@FinanceYF5: 1/ Thirty kids, two days, earned $587.85. This is the final scorecard of a startup hackathon for kids aged 9 to 16 — pick a field you're familiar with, build something, present it to 20 strangers, and earn your first dollar. One of the kids emailed my mom, my dad, his two best friends, and Mark …

1/ Thirty kids, two days, earned $587.85.

That’s the final scorecard for a group of 9- to 16-year-olds at an entrepreneurship hackathon—pick a field you know, build something, put it in front of 20 strangers, and earn your first dollar in life.

One of the kids emailed my mom, my dad, his two best friends, and Mark Cuban, asking to partner up.

In the end, the only one who wrote back was his mom. https://t.co/RY4d2XrFej

2/ The speaker on stage was Joe Liemandt—dropped out of Stanford in 1990 to found Trilogy, made the Forbes 400 before turning thirty, now head of Alpha School.

After reading out his email list, the kid asked: how do you get someone to see your thing and want to buy it on the spot.

Joe said: start with family and friends, because they trust you; and you need more patience—a kid’s clock runs faster.

3/ A kid building an ADHD product asked: if I spend two or three hours a day on this with AI, how long until launch.

Joe said: a product is never finished. Don’t plan around launch—plan around when it gets into the hands of the first person willing to try it.

Another kid, building a Rubik’s Cube teaching product, asked how to find customers. Joe told him to go write content in enthusiast communities first—“build an audience first, then build the product.”

4/ One kid asked: how do you turn customers into a group that vouches for each other.

Joe called this a “advanced class” question—community, word of mouth, and ongoing customer relationships are the layer that actually scales a business.

Another kid asked what’s the most underestimated part of starting a business. Joe answered with one word: time. “Three years in, still three months to go.”

5/ A kid building a Shopify agent asked how to find good customers who “truly see the value.”

Joe pushed him to quantify it: how much money does this actually save a store owner. The kid calculated it was roughly nine to ten times the cost of hiring one employee.

Joe said he could connect him with Shopify’s former CTO—but only one line’s worth of opportunity: turn it into a concrete number.

6/ A nine-year-old couldn’t quite explain what he wanted to build. Joe rewrote his pitch on the spot: make the best fourth-grade math course in the world, because I’m a fourth-grader myself and I love math.

The principle: keep your first customers narrow, put yourself where your real passion is, and your personality will show through.

7/ Across the nine projects, the biggest single sale was $249—the smallest was just $14.

Is that failure or success? Is this just a weekend kids’ hackathon, or an entire way of thinking—from idea to getting a stranger to actually hand over money?

What do you think?

Read the original: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/M8xNBRSQvh5l93mcpOpLiw…

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