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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?"
This was my business plan, and I have found it highly effective.
:)
Step 1: Steal Underpants
Step 2:
Step 3: Profit!
Rince, and repeat.
No I didnt spell check this post...
1) Spend $1,000 on clothes and a lease on a phat car
2) Use clothes and phat car to get hot women
3) Pimp out hot women
4) Profit, motherfucker. Profit.
I beleive if you live in certain places, they pay you for donating sperm. My summer job when I was a teen, was more like summer volunteer work.
-------
Support Indy Music. Buy
1. Where are you? US? What region thereof?
2. What's your skillset?
3. What's your dream job? What's "beneath you?" What can you not stand to do?
I don't want to crush your hopes, but you may find it very difficult to do something meaningful. You might consider finding the Entrepeneur's Club at a local college / University and hooking up with them. They may be able to find investors for you if you can present a viable business plan.
Good luck. You'll need it.
first off, blaze (with accent.)?
it's blase. (with accent.)
here's the idea i am sure could make somebody a ton of money.
instead of refilling and rehabbing toner cartridges, do it for lcd projector bulb cartridges. almost all the time, you have to buy a new one- for a good chunk of change. a little googling found me a place or two where you can buy solely the bulb. clean the cartridge, and replace the bulb (being careful of course not to get oil on anything) and charge 1/2 to 2/3 of what a new projector bulb costs.
if i were mechanically inclined, i would do this. it's a growth industry. here at work, thanks to doofuses who can't remember how to turn off a projector, we can chew through a unit, at $330 per, in 6 months. and i know college professors aren't the only group of clueless projector users out there.
stored on computers from birth to the grave
...on the web! Then get 10 million in VC funding and go public.
Oh wait, it's not 1999. Forget I said anything.
Rent a box from somewhere, and harass friends, family, and neighbors if they know anyone who could use a web presence. You provide the hosting, set up domains and stuff, and if they need it, some basic web design.
There's even a few packages out there that have a very simplified markup structure (ie. _underline_ and *bold* and stuff) that means your potential clients can edit pages directly.
Your costs are monthly fees to your host, and one-time fees for domains and such. Income is monthly hosting fees from clients, and one-time or recurring fees for web design, graphics, and maybe even some freelance coding for special features and whatnot.
Programming of any sort (including web design) is probably the most portable of the IT trades. You can do it from your house, or from your dorm room if and when you go off to college. Beyond that, maybe building custom-order systems for people, but it's unlikely you could ramp that up in 3 months. You might also check out itmoonlighter.com for some available contracting work in your area which might not require you to be on-site.
I'm not a cool guy, I just play one on T.V.
I'd not even bother.
/ad aware and the like make problem solving easier on consumers
1: Everybody can make a website.. Notice I didnt say good
2: Anti-crapware like the new AOL discs
3: Real software issues on MS systems always require a reinstall-Use vendor wipe disc
4: If its a hardware issue, you cant repair motherboards and the like. On dell/gateway crap, it's "Buy New Machine"
5: You're just HS students. I'm 22 and people look down at our age group as consultants. The "Consultant" is supposed to be 30-40 after numerous lay-offs and fires (from idiotic companies that lie to get out of unemp.)
Yeah, at 22, I'm jaded enough to be a consultant. I've not seen it all, but close.
Since you guys are (most likely) minors and can legally repudiate any contracts you sign, many folks are going to be rightly cautious about dealing with you. You can make decent summer cash with a gas can and a lawnmower. I would have said get a paper route, but most paper carriers these days are retired folks with station wagons. One retired guy with a station wagon replaced me and my two brothers, plus a few other paper carriers when we gave up our routes in the late early 1990's. If you have friends who run a business, you might be able to get some web design work tossed your way, but I think you'll find that mowing grass will provide a more steady stream of income. Sorry to be a buzz kill, but I was 16 once, too. Don't lose your entreprenurial bent, though - it will serve you well once you join the majority. I've started 3 companies - cratered two and sold one, but I've had a lot more fun than my friends who've stuck with their "safe" jobs.
