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Summer Businesses for High School Students?
An anonymous reader asks: "A friend and I are going into our final year of high school, and given a variety of factors (the relative paucity of technology jobs for HS students, etc.), would like to start our own business. We'll probably have about $1000 in capital, but (in effect) start out with no other resources other than our own skills (technical and otherwise). We have no constant access to a car, which means on-site tech support is effectively out. We'd like to start something in the technology field (IT, software design, hardware construction - we can solder, web design, etc.), but are open to any suggestions. We'd also like some sort of business we can start this summer, but can continue to maintain. What do you suggest as a business idea for the summer->longer term?"
Get more capital first you cannot do much with just a $1000.
Have fun, =Otto(matic)
During the height of the DotCom bubble -- a time when anything went -- a (now former) friend had the brilliant idea to make money by writing webpages. His skill set comprised of DHTML, ASP, VB, J++, and taking public domain and/or example code and putting his name on it. I had worked almost exclusively with application languages, so I did actually get something from the experience.
Mind you, this was before our freshmen years. So I viewed it with much skepticism but, not wanting to disappoint him, I went along.
He wanted to charge people $10 a page, plus $5 for javascript. The worst part is that some people took his offer seriously. They all said that he was too expensive.
Perhaps the one thing he loved more than money was power. He would manipulate me (admittedly easy to do), changing the rules of a situation to his benefit.
He even had the gall to, at one point, post an employment opening on our site (hosted on PWS or whatever POS mini-IIS that came with Win98. To which one poor soul actually replied. My friend took pleasure in emailing him, telling him that he wasn't "qualified" enough.
In short, he was a greedy fraud, an MS shill (his lasting image on me probably intensified my love of free / open source software, at that point in time yet to come), a bona-fide script kiddie, warez junkie, cheater in games, a person completely unworthy to breathe the same air as living creatures, the epitomy of what is wrong in this world; last I heard of him was that his mother had to call the police to break up a fight between him and his brother. I am grateful to myself for having had the insight and fortune to withdraw from that friendship, even though I couldn't see that at the time.
I'm sorry that I wrote all of this here, but I had to purge it, and it is slightly on topic, so...