For a lot of guys playing video games is a nice way to waste time and put off responsibilities. What if you could take your interest and grow it into an 8 figure value company? Andy “Reginald” Dihn, the own of Esports organization TSM has accomplished such a feat. Andy started TSM as a competitive League of Legends team to win prize money from tournaments, but early on he recognized that the real money wasn’t in the prize money. Andy instead focused on building a brand and bringing in the sponsorship money. His brand is currently sponsored by Geico, Gillette,  Logitech, HTC, Red Bull, HyperX, CyberPowerPC, and his brand’s primary site to stream on Twitch.TV. Through streaming, playing, and sponsorship Andy has earned himself an estimated personal net worth of 1.5 million dollars. However his real value lies in the holdings of his company.

Andy’s Company owns several domains that have multi-million dollar valuations Probuilds.net, Champion.gg, and LolCounter.com. These combined holdings have a combined valuation of more than $20 million due to how frequently they are used by the League of Legends community. His brand of TSM itself was estimated to be worth almost $28 million in late 2015.

Andy stands as a titan in the esports world but what is especially impressive is how a guy who only graduated high school was able to navigate himself to owning a brand worth over 8 figures and is one of the most recognizable brands in the online community.

Lifting has come back in a big was in popular culture, but I’m not talking about the act of going to the gym and working out because that never went away. Lifting has come back in popular culture through Youtube and fitness culture. In the 70s and 80s young men were inspired to go to the gym by seeing Arnold Shwarzenegger. Today young men and women watch fitness youtubers who coach their followers on diet and workout routines. As with everything that comes into prominence in society, there must be someone to make satire of it, and that’s where the character of Dom Mazzetti, the ultimate lifting bro, performed by Mike Tornabene comes in.

Mike took advantage in the lack of comedy in the lifting world when he first started uploading videos in 2013. Dom started off as just a joke to make fun of all the “lifting bros” out there who didn’t follow gym etiquette. This would later just more into general gym comedy videos like “How to skip leg day” or “What is a pump”. He started doing crossover videos with the guys he had started off lampooning such as Bradley Martyn. His videos started going viral through his one liners having now racked up nearly 300 million views on Youtube. So he capitalized on this success by starting a merch brand selling t-shirts, tank tops, hoodies, and stickers. Dubbing himself the “brofessor” he came out with his own pre-workout for his fans called gnar-pump. He released his own guide to being a lifting bro called “The Swoley Bible” an amazon best seller in the fitness category.

Mike was able to then start his passion project called GNARPM, which is a Top-Gearesque Youtube car show. Mike shows off cars from dealerships and does a lot of similar things to what the guys from Top-Gear did. He now participates in off road rally racing and doing racing events promotion in addition to still uploading to Broscience. Tornabene is a good example of finding a niche in the market that is missing and filling it and using that momentum to chase your passions. Broscience is one of the most popular lifting channels despite the fact he doesn’t give “real” advice and shows the  power of  viral comedy in building a brand.

Predictit.org is a site that allows people to trade shares on different “markets” revolving around various current events that are taking place. The site is “an educational purpose project of Victoria University, Wellington of New Zealand, a not-for-profit university, with support provided by Aristotle International, Inc., a U.S. provider of processing and verification services. Prediction markets, like this one, are attracting a lot of academic and practical interest (see our Research section). So, you get to challenge yourself and also help the experts better understand the wisdom of the crowd.” On predictit you trade “stocks” that are valued between 1 cent and 99 cents based on the value the public trading these stocks puts on them with your own money.

Examples of markets that people get involved with are ones around election results, polling data, or even how many times President Trump will tweet over the course of a given time period. These differences keep people interested and involved in the goings on in their country’s politics and even makes them feel a bit more invested. This feeling I think is very valuable and something that we need more of in the general population because people not being educated and involved in politics is bad for our nation.

Personally I love using the site because it allows people who do lots of research on political issues to gain a slight advantage over their fellow players. I think it encourages participation in the political process in a unique way. Personally it gets me to read a lot more articles about what is going on in congress, in the judicial courts and in foreign governments than I would be reading if I wasn’t on the site. So I think the members of Victoria University who created this should be commend on an interesting take on getting involved in politics that as a non-profit allows them to fund their research on how people think about politics.

If you’ve seen the famous viral commercial for Dollar Shave Club then you’ve probably heard of it’s foil, the Dollar Beard Club. Dollar Beard Club was an idea that had been kicked around by Chris Stoikos but he wasn’t quite sure how to market it until he saw the approach that Dollar Shave Club took. So he took their format and made it about growing beards, not shaving them. The rest is history and in the first 8 months of Dollar Beard Club’s life, they had a revenue of 8 million dollars. Chris has even been on the TV show Shark Tank and landed a funding deal.

According to his own website Chris would describe himself as, “a wildly creative, out-of-the-box thinking, high performing CEO. He has been behind multiple successful product and company launches, and established a formula to create extremely engaging, low budget marketing videos that simultaneously entertain and educate your audience.” Chris thrives off of viral social media campaigns.

I believe Chris is quite exemplary for a millennial entrepreneur as he has started two multi-million dollar business by the age of 27. Chris is also quite brilliant at running viral campaigns, particularly when it comes to beards. His videos on youtube have hit over 100 million views advertising Dollar Beard Club and I would say that shows expert knowledge of how to use social media for marketing. Chris in a huge innovator in these social media viral campaigns he has been called “explosive and energetic” by the king of social media himself, Dan Bilzerian.

Chris also shows a good grasp of networking which can be a good trait when starting a business. He was able to network one of his companies “Coolbox” onto Shark Tank where he managed to strike a deal. He also has networked to Social Media Phenomena like the Ice Bucket Challenge to attract brand ambassadors to Dollar Beard Club. This includes social media stars like Sean Whalen, now running for Congress, and the infamous Dan Bilzerian.

Chris shows an understanding for marketing towards the under 35 crowd in the social media landscape better than anyone else out there, and that might be the greatest thing that sets him apart from his fellow Millennial Entrepreneurs.