What If Teenage Entrepreneurs Are Building the Wrong Businesses?

There is something slightly strange about the way we talk about teenage entrepreneurs. A young person starts selling clothes online and we ask how much they are making. They launch an app and we want to know how many users it has. They start a podcast and the numbers quickly enter the conversation. Downloads. Followers. Revenue. Growth. Perhaps even investment. We reach remarkably quickly for the same measurements we would use to judge a business run by somebody who has been doing it for twenty years.

But what if we are measuring the wrong business?

That question began nagging at us after an email arrived at Stories of Business from Svar Chandak, the teenage founder behind The Young Founders, a platform built around making entrepreneurship more accessible to high-school students. He had contacted us about its podcast, where young founders talk about starting ventures, making mistakes and learning what building something actually involves. We went looking at what he was building expecting, naturally enough, to find a story about teenage entrepreneurship.

Instead, we found ourselves wondering whether the businesses were really the most interesting part.

Imagine a sixteen-year-old decides to sell T-shirts. They choose a name, make a logo, find somewhere to produce them and put up a website. Friends tell them the shirts look brilliant. The first Instagram post gets plenty of likes. Mum buys one. An uncle buys another. Then almost nothing happens. A few months later the website disappears and a box containing 34 unsold T-shirts ends up underneath a bed.

Was that a bad business?

Possibly.

But it is worth looking inside the box.

Somewhere between deciding to sell the shirts and putting them underneath the bed, our sixteen-year-old probably encountered things that had previously existed only as words. Cost. Margin. Demand. Pricing. Stock. Marketing. Delivery. Customer service. They may have discovered that people saying they like something is not the same as people paying for it. They may have learned that selling a £20 product for £20 does not mean you have made £20. They may have discovered that postage is surprisingly expensive, that packaging takes time, that getting attention is easier than converting it into a sale and that having 1,000 social-media followers does not necessarily mean having 1,000 customers.

Perhaps they also discovered something about themselves. Maybe they hated selling but loved designing. Perhaps dealing with customers came naturally while keeping track of money was torture. Maybe the friend who was incredibly enthusiastic at the beginning became less enthusiastic once there were parcels to pack. Perhaps our teenager discovered that they were good at persuading people, terrible at organising themselves, surprisingly comfortable asking strangers questions or much more resilient than they thought.

None of those things necessarily rescue the T-shirt company.

It may still have been a terrible business.

But something was built.

This is where teenage entrepreneurship becomes much more interesting than the familiar stories about exceptionally young founders making extraordinary amounts of money. Those stories are understandably attractive. A seventeen-year-old building a company worth millions is unusual. Unusual things become stories. Yet focusing on the exceptional success can obscure a much larger and perhaps more useful question about all the ventures that never become exceptional at all.

What happens to the teenager who builds something that doesn't work?

For an adult entrepreneur, the answer can be brutal. Rent still needs paying. Employees may depend on the company. Investors may want their money back. A failed business can carry debt, damaged relationships and years of financial consequences. Failure is easy to romanticise when somebody else is paying for it.

For a teenager experimenting on a much smaller scale, however, there can sometimes be a peculiar window in which the economics are different. Not consequence-free, certainly, and not without risks, but different. A tiny venture built from a bedroom, school desk or phone may be allowed to be economically unimpressive while still producing something valuable.

That possibility changes the question.

Perhaps the teenager with 34 T-shirts underneath the bed did not build a successful clothing company. Perhaps what they built was their first encounter with demand.

The teenager whose podcast attracted hardly anybody may have built an understanding of distribution. The one who tried washing neighbours' cars may have learned what customers will pay for convenience. Someone selling cakes may discover the difference between revenue and profit. Someone building a tiny app may learn that creating something is only half the problem because nobody automatically arrives once it exists. Someone organising an event may discover that ten people saying “I'll definitely come” can somehow turn into four people actually arriving.

These are not lessons unique to entrepreneurship. A Saturday job can teach things a bedroom business cannot. Working in a restaurant can teach pace, hierarchy, teamwork and dealing with people when you would rather not. A supermarket shift can introduce the discipline of turning up at a particular time because somebody else is relying on you. Sport, volunteering, school projects and family responsibilities can all build capabilities that entrepreneurship enthusiasts sometimes mistakenly claim belong exclusively to starting businesses.

