subject: Start Up Of A Nineteen Year Old Entrepreneur [print this page] Taylor Malahoff, born and raised in a northern town of British Columbia, began his journey into entrepreneurship one summer when he became very ill with a disease known as Ulcerative Colitis. This disease, being common in nineteen year old boys, forced him to quit his current employment and to regain his health. "It was more of a motivator and since I wasn't working I had a lot of free time." says Taylor.
He quickly began to scour online sources and methods to make money online while recouping for his second year at the University of Northern British Columbia's computer science program. Taylor found the process slow at first, shifting through tons of bogus and scam ways but then eventually found a couple marketing forums and began to try out methods that seemed to work for others. " I remember one method that had you press a button for free money everyday but you would only get so many clicks. The real money was in the referrals so it was a total pyramid scam. I only made fifteen dollars before I gave up on it. Not lucrative at all."
After wasting his time on petty ways for chunk change he started to focus on the better methods. Taylor began to read about Dropshipping, which is when you don't take care of inventory or stock but contact suppliers to ship product right to your customer's address. This brought up a new problem, where to find the suppliers and how to market to customers? "I found out with a little more reading and searching that suppliers were everywhere and that prices could be a lot lower than retail in North America, the big thing was calculating shipping costs."
After finding suppliers, Taylor started selling his wares on Ebay, the online auction provider. " I started to make some decent money if I really tried to put the effort and time into it. The only problem with Ebay was they took a huge percentage of the profits on each sale. I knew I had to start up my own website and find a good catalog of items from my suppliers."
With his money that he made from his auctions, Taylor reinvested in his business and purchased a website and domain name. "Finding the name was the toughest part, I had to think of something unique. My mother actually gave me the name as I said I wanted to sell fun and newfangled gadgets and electronics. She just blurted out FunFangled and that was the name."
Taylor launched his website and is now trying to make it a success. He has switched his major from computer science to marketing and says that he will focus more on his school work to get his degree rather than his business. If his business project hits it off then that will be an added bonus. "It's actually been very fun to learn a few tricks here and there for online businesses, and I plan on continuing to grow and work on my website and product catalog. Hopefully in the near future I'll have my degree and I'll have my business. The sky is the limit."
