Justin GordonFounder, The LA Grind & The SF Grind

$10k Selling T-Shirts in HS to Startup Founder

9 Apr 2025 · 1 min

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1:02

In this first‑person narrative, the speaker describes how a chance opportunity in a high‑school computer class led to a website development side‑business. While serving as student‑body treasurer, they noticed the school’s t‑shirt vendor struggled with delayed payments. They offered to expedite payments for a 10% commission, effectively launching a t‑shirt resale service. By their junior year, this venture generated roughly $10,000 in revenue, a substantial sum for a high‑school student, illustrating how leveraging existing roles and solving a simple cash‑flow problem can spark a profitable micro‑business.

Chapters

I think we've talked about this a little bit before, but I started the first business in high school sort of on accident. Basically this teacher that I had in this computer class was like, oh, there's this one student that started a website development company and he is making, you know, whatever he was making a year. And I was like, I can build websites. Like, that's not that hard, you know, WordPress website. So did that in high school. And then really random, I was like the student body treasurer and there was a t-shirt company that would call me all the time. Because I would, interestingly, like in high school, they like let you sign checks. Yeah. So I was signing checks for this t-shirt company because in high school, like that's where most of your money is spent on like school spirit. And this t-shirt company was just like not getting paid on time. And I was like, I can get you paid faster if you give me 10%. So then I started a t-shirt business and I think Junior of high school is making like 10 grand a year, which, you know, in high school, I mean, it's kind of a lot of money. Great for then, especially.