Hello there fellow steem user. I'm Sam, a 16 year old trying make it big like everyone else. I grew up in the suburbs of Minneapolis. My childhood was great. I lived a comfortable, easy, and fun life through elementary school. I spent my days playing with friends, adventuring, and selling things. Whether it be 4 leaf clovers or video game items, I sold everything I could. I learned at a young age that I really enjoy making money. At the time, I had no need for mon!ey, as well as little to no drive to create a business or real source of income. When I turned 11 years old and finished elementary school, some things changed.
During the summer before I found out that my parents were getting a divorce. I immediately moved into a new house and started a new life. This time was hard, but I wouldn't be the same person without it. I wasn't happy, my family wasn't happy, and I thought money would make things better. I couldn't get a job because I was young (12 or 13), so I researched for hours a day about making money and building a business. At the time I was super impatient so I fell for many scams and wasted a lot of time. It seemed impossible to make even one dollar online, but I couldn't stop trying. Making money became an obsession and eventually became a huge stressor for me. I ended up taking a 6 month break from thinking about money because it got unhealthy. When the break was over, I invested into my first business plan!
When I invested into my first business, I was in 8th grade and it was towards the end of the year. My family was more financially and emotionally stable, and I was a lot less stressed out. I wasn't on a desperate craze to make money, I was just excited to run a fun project that would earn me money. I think having a positive perspective on money was very important for the success of this certain venture. I saw a kid in my class wearing colored eye contacts, and everyone was asking him where he got them. I had researched about alibaba and aliexpress prior to this and new that I could find the same contacts for very cheap. I looked that night and found that I could get desirable designs and colors for $2 a pair. When I saw this I was super hyped, but the minimum order was 50 pairs, and shipping was $60. I didn't have any money and didn't want to ask my parents, so I got my two best friends in on the business. We agree on 1/3 splits and ordered the contacts. After hyping them up for 3 weeks, it wasn't hard to sell them fast. We were taking home $30-60 a day! After about a week, people started finding out that we got them from china for $2, and there were some madddd middle schoolers! We got bullied into quitting selling the contacts but still ending things with a big profit. I learned a lot from this small business, but the most important thing is that it made me decide to be an entrepreneur and give everything I got to become successful.
For the first 2 years of high school I tried out lots of businesses that could have been successful, but I honestly didn't know how to work hard! I didn't make very much money, but I learned sooo much about business, networking, systems, and I figured out what I like and don't like. In 10th grade I did a lot of auto detailing. It was good money (about $20 an hour) but like I said, I didn't know how to work hard and I dreaded the work! I also made an incense ecommerse store, but I didn't know how to market using social media so that failed pretty quickly! One of my more successful businesses was making websites. I charged about $15 an hour and made a few really cool sites! Check out crystalrockproducts.com if you want to look at one I did. I hated doing websites, but it was pretty easy and good money. I learned so much from trying all of these businesses and even though not much money was made, I gained priceless experience. Also, at one point in time I had a job stringing string through letters to make banners. The pay was mediocre and it was grueling work. From that I learned that working for people is not my thing! This time period also included hours (500 hours estimate) of watching videos, reading, and more to learn about business. A lot of it is useless information or niche information, but everything helps.
In the last 6 months I have been tying loose ends with the website business and finishing things up. My main source of income is from eBay. I love eBay and I'm going to make guides on how to get started and make $100+ a day very easily! I have a client I work with to help him liquidate his massive inventory of engine parts. I'm also helping my friend with his social media marketing and website development business. I'm going to do advertising for him and his clients. Soon I'm going to buy a mining rig for ethereum and other cryptocurrencies. I'm super pumped to start writing a lot on Steem and hope to help lots people in the community start or grow their businesses! Once I have $5000-10000 I'm going to spend some time investing in cryptocurrency which will be super fun. I have a year of school left, but at this point it seems like a waste of time. I don't plan on going to college and I can fully support myself financially. But, it's pretty fun if you focus on socializing :) I like playing volleyball and run open volleyball on the weekends. My big goals are to make a million dollars before I turn 18, $30,000 before the end of summer, and to be on the short story long podcast. I also want to make 1000 people successful in my lifetime. My friend Ian who has the social media marketing business is a good start. He's growing fast and I believe he'll be successful soon! Long term I want to have a large influence on the world and be involved with spacex and other space companies. If you think we would get along or you want to talk about business, drop comment a comment and we can talk :)
Thank you for reading!!! If you are interested in me or what I do or want to learn about eBay, business, and things that could help you make money, follow me! I'll be writing guides and other stuff soon!