How to become a millionaire by 25

Hi, obviously my real name isn’t Sue Denim. The reason for the generic performer name is that I’m 16 years old and despite being a nihilist I still crave approval from my peers so unless this thing turns out to be a black swan success of a blog you’ll know me as a boy named Sue.

I know what you’re thinking now: the world doesn’t need another teen over dramatizing their high-school experience on a blog. If I haven’t lost your attention by now it won’t be long until I do so I’ll get straight to the point. I made over $5,000 this year with less than 50 hours of work. I understand this isn’t very impressive, I’m sure other kids have made much more than this before. However, the things I do literally any one can do.

I’m not going to tell you how to make a complex product and create a billion dollar company out of it because you can find that everywhere else. What I’ll explain in my blogs are the simple things I as an average 16 year old kid am doing and have done to make money more efficiently and effectively than the average young adult who gets a job at Kroger or mows lawns; I’ve done both and there are better options.

The best part about any of my successes is that you can do the same thing. I’m completely average, nothing special or unrepeatable about me or the process. I get C’s in some of my classes, I don’t have a family with business background or money (my dad’s a fireman, moms a preschool teacher), I wrestle and play lacrosse for my schools team, drink at parties, and chase hot girls. Just your typical average or maybe even below average high-school student.

Because I’m nothing special I don’t feel qualified to teach you but, what I can do is share my experiences and developing thoughts with you in an attempt to give you something you can apply and hopefully benefit from. Whether you directly apply my work by doing the same thing I did to start making money or indirectly apply my theories and opinions loosely to form your own hustles, theories, and business’s take everything with a grain of salt.

If the topics previously discussed sound at all interesting to you, take a look at my first post about my latest business success that’s made me most of my money to date. I highly recommend it for almost anyone in between the ages of 15–24 that doesn’t already have a firm career plan. It gets straight to the point and is a short read so take a look, I promise it’s applicable to your life either directly or indirectly by using the fundamental principles found.

Thanks for your attention, I value you your time and hope to give you that value back with my first blog post you can find here. I’ve attached mixed it together with this post.

Let’s get right into today’s subject since you’re probably coming from my introduction post that briefly explained this post already.

Claw machines. I read an article online about how Warren Buffett used to put pinball machines in his local barber shops to make money as a kid so I translated that into today’s terms and came up with the idea to put claw machines in restaurants and other busy shops.

I bought a used machine on Craigslist for $750 and bought the plush toys for it from (link) for $200. I called around and offered to give owners 50% of the profits and in a couple days found a local restaurant 10 minutes from my house to put the machine in.

I make an average of about $350 a month from this one machine.

Claw machines are simple and will always make you money if you manage them right. Yes, no matter how well you could feel the claw and be the claw at one of those machines, you won’t win unless the operator wants you to. The strength of the claw can be set to an amount where it won’t pick up a feather. Modern machines can even pick toys up at full strength and decrease it dramatically right before the claw is above the prize shoot so players get the sense that they’re close to winning.

I set my payout ratio to about 1:8. With $1 plush and 50 cents per play I make $3 on each toy that is then divided by 2 because the owner of the restaurant gets 50% leaving my actual profit $1.50 on each toy. By testing all possible variables from price per play to type of plush I’ve found this ratio the most effective for this particular location. I recommend doing your own research to find the most effective combinations because every location and machine will vary greatly.

After I made my initial investments back I bought another machine and hired some friends on commission ( $100 commission per sale ) to market my machines for me in an attempt to completely automate my business.

There’s no reason you can’t do this to make a little extra money. If you’re coming up with excuses why this won’t work for you I will attempt to dispel them here: Time is not the problem, There’s not much time required of you, you can completely automate this business by hiring managers, salesman, etc. You don’t need to be a mechanic to program and fix these things. All machines have a manual and are very user friendly. You don’t have to be a good salesman to get your machine in a restaurant. You’re giving the owner money at almost no cost to them, a lot of businesses have unutilized space anyway. This may be one of the easiest sales pitches ever. Don’t have a trailer to pick the machine up with? Hire someone who does off of craigslist or borrow one. The main objection I assume most of you will have is getting the initial $1000 or so needed to invest. Save and grind. I made it by posting ads on craigslist and handing out flyers in my neighborhood to get mulching jobs during the summer. It sucked but it was worth it.

I hope you can use this to make money and apply the same basic principles to other businesses and areas of your life. If you liked this post please check out my next post which will help you with your new claw machine business! And if you didn’t like this post I hope to make it up to you in my next post about a more abstract business philosophy/theory that completely changed the way I viewed business and life.