Blogging Weight Loss, Distance Education, and more at verlin.com
And little money. Check
And you're young. Check
And don't have much of an idea on what to do. Check
I hate to be the first one to tell you, but million dollar ideas aren't sitting around waiting to find you on slashdot. It's going to be up to you and your friend to decide what's best here. As a consultant I can tell you, with no idea what you want to do, you really should hire a consultant if you want this to be anything more than you making webpages for people you know over the summer.
You're going to be fighting an uphill battle, most businesses won't talk to you based purely on age and lack of business experience. The one thing I would suggest if you do this, do it right and get insurance, because if you're handling something worth thousands, you don't want to be held liable if you break it.
I work at a local comuter retailer in my city, one of the top requests we get from our customers is: "Do you guys or do you know of anyone that offers training?"
They just want to know basic stuff, how to use their computer, how to copy files, create folders, etc really basic stuff.
Our business doesn't have the space or the resources to make this happen. But it would be simple to do and something that high school kids could pull off with a little investment of money.
You could check out an auditorium at a city library, they often have facilities for such things, including screens and projectors. You could hook a laptop up to it and do your demonstrations there.
Q&A's, how to, basic stuff. May have to pay a few bucks to use the facilities, but long as you balance the costs:profit, shouldn't be a big dent.
What kind of customers can you expect? The older generation, elderly retired people are new to computers still, they don't learn quickly, have surplus income to spend and have the time and interest to attend such a training class on general computer use.
They're really into geneology and email correspondance. Little else, so although it's not the best use of your tallents, it should be rewarding finacially and equally rewarding improving some old farts quality of life.
How to get the word out. Basic cheap marketing that targets your market. The Newspaper, they're one of the few audiences that still read it. Cheap too. Putting flyers up at senior centers, veterans hospitals, etc. anywhere old people hang out. Charge a minimal fee at first, just to gauge what your expected turn-out will be, jack the price up a bit afterwards once the word-of-mouth starts within their communities.
Should work out well, I do this stuff on the side on a one-on-one basis (since I have a car) and the money is pretty good. I usually charge $175 an hour, but if you're going to have more bodies in an auditorium, shoot for 30$ a person, something basic that everyone can afford.
Good luck, better than working at McDonalds all Summer (although working there would really give you a reason to go to college).
With words like 'paucity' you should probably give up on the tech route and get a job tutoring fellow students for their SATs.
If I had some kind of magical business plan for a company that only needed $1000 in seed money and a couple of high-school students, I sure as hell wouldn't be explaining the details of it on Slashdot.
I'd probably be selling it on a late night television infomercial with Tony Robbins and that other guy with the shiny teeth.
I have an excellent opportunity for you. I am the ASSISTANT COLONEL VICE FINANCE MINISTER of a corrupt third-world dictatorship, and I am trying to embezzle foreign aid money. I have diverted FORTY-SEVEN MILLION UNITED STATES DOLLARS ($47,000,000) from the International Petroleum Reserve Slush Fund to a separate expense ledger sub-account within my country's incomprehensibly complex banking system.
Unfortunately, my country's laws require me to find a RANDOM STRANGER ON THE INTERNET to complete this transaction. If you have the IQ OF BREAD MOLD, this could be you! I need to transfer the money into a U.S. bank account, rather than an account in an actaul banking haven. We would split the money as follows:
Now, to begin the transaction I simply need $1,000 from you as an EMBEZZLEMENT TRANSFER FEE. For reasons I can't explain, because I'm making this up as I go along, I am unable to pay this amount myself, though it amounts to FIVE THOUSANDTHS OF ONE PERCENT of my profit.
Simply withdraw your money in small bills and FLUSH IT DOWN THE TOILET and my operatives will remove it from the sewer system and deposit the money into your account. I TRUST IN THE NAME OF THE LORD JESUS H. FUCKING CHRIST that you are a trustworthy person who will do the right thing.
Sincerely,
COLONEL DOGUM GUNUN KUTLU OLSUN
Here's my advice to high-school students looking to be entrepreneurial during a summer: find a way to make or import something interesting and sell it on eBay. You don't have a lot of overhead and actually wind up with real-world experience of building and/or supporting a product.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
Consider
1) So, given it takes money to make money, $1000 isn't going to net you much in ROI.
