Every day after school, 14-year-old Hadiya Ali, who lives in Lahore, Pakistan, gets to work. First up is homework. Then, it’s on to her agency, for which she creates Instagram reels, TikTok videos, and YouTube shorts for clients looking to raise engagement across their social-media platforms.
In Sydney, 15-year-old Liam Brian earns more than $10,000 a month producing short-form videos for his clients. He recently took his parents on holiday to Bali with his profits.
Ali and Brian are your average teenagers, except that instead of scrolling through TikTok, they spend their spare time making videos for others. They are just two in a growing spate of budding entrepreneurs around the world who don’t want to wait until after college to start earning a living.
Many of these teenagers follow the tenets of Young Wealth, an online community for young entrepreneurs founded by a South African influencer named Maurits Neo. It’s the largest one for teenage entrepreneurs, with a little over 200 members ranging from 12 to 18 years old. Neo offers courses on how to create an online brand, build a business, invest, and follow a healthy, disciplined lifestyle.
Now 18, Neo began earning his own money at age 12 by selling candy at a premium at school. “I got banned from selling those sweets because all the kids were jumping off the walls with sugar,” Neo says. “So then I would buy lollipops in bulk and have friends in other schools sell sweets for me, and I would give them a percentage of the sales.” From there, he began drop-shipping—or, selling items from manufacturers directly to customers and taking a fee. He sold fitness products, such as a six-pack-ab stimulator. In 2020, at age 13, he started trading crypto, a couple of years after the crypto-market crash.
Despite this week’s market fluctuation, Neo’s crypto portfolio is currently worth more than $770,000. He invests in Ether and Toncoin, among many others. He also runs his own content agency, whose monthly profits he uses to buy more crypto. Neo sets a bit of cash aside in a bank account that, until recently, was a junior bank account. (IMDB, which doesn’t fact-check most user-added information, claims his net worth was $4 million in 2023.)
Over the years, as his clients’ social-media pages have gained views and followers, Neo’s personal accounts have, too. Suddenly, other kids his age were asking him for tips on investing or starting a business. Today, his personal Instagram has more than 244,000 followers. His movie-star good looks don’t hurt his follower count.
Hadiya Ali and Liam Brian are your average teenagers, except that instead of scrolling through TikTok, they spend their spare time making videos for others.
Neo’s favorite film is The Wolf of Wall Street, the 2013 comedy about a hedonistic stockbroker, and he often posts luxe photos of himself traveling to Dubai and standing next to Ferraris. But unlike Martin Scorsese’s movie, Young Wealth preaches discipline. Exhibit A: Monk Mode, a key principle of the teenage entrepreneurial community. A social-media trend that encourages unplugging, Monk Mode implores people to isolate themselves, establish a productive routine, renounce life’s guilty pleasures, and work on one goal or project for a specific amount of time.
For Neo, Monk Mode involves taking an ice bath early in the morning and, at bedtime, re-reading The Creature from Jekyll Island, by G. Edward Griffin, a “terribly boring book” about the Federal Reserve. “I used to etch the numbers into my wall,” he says. “Day one [of Monk Mode], like a prisoner in a cell counting off the days.”
Meanwhile, Ali, another member of Young Wealth, starts her days at five A.M. with a cold shower. Then she prays to Allah, journals, meditates, and eats a healthy breakfast of yogurt and granola before making her way to school. At night, after completing her homework and addressing her clients’ business needs, she reads Millionaire Success Habits, by Dean Graziosi. “I’m just a girl striving to be one-percent better each day, and you should too,” she wrote on Instagram.
“Let’s be honest, it’s 2024. If you don’t have a social-media presence, you can’t build trust [with clients],” Ali tells me. Her current goal is to make $5,000 a month—just above what the average American adult earns. She gesticulates when she talks, like a seasoned TEDx speaker. Yet her appearance—big brown eyes, round cheeks, long black hair pushed back in a half-do—reminds you that she’s still just a kid.
“Maurits succeeded very young because he started very young,” says Ali. That’s the second principle of the young-entrepreneur community: The younger you start, the better.
For Maurits Neo, Monk Mode involves taking an ice bath early in the morning and, at bedtime, re-reading The Creature from Jekyll Island, by G. Edward Griffin.
Brian says he joined the Young Wealth program in January just to network with Neo. He was making $3,000 a month at the time. Now, he earns $10,000 a month and is on track to triple that by the end of the year. He claims to earn more than both of his parents combined. (Brian declined to share details about their occupations.)
Because of Brian’s success, Neo asked him to teach a course on the Young Wealth platform detailing how to go from making nothing to making $5,000 a month with a short-form content agency. According to Brian, the formula for making money as a young entrepreneur is simple: “Go on YouTube; learn a skill; go on Discord; monetize that skill, and then build an agency around it.”
The community of young entrepreneurs goes beyond Neo’s Young Wealth program. Charly Mazuel, a 14-year-old personal-brand developer from Lyon, France, claims he’s read Atomic Habits, by James Clear, six times. He documents his journey making his first $100,000 on Instagram for his 173,000 followers. Mazuel, who has braces and wears round, thin-rimmed glasses, says that his lifestyle is not for everyone. For one thing, these young entrepreneurs are often bullied, both online and off.
In a recent Instagram reel, Mazuel recalls when a teacher told him that he should hang out with his friends instead of working so much. “I understand her point of view,” he says, “but I also know what I want in life.”
FOMO, a millennial phobia passed on to Gen Z, doesn’t affect these young entrepreneurs. “I think people wish they were me,” says Brian. “I don’t find these tasks fun. I find the result of these tasks fun … which is money.”
Asked if parents should encourage their children’s entrepreneurial ventures, Dr. Jaysree Roberts, a New York–based clinical psychologist with a background in child development, says, “Yes, with a lot of caveats. If you have a kid or a teen that is really interested in entrepreneurship and business … I think they should be encouraged.”
However, Roberts explains, parents must help their children understand that making money shouldn’t be their only goal. “These are the formative years where relationships, education, family, and experiences matter so much. It’s like the blueprint for what your life could look like.... We don’t want to create a world of future ambitious people that aren’t able to step back and take care of themselves and connect with other people.”
Neo, who is graduating from his high school as class salutatorian in November, believes he’ll be able to catch up on fun in the future. “Part of me does feel like I’m missing out,” he admits, “but at the same time, if you want to have an extraordinary life you can’t have [it] doing the things everyone else does. It’s just part of the sacrifices that need to be made, and I’m O.K. with it.”
“Especially now,” he adds. “I’m turning 18 next week, and everything sounds less impressive, so I have to go even further.”
Carolina de Armas is an Associate Editor at AIR MAIL
