For many teenagers, making a living on the side of their school work is top of mind.
But few do it as successfully as Harry Edwards.
The 20-year-old from Melbourne started a side hustle in his teens that is now turning over more than a million dollars.
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Harry’s company creates TikTok and Facebook video ads on the freelance marketplace Fiverr for leading e-commerce brands.
Harry says his entrepreneurial spirit started from a very young age, and it all started with a passion for filmmaking.
He wanted to buy a computer powerful enough to edit his videos and it was about this time that he made a graduation film for his primary school.
Selling CDs of the film for $10 each, Harry says this was the “first time I heard the word entrepreneur”.
At age 13, Harry had the desire to “earn enough money to buy a top PC”.
This led to him searching “how to make money online”.
“My curiosity led me to try Amazon FBA, but it required $1000+ to buy inventory, which I naturally didn’t have,” he tells 7Life.
“So instead, I moved to e-commerce and dropshipping, which I could start with a simple $30 per month Shopify subscription. And I could support the rest myself with organic marketing.”
When he first started his side hustle, Harry had a limited budget and chose to do e-commerce/dropshipping using $300 he had saved from birthday and Christmas gifts.
“This limited budget meant that I would follow every organic marketing method available to sell my e-commerce products, such as using Instagram theme pages and joining Facebook groups to promote my products,” Harry says.
But it wasn’t long before his business started to grow.
Juggling his school studies and building a business, Harry left school after two and a half years and moved out of home at the age of 16.
Due to his limited budget, Harry would utilise influencer advertising, usually paying an Instagram theme page in the relevant niche between $10-$50.
“From this, I was able to consistently generate profit, as I might pay $10 for the ad which would result in three sales of my $20 product, earning $60 in revenue,” he says.
“I did this consistently for some time until I had over $1000 in my bank account.”
It was his success on Instagram that led Harry to start running Facebook Ads, and in the space of one month, he broke even on one of his stores.
This allowed him to then scale his business.
He put it for sale on Shopify’s marketplace and sold it for $8000, which he says was a “huge surprise”.
“That sale was a huge moment, as it gave me real cash for the first time, up until that point I was working with under $1000, and hadn’t made any substantial profit,” he admits.
“Following the sale I had more than $11,000 in my account, which then made it easier to test and scale up. I used that money from the sale to start many other stores and test other products. If it was profitable, I would scale it up.”
On Harry’s best day of sales, he earned $US3800 ($A5727.38).
However, Harry’s entrepreneurial journey hasn’t been without its challenges.
“There were other times where I would test many products and lose money, to the point where I was in the negative,” he says.
“After two years, until the start of 2020, I had no money in my bank account. In e-commerce, you win some, you lose some.”
This was the catalyst that led Harry to then start his video editing business.
“I sold the things I had bought from my e-commerce business profits, such as my laptop and headphones, and started my video editing business.”
“I knew that every time I tested a product, I would pay a freelancer on Fiverr around $50 for a video ad, so I thought to myself ‘since I have no money, why don’t I refine my skills and edit those videos myself?’ And that’s what I did, and continued to do until I could further scale my business and build a team.”
Harry says that while he “made many mentors and friends along the journey”, a lot of what he did was on his own.
“My mum and dad didn’t really know what I was doing; they just knew that I was working on my online business that related to making videos and selling products online, not knowing the specifics, so weren’t able to give any technical support.
“However, throughout the journey, I made many friends and mentors with whom I shared my learnings, and vice versa. Apart from that, I was on YouTube studying everything I could find related to strategies to make money online.”
Last month Harry made $31,000 in revenue but says that “the profit on that is relatively small after paying my team and investing in other software businesses”.
“If I stopped investing in the software businesses however, my profit on this $31,000 would be roughly 50 per cent. From January to May we had an average monthly revenue of $40,000 a month.”
There’s no such thing as a typical day for the tech entrepreneur and he says every day varies depending on his schedule and what he is working on.
“Some days I will be working the entire day, from the minute I wake up, to the minute that I sleep, and this may go on for a few weeks if there are a lot of problems to solve,” he says.
“Certain days days will be productive while other days I will not do any work. That’s the beauty of Fiverr’s platform, as it provides the flexibility to offer services and connect with clients at any time, which means I can adjust my schedule based on demand and personal commitments.”
Most recently, Harry returned from a trip on a desert island, three hours by speedboat from the west coast of Sumartra, where there was no electricity, just an island with a small wooden hut.
But he says, “there are plenty of other times where he is working incredibly hard and not doing anything ‘fun’, other than work, but that’s work is often ‘fun’.”
In five years’, time, Harry sees himself continuing to grow his business and “doing what he enjoys”.
His advice to other young people wanting to start their own business is to “just do what’s fun and a little productive in our economic model. Platforms like Fiverr can be a great way to test your ideas and skills on a small scale”.
“You can offer services related to your passions and see what resonates with clients. This approach allows you to learn about your market and build experience while earning from something you love.
“That genuine curiosity will lead to something that you can earn from.”