2) Instead, write something gratis that other people will use, and will give you something to put on your resume after college.
3) Open up a sourceforge account to organize your project. Do all the project planning work out in the open - project goals and descriptions, requirements, specs, docs, code. In the future, you can point people to this as a sample of your early work (keep it updated). Have a GUI (I don't recommend Web apps for something like this - too much infrastructure), write it in C++ (what I suggest), Java, or VB, depending on your talent and audience (and resources - Gnu C++ and Java are free).
4) People don't use 80% of software they buy - so make that 80% open-sourced 'infrastructure' libraries and such, and the remaining 20% closed-source plug-ins or specialized customizations (and a good installer - people tend to buy stuff that has a good installer).
5) If someone wants a feature or a bug fixed, see if they will pay for support.
6) Leverage other people for the product.
7) Learn how to market your product. Just see it as an experiment - don't be shy, be outgoing, and specifically, be clever.
Do some market research: go and figure out what someone wants to do that they can't do now, or that the software to do is expensive. How? Ask them!
The criterion for your research should be - you should have a representative sample of the population nearby, they probably should be a small business (since individuals don't pay much and usually need more prettiness-per-unit-usefulness than a small business solving a specific problem would need), they should have some general-purpose computers that are underleveraged (people do one or two applications on them (mail, word/excel/quicken, and Minesweeper) and don't really use them to their full potential).
Consider what target audiences you have around you: small, non-chain restaurants (specifically their back office); professional practices, like small dentist/physical therapist/massage therapists/chiropractor offices; the corner bodega - they might have a cash register, but no computer tracking of stock so they never quite know what their inventory is or how much to buy - sell them that. House painters/plumbers/small general contractors. Churches/Synagogues/Mosques.
Find something some group of the people above do that's tedius, and see if you can make it trivial. Don't be afraid to ask a lot of people, and say 'no' if it looks like too much - even if they will pay you. Do _not_ get in over your head.
KISS - keep it simple, silly. Bang-for-the-buck is the keyword for this sort of development. You are trying to make their lives better/easier/smarter, and they might need 'just one thing'. Consider the first spreadsheets - they merely edited columns of numbers and added them up correctly, and saved and read them to a file. This saved an _enormous_ amount of time for people who had to do this stuff day-in-day-out. Almost nothing subsequently has had as profound an impact on their lives as taking the grunt work out of moving raw numbers around with pen-and-paper.
-J
As a 19 year old college student with a ton of ideas all the time, its hard to pursue any of them. I keep a small notepad with me at all times. Anytime I get any inspiration (if its in the middle of a professor giving a lecture), I write it down. Then I can go and review it later.
But I was in your position a few years ago (I was a Freshman in highschool, not a senior). Here's what I did (in 2000):
The local science fair had a web design contest. I had been doing web design for about a year, mainly for my own amusement and knowledge. I also had a close friend who did the same, and since we needed teams of 2, we formed a web design team. We made a web page (one we actually wrote, didn't use Dreamweaver) according to the specs of the contest, and totally blew away the judges. They thought it was the most amazing thing ever. They both gave us their business cards, told us to contact them, we did, and bingo, $12 an hour work for each of us. We were psyched.
Eventually our client fell out from beneath us and never contacted us back, but we got paid for the work we did, so all was good.
Another science fair story: the magnet high school program I attended required everyone to do a science fair project every year. Since I was(am) a decent programmer, I always did stuff in the computer science category. I loved the stuff, and the category was small so I was always almost guranteed to win. I did a project on Artificial Intelligence one year, and OpenGL another and Massive Parallel Rendering a third year. All the judges loved it, and a lot offered me jobs. I already had a well paying job at the time, so I passed on them, but I got my name out there.
Those are my opinions and experiences, take them for what their worth from someone in your shoes a few years ago. Keep in mind, as well, that all of this cost me nothing (in fact, it all made me $$$ as 1st place at the web design contest got me money, and so did 1st place at science fair, not to mention the actual jobs).
Good luck!
