Steal ideas from people who already won.
Twelve of the most useful business and money thinkers, translated for a 13 to 19 year old with no money, no contacts and a phone. Each profile gives you the core ideas, an example with a real teen side hustle, and one thing to try today.
You don't need to agree with everyone here, and they don't agree with each other. Read one profile, do its "try this today", and come back when you've done it. Ideas you act on are worth more than ten you've only read about. Where a line is a direct quote it's marked as one; everything else is our summary of their ideas in plain words.
Alex Hormozi
Entrepreneur and investor who built and sold gym and business-services companies. Author of $100M Offers (2021) and $100M Leads (2023). He posts a lot of free content on YouTube, Instagram and podcasts.
The value equation
How valuable something feels depends on four things: the result people want, how sure they are they'll get it, how long it takes, and how much effort it costs them. Push the first two up and the last two down.
The Grand Slam Offer
Stop selling a thing. Sell a bundle that solves every problem around the thing, so the price looks small next to what people get.
Guarantees, bonuses, scarcity
A guarantee removes risk. A bonus adds value. Real limits on time or spots make people decide now. All three must be true, or you lose trust.
The core four
There are four ways to get customers: talk to people you know, contact strangers, post free content, and pay for ads. Start with the first two because they're free.
The Rule of 100
Do 100 actions a day to get customers (messages, calls, minutes of content) for 100 days before deciding whether it works. Most people quit after ten.
Weak offer: "Dog walking, £10." Strong offer: "Your dog walked every weekday at lunch, a photo sent to your phone after every walk, first walk free, cancel any time. £10 a walk." The price didn't change. Every part of the value equation got better.
Write your offer three times. Each time, add one thing that makes the result more certain, faster, or easier for the customer. Then send it to 10 people you know.
Caveat: his numbers and stories come from running businesses as an adult with staff. The ideas about offers transfer well. The "work 100 hours a week" side of hustle culture doesn't have to, especially while you're at school.
Dan Kennedy
Marketing consultant and copywriter known for the No B.S. book series and Magnetic Marketing. His world is direct-response marketing: ads that ask you to do something now, so you can measure whether they worked.
Message, market, media
Get three things right in this order: who you're talking to (market), what you say to them (message), and where you say it (media). A great flyer handed to the wrong street fails.
Every ad asks for action
Don't just announce that you exist. Tell people exactly what to do: text this number, by this date, to get this thing.
Follow-up is where the money is
Most people don't buy the first time they hear from you. The second, third and fourth message wins the sale, as long as it's polite and useful.
Track everything
If you can't tell which flyer, post or message brought a customer, you can't do more of what works.
Don't be a commodity
If you look the same as everyone else, the only thing left to compete on is price. Be the specific, trusted, slightly different choice.
Car washing flyers: print two versions. Version A says "Text WASH to …". Version B says "Text SHINE to …". Drop A on one street, B on another. Count which word comes back. Next week, only print the winner.
Find everyone who said "maybe" or didn't reply to you in the last month. Send one friendly follow-up with a reason to reply now, such as a free extra this week.
Caveat: some old-school direct-response tactics push hard. Use the measuring and the clear asks; skip anything that feels like pressure or tricks.
Peter Thiel
Co-founder of PayPal and Palantir and the first outside investor in Facebook. Zero to One (2014), written with Blake Masters, grew out of his Stanford class on startups.
Zero to one vs one to n
Copying what works (one to n) adds a bit more of something familiar. Creating something new (zero to one) makes something that didn't exist. The big wins come from the second.
Competition is for losers
Businesses in a crowded market fight over thin profits. Aim to be the only option for a specific group of people.
Start small and dominate
Pick a market so small you can own it, then expand step by step. Amazon started with books.
Secrets
Look for important truths most people haven't noticed yet. They're usually hiding in plain sight.
Last mover advantage
Being first doesn't matter. Being the one that's still standing and still best does.
"Phone repair" competes with every shop in town. "The person at school who fixes PS5 controller drift for £15 and does it the same day" has no competition. Own that tiny niche, then add Switch Joy-Cons, then Xbox controllers.
Answer Thiel's question about your area or school. Then describe the smallest group of people you could serve better than anyone else.
Caveat: Thiel is also a controversial political figure, and the monopoly ideas are written about venture-backed tech companies. For your first £1,000, a busy, ordinary market is fine. The niche thinking matters when you want to grow.
Y Combinator & Paul Graham
Y Combinator is the startup program behind Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox and Reddit. Paul Graham co-founded it and writes free essays at paulgraham.com. YC's free Startup School videos are on YouTube.
Make something people want
YC's motto. Everything else (logos, business cards, a fancy website) matters far less than whether real people want the thing.
Do things that don't scale
At the start, recruit customers one by one, by hand. Airbnb's founders photographed hosts' flats themselves. Personal effort beats clever systems early on.
Talk to users
Ask customers what they hate, what they'd pay for, and what almost stopped them buying. Then change the product.
Launch fast
Ship a rough version and improve it. You learn more from ten real customers than from ten weeks of planning.
Schlep blindness
People avoid ideas that look tedious. That's exactly why tedious problems are often left wide open for you.
How to get ideas
Graham suggests: notice what's missing in your own life, "live in the future", and build what seems obviously needed to people like you.
Starting a study-notes business? Don't build a website first. Make one set of notes for one exam, sell it to five classmates by message, ask what was confusing, fix it, and only then think about a site.
Message five possible customers and ask: "What's the most annoying part of [problem]?" Don't pitch. Just listen and write down their exact words.
Also from YC: "default alive" means a business that will reach profit before its money runs out. For a teen business with no investors, aim to be profitable from week one.
Copywriting legends
Four writers whose ideas are still used in every ad, landing page and TikTok hook. Our Copywriting page turns them into templates and tools.
Gary Halbert
Halbert's famous lesson, paraphrased: if you opened a burger stand, the advantage you'd want most isn't the best recipe or location. It's a starving crowd. Find people who are already desperate for what you sell.
Teen version: before exams, students are starving for good study notes. In autumn, homeowners are starving for someone to clear leaves.
Eugene Schwartz
Schwartz taught that copy can't create desire. It can only point desire that already exists toward your product. He also mapped five levels of awareness, from people who don't know they have a problem to people ready to buy.
Teen version: don't try to make people want clean trash cans. Find people who already hate smelly ones and show them the fix.
David Ogilvy
Founder of the agency Ogilvy & Mather. He tested everything and believed in research, specific facts and headlines that carry the message.
Joseph Sugarman
Sugarman's slippery slide: every line exists to make you read the next one. Short opening sentences, curiosity, no friction.
Rewrite the first line of your flyer, bio or post so short and curious that someone has to read line two.
Morgan Housel
Writer and partner at the Collaborative Fund. The Psychology of Money (2020) is short stories about why smart people make bad money decisions.
Wealth is what you don't see
The car someone drives shows what they spent, not what they kept. Real wealth is money not spent.
Compounding needs time
Most of Warren Buffett's fortune came after he turned 65. Starting early beats starting big.
Enough
Knowing what "enough" is stops you risking what you have for things you don't need.
Room for error
Keep a buffer. Plans go wrong, and savings let you survive long enough for compounding to work.
You made £400 flipping sneakers this summer. Spending it on a new phone shows everyone you have money. Keeping £300 invested from age 16 is how you actually end up having it.
Write your own definition of "enough" for the next year. What would you actually buy, and what would you only buy to impress people?
Codie Sanchez
Investor and founder of Contrarian Thinking, who buys small "boring" businesses like laundromats and car washes. Author of Main Street Millionaire (2024).
Boring is beautiful
Unglamorous businesses often have steady customers, little competition and real cash flow, because cool people don't want to run them.
Buy, don't only build
You can buy an existing business that already works, instead of starting from zero. That comes later, but the mindset starts now.
Cash flow first
A business that pays you every month beats an exciting idea that might pay one day.
Trash can cleaning, gutter clearing, pressure washing and window cleaning are boring. That's why one teenager with a route of 40 regular customers can out-earn friends chasing viral fame.
Walk your street and list five dirty, annoying jobs people would pay to never think about again.
Warren Buffett & Charlie Munger
Partners who ran Berkshire Hathaway for decades. Buffett's free annual shareholder letters are on berkshirehathaway.com. Munger died in 2023; his talks are collected in Poor Charlie's Almanack.
Compounding
Returns earn returns. Small amounts left alone for decades become large. Buffett bought his first shares at 11.
Circle of competence
Invest in, and build, things you actually understand. Know where your knowledge ends.
Invest in yourself
Buffett often says the best investment is in your own skills, because nobody can tax or take them away.
Mental models
Munger collected big ideas from many subjects (math, psychology, biology) and used them to make better decisions.
Spending £30 and a weekend on a first-aid course for babysitting, or a free coding course, is "investing in yourself". It can raise what you earn for life.
Use the compound interest calculator to see what £25 a month from your age to 65 becomes.
Seth Godin
Marketer and author of Purple Cow (2003) and This Is Marketing (2018). He has written a short blog post every day for years at seths.blog.
Be a purple cow
After you've seen a field of brown cows, they're boring. A purple cow gets talked about. Make something remarkable, meaning worth making a remark about.
Smallest viable audience
Don't try to please everyone. Find the smallest group you can delight, and serve them so well they tell others.
People like us do things like this
People buy to fit in with a group they identify with. Know which group you're serving.
Lots of people sell friendship bracelets. Bracelets in your school's colors, with a tiny charm for each sports team, are a purple cow for one specific audience.
Finish this sentence: "My business is for people who ______ and want ______." Make it narrow enough that most people are not included.
Ali Abdaal
A former junior doctor in the UK who built one of the biggest productivity channels on YouTube while studying medicine. Author of Feel-Good Productivity (2023).
Feel good, then get things done
His central argument: you get more done when the work feels enjoyable, not when you force yourself through it.
Start before you're ready
He started making videos as a student, filming around exams. Consistency beat quality at the start.
Learn in public
Share what you're learning as you learn it. Your notes become content and your content becomes an audience.
Studying for big exams? Post a 60-second explainer every time you learn a topic. Your studying becomes a channel, and the channel can later sell notes or tutoring.
Pick one thing you learned this week and explain it in a 3-sentence post. Don't publish it yet if you don't want to. Just write it.
Mental model flashcards
Tap a card to flip it. Use the arrow keys or the buttons to move through the deck.
A mental model is a shortcut for thinking. Once "value equation" or "starving crowd" is in your head, you'll notice it everywhere: in ads, in shops, in your own offers. Testing yourself is one of the most reliable ways to remember things.
Card order is saved in this browser only.
Which thinker should you read first?
Three questions. Your answer appears as soon as you've picked all three.
Answer all three questions
We'll suggest one thinker and the exact thing to read or watch first.
Jump to profileWhere they disagree
Good thinkers contradict each other. The skill is knowing which idea fits your situation right now.
Work harder, or work smarter?
Volume wins. Do more outreach than anyone else and you'll beat luck.
Hours don't make you rich. Leverage does: code, media and capital that work without you.
Our take: use volume to get your first customers and learn a skill. Once you know what people pay for, look for leverage, like templates, content or helpers.
Find a niche, or join a busy market?
Competition is for losers. Find something nobody else does.
Boring, ordinary businesses like lawn care make steady money with no need to invent anything.
Our take: a lawn business is fine. Make it a little bit Thiel by owning one estate or one type of customer completely.
Plan, or just launch?
Launch fast, talk to users, and fix it as you go.
Stay inside what you understand and avoid big mistakes.
Our take: launch fast when it's cheap to fail, like a £10 flyer test. Be slow and careful with your savings and anything you can't undo.
Spend to grow, or save?
Reinvest in getting customers. Ads and offers pay for themselves if you track them.
Keep room for error. Savings let you survive surprises.
Our take: reinvest only in things you can measure. Put a fixed share of every payment into savings first. See the Money page.
Reading roadmap
Start on the left. Free options are marked; you can also borrow almost all of these from a library, or get audiobooks through apps like Libby with a library card.
Get your first customers
- The Almanack of Naval RavikantEric Jorgenson · Free online
- $100M OffersAlex Hormozi · free summaries and talks on his YouTube
- The Psychology of MoneyMorgan Housel
- Show Your Work!Austin Kleon · short, about sharing what you make
- How to Start a StartupPaul Graham essay · Free
Grow and sell better
- $100M LeadsAlex Hormozi
- Zero to OnePeter Thiel with Blake Masters
- The Boron LettersGary Halbert · letters to his son, quick read
- This Is MarketingSeth Godin
- Startup SchoolY Combinator · Free videos
- Do Things That Don't ScalePaul Graham essay · Free
Think like an owner
- Breakthrough AdvertisingEugene Schwartz · dense but legendary
- Ogilvy on AdvertisingDavid Ogilvy
- Main Street MillionaireCodie Sanchez
- Berkshire Hathaway shareholder lettersWarren Buffett · Free
- Poor Charlie's AlmanackCharlie Munger