Young Entrepreneurs - Donny Ouyang

Donny Ouyang, of British Columbia, Canada, built several successful internet businesses before turning sixteen.

His ventures, which include kinkarso.com, christianavenue.org, battleforums.com, and live.tv.ws, have brought in significant income. Donny's recent ebook outlines how he built from zero income at age 11 to $6,500 per month at age 15.

Find out more about Donny's ebook.

Donny didn't start out in life with ambitions to be an internet entrepreneur. His early aspirations to drive a taxi and later desire to become an engineer were eclipsed by his unintended successes online.

A curious mind coupled with a desire to hack the code for the virtual world of Neopets saw a 12 year old Donny head for his father's bookshelves.

"My dad, who had a degree in computer science, had a whole stack of books on HTML, CSS, Java, etc. I was curious one day and found it pretty cool after flipping through a couple pages of basic HTML. That's how it all started."

Donny's mother, Hongyan, worried about the amount of time her son was spending on the computer, limited him to half an hour a day.

After he sold his first website for $200, she relaxed that rule!

Donny is upbeat about the future of internet businesses.

"The Internet is growing at such a huge rate, it is impossible to ignore the potential. Never before have we been able to use such mediums to communicate with our visitors, customers, clients, and prospects. With the Internet, anyone of any age, gender, nationality, race, or financial situation can profit huge. The Internet equals the future."

Donny balances his business activities with a normal school life, including an active social life.

"Honestly, I didn't think much about my 'business' at all, which is probably why most of my friends don't know about it - yet," says Donny. "After school and extra-curricular activities, I spend around 2-4 hours each day working on my projects."

With a productivity many adult entrepreneurs would envy, Donny has turned his 2-4 hours a day into a virtual empire of profitable websites.

"One thing that I believe 100% in is the fact that 'the less you do, the more you get'," he explains. "Basically, I only do what I am good at doing (marketing, packaging, managing, etc), and I leave everything else for the professionals. I outsource for web designers, programmers, and writers to develop my new websites."

"One of my current websites is BattleForums.com," he says proudly. "It is one of the largest gaming communities out there and has over 60,000 members who are responsible for over one million forum posts. Another project that I am currently working on is LiveTV.ws. It is a Internet TV resource website where users may watch TV channels from around the world at a click of a button. It currently has around 22,000 members."

In addition to owning sites which earn advertising revenue, Donny has become a master of trading in websites, known as "web site flipping".

A recent newspaper article described Donny as "cyberspace's equivalent to the antique dealer who cruises garage sales, picks up gems and then resells them."

"The last site I sold was a StarCraft site," said Donny to reporter Nelson Bennett. "I bought it for $2,000. In two weeks I sold it for $4,250."

Whether it is collecting business cards, video games or online communities for religious groups, someone, somewhere has developed a web site for it. But they may not want to keep it, or may not know how to market it. Donny finds websites that he thinks are marketable, buys them, sometimes modifies them a little, and then resells them.

Despite being too young to enter into financial contracts, Donny has secured a bank loan to expand his business. He explained how he did it during a recent interview with Retire@21.

It's actually quite an interesting story. Back in November of 2007, I was looking for funding for one of my active projects. After having no luck with any of my online contacts, I decided to see if I could find funding elsewhere. I whipped up a business proposal and went to a Royal Bank local branch with my dad to see if I could get some capital. They had a look, loved what they saw, and decided to go ahead and give me the investment loan.

Of course, I wasn't legal age to have something like this assigned under my name. My dad was generous enough to have the loan listed under his company's name, and that's how it all worked. It went a lot smoother than I had imagined.

Donny's advice to other young entrepreneurs?

Focus on a single project, and don't do anything until you are finished with that particular project. It's the bare basics. Half done of anything is not done. There is no middle ground. The first step to success is to get things done!