-Vic
The summer before my last year in high school I had a cheap beater of a pickup truck (a 1970 Ford F-150 with a motor and transmission out of a Mustang (V8-302, 3 speed manual tranny) - it was ugly, beat up, and cheap. Also had lots of room in the back for gear. Estimated cost : $500
... something that involves pushing buttons and moving a mouse around ... if you do let us know because a bunch of us would love to do the same.
Bought a used lawn mower, cleaned it up and sharpened the blade with a file. Estimated cost : 100 total.
Got an electric weed-eater for about $40 new w/ a 100' heavy duty extension cord.
Other crap : eye protection, ear protection, maybe a second mower and trimmer because there are two of you.
Total cost, roughly your entire $1000 budget.
Get started by printing out 1 page flyers to put on people's doors in neighborhoods (nice neighborhoods.) Each place you do will take you about 2 hours max with two people, and will pay $40, and needs to be done every two weeks. You can do like 4 each day tops, and if you do a GOOD job you will have awesome repeat business. Totally a cash business, so no taxes.
It takes some time to build up a client base, but once you two do a good job you will have more business than you can imagine. $800 free and clear every week on a full schedule, possibly more. That's $400 a week per person free and clear, $1600 a month.
It is hot, sweaty, dirty, demeaning work - which is why you will have so many people eager to have you do it for them. If you aren't too proud to sweat you will make more doing this than doing 'computer work' - esp. now.
Maybe you will find something that you can do with your $1000 start up fund, something that will net you $5,000 apiece in three months without access to a car
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
OK, first things first: You should be commended for wanting to work and (lack of car, funds and details aside) for wanting to pursue an entrepreneurial path.
Some thoughts...
"It was a summer's tale: Just a boy, his Linux, and a head full of dreams..."
This is how I financed my college education.
For $1000 you should be able to improvise a small hydroponic operation....focus the money on the lights....you can even just use compact fluorescents for the mother plants for cloning, and keep the HIDs for flowering time.
You can probably turn $5000-10000 profit over the summer (~90 days).
Good luck.
-psy
I wish there were some students around here I could trust enough to pass off all the people who want me to install a virus checker on their win98 boxes.
Get some practice with the main virus scanning tools, anti-spyware cleaners, and other basic windoze utilities. Learn how each version of windoze does things like dial-up, and how the local cable or ADSL provider like user machines to be set up. Then print up some nice flyers and go around to all the computer stores in town and ask them if they'll promote your "summer job" business of doing all the crap work helping (l)users set up their systems and get on the internet.
Draw up a list of jobs you will do, a time estimate for each one, and the price you will charge for each job. Something like installing Norton Anti-Virus should take about an hour, and you should charge something around US$10 or $15. Installing a free firewall, with basic configuration should cost $10. Helping with an ADSL installation maybe $20.
Make sure you are up front that the person with the machine is going to be buying the software, like a commercial virus checker, and your fee will be on top of that. Add $5 if you are the one to run to the store and buy the software for them. Don't get tempted to try pirating commercial software, enough people will then be wary of you, and the recommendations will fall off. Make sure you explain how some of the software is free for personal use, like AdAware and ZoneAlarm, but some effective virus scanners cost $40 or $90.
Have your own collection of freeware utilities, on both a USB key and a CD, and maybe even a floppy with necessary drivers. You would be surprised how many old machines are out there still running win98 or NT, and don't have USB ports or a working CD drive. The owners don't care, since they have 33.6k dialup, AOL, and Word97. They don't really need much else, but the trojans and email virii are hurting their systems and they need somebody cheap to help them out, and the computer shops tend to want to charge large amounts per hour for basic installations.
By the end of the summer, you will have learned you never want to work in technical support again, and you will probably blow your hard earned cash on a high powered rifle and a case of hunting ammo.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
You're about to leave the last free school you're going to get, most likely. [Unless it's offered as a benefit as a future employer]
And then you get to the paying for education, and then the trying to pay off student loans, and find someone to give you money for your time.
