Advice for high school students
If you’re in high school, there’s nothing I’d recommend more than starting a business.
When you start a business, you’ll enter a real-world adventure in which you’ll learn, build, and have more fun than through school or any extracurricular activity. When all is said and done, at minimum, you’ll end up with knowledge and experience that none of your peers have. If it works out, it might just change the trajectory of your life.
I started my first business, ooShirts, when I was 16 and had a bad t-shirt ordering experience. I’m 29 now, and that same business has evolved into a company called Scalable that employs hundreds of people across 4 countries.
This is my story — of how one high school student started his life’s work.
My story
Monta Vista High School had a new tennis club, and I was tasked with ordering its first batch of t-shirts. My biggest obstacle was budget: being a brand new club, we had less funding than the established clubs.
Luckily, as a kid who wasn’t given an allowance, one of my hobbies was finding great deals. A part of me was actually excited to save some money for our new club, so I started searching.
The search was painful. After days going back and forth with different t-shirt printers, I came to the miserable conclusion that we simply couldn’t afford shirts for our club. Every quote I received was more than double what I thought the shirts ought to cost.
Why t-shirts cost twice as much as they should
It turns out the printing industry is massive, but also slow and outdated. There are thousands of printing companies in every state, but despite the overwhelming range of options, you can’t find quick service, and you can’t find good prices. (You would think capitalism doesn’t produce market failures like this, but inefficiencies like this are everywhere. We’ll save that for another post…)
Some of this has to do with complexity in the manufacturing process, some of this was due to fragmentation in customer types, and some of this was a symptom of the prevailing culture in the industry itself.
But I didn’t know any of this yet.
Getting started
When ooShirts started, it looked nothing like a normal business. It was just myself — a high school sophomore — doing one-on-one sales to my classmates. Whenever I’d find a customer, I would spend a few hours preparing their artwork files and scavenging through obscure suppliers to get the best price.
In hindsight, it wasn’t a very good business model [1]. My effective hourly rate would have been a fraction of minimum wage. But that didn’t matter: I felt that, for the first time, however small, I was making a difference in the real world.
And that made the work really, really fun.
ooShirts quickly became something I looked forward to spending time on every day. The more time I spent on it, the more there was to look forward to. Every time I uncovered something that could make the business better, it was like unboxing a Christmas present, except the presents would keep on coming. What if there was a way to process orders in minutes instead of hours? What if there was a repeatable way of attracting customers? What would happen if our website loaded faster? What if we could offer the best quality in addition to having the best price?
Inflection point
What started out as a quest for lower prices led me down a multi-year rabbit hole that’s still going to this day. I just kept digging and kept getting exposed to things I would have never learned in school — building a website, setting up a supply chain, designing an order management system, and countless others. And it felt a lot easier than school.
When you’re excited about something, it turns out, you’ll learn a lot faster.
The most incredible feeling from my teenage years was when I realized the world was editable. It’s the lightbulb moment of lightbulb moments — it changed the lens from which I viewed the world from a world of problems to a world of opportunity; a world I’m living in to a world I’m helping build.
For me, that moment came when I got my first order. Instantly, I felt a sense of purpose. It was so exhilarating, and I couldn’t have asked for a better way to grow.
Advice
There’s no better time to get started than in high school.
Starting a business is the best way for you to spend your time. Per hour spent, you won’t learn at a faster rate, be more productive, or have more fun. Not to mention — it just might lead to something much bigger.
Potential obstacles
Obstacle #1: Friends & Family
One of the most underrated reasons for success in business or otherwise is having supportive people around you [2]. If you haven’t found your people yet, there’s good news — now’s the best time to look.
If I could be a teenager all over again, I’d try to put together a “dream team” with two components: supportive peers and supportive adults [3].
On finding supportive adults (some would call them “mentors”):
When I started out, I thought being young would hold me back. In hindsight, being both young and ambitious is a superpower. “Adults” like seeing young people succeed and will put special effort into helping them do so. Being young is a one-time benefit that will help you get in touch with people you admire, for getting news outlets to notice you (but don’t get carried away with this), and for getting the benefit of the doubt.
On finding supportive peers:
This is a harder one. Chances are, if you’re seriously considering starting a business as a teenager, your passions are probably different from most of your peers. It’ll be hard to find like-minded friends. This is okay!
Right now, there are at least a million people your age who will eventually start a business. Several thousand of them will succeed in a big way. A hundred of them might even become billionaires. These people probably aren’t doing “normal” high school things, like socializing or winning generic accolades. Instead, they’ll be tinkering away at something. To find like-minded peers, look in niche groups instead of broad groups. Join a coding club instead of a business club. Look for friends online instead of just offline.
Obstacle #2: “I don’t have enough time”
Everyone in the world has 168 hours per week — I have 168 hours per week, you have 168 hours per week, Elon Musk has 168 hours per week. Peoples’ lives unfold based on how they choose to spend their time.
Back in high school, my 168 hours could be broken down into:
Sleeping — 52 hours. Don’t skimp on sleep! And make sure your sleep is productive.
Overhead — 20 hours. Includes daily essentials like eating and showering.
School — 40 hours
Tennis — 10 hours
Leisure — 46 hours. The balance goes here.
Of the 46 hours of leisure, I would spend a few hours hanging out with friends or playing video games, and spent the rest on the business.
If you do the same exercise (let’s call it the “168 hour breakdown”), you might see a different composition. When you get to the “leisure” section at the end, think about how you spend that time. How much of that time do you spend doing things you love? And how much of it is just idle time?
One secret as you get older is this: you’ll never have as much time as you do today. Once you start college, you’ll need to figure out how to pay for rent, food, and tuition. During college, you’ll start worrying about dating and messy interpersonal relationships. After college, you’ll start worrying about doing well in your job. If you decide to have children, then raising children is now your full-time job [4].
Today is the best time in your life to get started.
Obstacle #3: “I don’t have an idea”
Coming up with an idea is simple. When was the last time you thought:
I wonder why (something) doesn’t exist.
I’m frustrated by why (something) doesn’t work better.
(Something) seems like such an obvious invention — why hasn’t anyone made it yet?
Next time you have one of these thoughts, write it down.
You’ll quickly find that ideas are everywhere. What matters is if you care enough to follow through with them.
Something I’m continually awed by is how most of the world has yet to be built. Most products, inventions, businesses, and services that will eventually exist do not yet exist. And not by a long shot.
So there’s no shortage of ideas — what matters is that you find something that gets you excited. This energy is rare, but as a high school student you’re likely to have more of it. It’s when you add your energy to bringing one of these ideas to life that something magical happens.
At the very least, you’ll learn something you wouldn’t have learned in school. At best, well, there’s no limit. It’ll change the course of your life and — perhaps — ever so slightly change the world around you.
Footnotes
[1] In fact, don’t think too much about your business model (or “business plan”) until much later. At the start, just on focus on your value proposition. How does your product make someone’s life better?
[2] In hindsight, I had the extreme luxury of having supportive parents. They avoided hanging out with the type of parents who would compare their kids’ SAT scores and they didn’t pressure me to earn “resume-builder” awards. Later on, it would be my mom who suggested that I drop out of college.
[3] I don’t think I did a good job putting together my own “dream team.” One of my biggest regrets was being too independent, not looking for peers, and not looking for mentors.
[4] This is in no way saying you shouldn’t start a company when you’re older — I’d recommend entrepreneurship to people at any age and have the utmost respect for those who can manage to start a company while raising a family. But the advice holds that there won’t be an easier time in your life to start something than right now.