app essentially all by himself. It shows a great level of innovation as well as dedication on his part.