Although it sounds like a good idea to try to make money now, you may actually want to look at things that might help you to make more money later. So pick what you like to do, and go talk to people who work for companies that work in the field, or have jobs of the type that you want. You probably won't get to do it, but it doesn't mean that you can't get an internship, and learn something.
Hell, it might be that all you learn is that you really hate the field, and that's the best thing that you can learn early. You might learn that you don't want to work for that type of company.
But you also start building your resume, and gaining experience. You meet people, who can tell you later in life when there's a position that you might be interested in. And you have so many more people whom you can use as references for that first real paying job.
As for transportation -- public transit. It's not glamorous, but the bus is your friend. Or, look for stuff within walking/bike distance. Hell, even a public library or local government might be willing to take you in, if you're interested in working there.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Unless you're dead set against it, why not just get a bullshit food service or retail job? Remember, you're in high school. This is the summer. One of the last ones you're going to get.
Think of it like this:
I was blessed with amazing jobs I got through family contacts my last two years of high school, but I worked in a grocery store my sophomore year. It didn't really teach me anything, and the pay was right around minimum wage, but I also got invited to some pretty cool parties I would have missed if I didn't know my coworkers. I was actually rather sad when school started again and my extracurricular commitments forced me to quit.
Hell, to this day I'm thankful for that job. The people I worked with there are, by a wide margin, the largest group of people who didn't leave town after graduation. Gives me people to hang out with when I have to go home to visit the parents.
I work in IT, and make a pretty damn good living now with great job security, but I still look back on wasted high school summers fondly. Unless you are the type who is just miserable in high school, then maybe you would too.
Game... blouses.
Great advice except for the no taxes part. That's against the law. You are required to report your income whether it's cash or check. Actually, some of your clients will probably prefer to write you a check anyway so you will have a paper trail.
Furthermore, if you want to account for your time in order to impress a potential employer in the future, you had better have your ducks in a row; there are ways of finding out. Otherwise, you will have to lie and say you spent the summer doing nothing. That might be dodgy given the fact that 30-40 people around your neighborhood will testify that they hired you, and hundreds more saw your flyer.
Maybe you are OK with working under the table like the thousands of carpenters and the like who try to get paid in cash, but if you ever want to do work for the federal government either as an employee or contractor, they will probably want to know every job you had for the past 10 years, so you then have the choice of perjuring yourself or admitting that you owe back taxes, neither of which is particularly great news to the employer.
Finally, you should consider that finances are a vital part of running a business; the accounting and tax work you will do will be useful experience for later on when you start the next great software company or whatever you end up in.
Good luck!
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
I just got done installing dotproject open-source groupware for Opera Columbus. After some tough negotitation, I won the contract (no contract really, they just hired me). They already have hosting with another provider. The provider wanted X to developed web-based project management; I serisouly undercut them with an application suite that was already ready. I had to do some user training, but that's about it for the hard part.
What I recommend is taking very little of your $1000, buy some cheap web hosting, and setting up some open source groupware. Spend a little bit more of that $1000 on printing manuals or throwing together a nice presentation -- charts and graphs, with binders, etc. Physical things, such as paper, will show people that you have an investment in what you are doing, and aren't just talking. They will have it to refer to later when they can't remember what you said. It shows stability and lastingness, that you will be there.
Be selective with the open sources packages, find the stuff that's 1. finished, 2. polished, and 3. easy to use for a non-techie. I highly recommend dotproject; the only problem is that it lacks printing.
Then, setup free demo accounts for users. Give them 30 or 60 day trials. Expect to spend some time training. Offer to do the initial setup, such as user accounts, etc. The people who use it and like it will gladly pay for the setup.
You can charge either
1. recurring fees for stuff you host. If you chose this, be prepared to go the extra mile for support when the thing crashes in the middle of the night.
- or -
2. a larger, one-time setup fee for setting it up on their hosting providers. Be sure to specify rates for future support of the application if you do a 1x set up fee. Here is where you clean up when they need you.
Pick a minimum price you want, and always present something higher. That gives you room to negotiate. Geeks hate negotitaion, business people love it. Be prepared for it. Be prepared to walk away from deals where they want too much; those people are users and they will expect you to work for them 24/7 for way too little money. It's just not worth it.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso