The Youth Blog

Milun Tesovic, the co-founder of Metrolyrics.com was awarded the Global Student Entrepreneur Champ award. He is doing a management degree in Entrepreneurship at the Simon Fraser University. Metrolyrics.com was the first website to start offering a huge database of legal, licensed music lyrics. At the time, it was launched Milun Tesovic was just 16-years old. He is a young entrepreneur. This years, that is 2009 Global Student Entrepreneur awards were held in Kansas City, Missouri

Like all good business, Metrolyrics was launched as a product that the audience requires. This is what Milun Tesovic said,

“There were a lot of places where music and video games were available, but what I saw was music lyrics wasn’t that well represented. So I made a quick script with my own code and started a database of music lyrics. … It cost $9 a month to buy up the domain.”

This means that Metrolyrics started with a capital investment of $9 only. Amazing. Metrolyrics serves a very high number of visitors, 36 million unique monthly visitors, 100 million monthly page views, and is currently the 3rd largest music property in North America. The most recent achievement for Tesovic is that AOL music provider has tied up with Metrolyrics to be the official lyric service provider.

And what was his passion behind starting Metrolyrics?

“When I was 15, I knew that after I got my driver’s license, I wanted a decent-looking car,” he said. “I had my own hosting company (on the Internet), and then I started analyzing where a lot of people go on the web.”

And he did fulfil his dream. See photo.

Ruth Amos with StairSteady

An innovative idea and some hard work is all you need to strike gold. Ruth Amos seems to be the best example for that. At the age of 16, Ruth designed a handrail as a part of her GCSE project. Today, three years down the line Ruth is running a firm that promises to churn out millions in a few years. She is also the proud winner of the Young Star award at the Women of the Future awards in London.

Aiming only for a good grade in her design and technology GCSE project, Ruth had no idea her innovative project would become a boon for the elderly and differently challenged.

Ruth’s teacher had suggested she try to make something that could help elderly people like his mother who had difficulty in climbing the stairs. The metal bar Ruth designed is attached to a metal stair rail. The StairSteady  bar is pushed along the rail as the person climbs up or comes down. Friction locks the bar in places so that the user can take as much time as he needs. This also helps the user to balance and break a fall. The bar can be pushed against the wall when it is not needed.

After winning the Young Engineer of Britain award in 2006, Ruth started her own business in partnership with Minivator, the UK’s second largest manufacturer of stairlifts.
The phenomenal success of  StairSteady http://stairsteady.net/ (which costs £470 and is bought at a rate of more than three per week) is making Ruth consider expanding her business internationally.

College is the stage of life for an amazing learning experience and daily assignments. Students in college know that this is their last passage to finally enter the ‘Real’ world where inaction, lethargy or carelessness can cost you a lot more than the grade.

Citisoles.com

Similar college students Katie Shea and Susie Levitt decided to take the plunge into the business world while they are still at college. They launched their company citisoles.com with a high spirit of entrepreneurship. Their enterprise is aimed at solving issues related to painful high-heel shoes Katie and Susie’s product is a functional, flat shoe alternative to pain inducing high heels. They launched their company while studying in their college. Their company Citisoles is launched right on their NYU campus.

This will most probably be a successful venture simply because Citisoles is aiming at solving a very practical problem.College is perhaps the best place to begin your business startup (if you are interested in starting one, that is!). Why? You may ask. The main reason being that as college goers you have a high value for money and know to adapt to shoe-string budgets and cutting costs against extravagant expenditures.

Moreover, the younger you are, the higher levels of creativity you have. Then there is a trump card that gives college entrepreneurs a big advantage.Guy Kawasaki came up with a great post for this.

As Guy Kawasaki puts it in his blog post,

College students have a bit of an ‘ignorance is bliss’ advantage, having not yet endured the hard knocks of a dog eat dog business world,”

How true! As years progress man becomes more mature and he unfortunately finds out that life is not all that much of a piece of cake that he had imagined it to be in his younger years.