There is no particular reason every teenager needs a company.

But starting one creates a strange kind of classroom. The curriculum does not arrive in the correct order.

The customer complains before the lesson on customer service. The parcel costs more than expected before anybody explains unit economics. Nobody buys before the marketing lesson. The person you started the project with stops answering messages before the conversation about roles and responsibilities. A customer asks for a refund before you have thought about having a refund policy.

The problem arrives first. Then comes the desire to understand it.

That reversal matters because learning something when you need the answer can feel very different from learning it because somebody has told you the answer may become useful one day. “Margin” is an abstract business word until you discover you have been selling something enthusiastically while barely making any money. “Demand” becomes considerably more interesting after you have produced something nobody wants. “Customer acquisition” sounds rather grand until you realise it means finding somebody other than your mother who will buy from you.

The business starts asking questions.

And the young founder has to go looking for answers.

That may be the more interesting thing hiding inside platforms such as The Young Founders. On the surface, the proposition is about helping teenagers start ventures. But underneath it sits another possibility: perhaps entrepreneurship can be a mechanism through which young people discover what they need to learn, what they are good at and, occasionally, what they never want to do again.

The last one matters too.

We tend to treat discovering a passion as valuable and discovering a dislike as disappointing. Yet finding out at sixteen that you absolutely hate selling things might be useful information. So might discovering that you love solving operational problems but have no interest in being the person at the front of the business. The teenager who starts a company may emerge wanting to become an accountant, designer, engineer, marketer or software developer rather than an entrepreneur.

Would the business have failed then?

It depends what we thought it was supposed to build.

Perhaps this is where adults can accidentally impose the wrong scoreboard. Revenue matters enormously to a real company because eventually a company that cannot sustain itself stops being one. Customers matter. Profit matters. Cash matters. Pretending otherwise does young entrepreneurs no favours. There is a danger in turning every failed teenage side project into an inspirational success story simply because somebody learned something from it. Sometimes a bad idea is simply a bad idea. Sometimes money is wasted unnecessarily. Sometimes enthusiasm would benefit from a little more preparation.

But perhaps there is also a danger in importing the adult commercial scoreboard too early.

If a seventeen-year-old starts a venture that makes £200 and teaches them more about pricing, customers, negotiation and themselves than they knew six months earlier, what exactly are we measuring when we call it small?

The question becomes even more interesting as starting things becomes easier. A teenager no longer necessarily needs premises, substantial stock or even much capital to test whether somebody will pay for something. A phone can be a camera, shopfront, marketing department, payment terminal and communications system. Digital platforms can connect a young person to customers they would never otherwise meet. AI can help with things that once required specialist skills. None of this makes building a successful business easy. If anything, lowering the barrier to starting may simply reveal how difficult everything after starting actually is.

And perhaps that is useful too.

Because the great promise of easy entrepreneurship can collide very quickly with reality. You can build the website. Nobody comes. You can create the product. Nobody buys it. You can produce the content. Nobody watches. Technology can remove some of the friction involved in making something without removing the much harder question of whether anybody wants what you have made.

That is an extraordinarily useful collision.

It teaches something that reaches far beyond entrepreneurship: the world does not automatically reward effort simply because effort was made.

Value has another participant.

The customer. The audience. The user. The employer. The person on the other side.

Perhaps this is why the teenage business that disappears should sometimes interest us as much as the teenage business that succeeds. The successful company tells us something about the market. The unsuccessful one may tell us something about the founder.

There is a temptation to imagine young entrepreneurship as a pipeline: encourage more teenagers to start businesses and eventually more adult entrepreneurs will emerge. Perhaps that happens. But it may be too narrow a way of looking at it. The person who experiments with a business at sixteen does not necessarily need to become a business owner at thirty for the experiment to have mattered.

They might simply become an employee who understands customers unusually well.

Or a manager who once discovered how difficult it is to persuade somebody to buy something.

Or an engineer who understands that building the product and finding the market are different problems.

Or an adult who knows that enthusiasm is not evidence of demand because somewhere, perhaps still in their parents' house, there is a box containing 34 T-shirts that proved it.

Which brings us back to the strange way we talk about teenage entrepreneurs.

Perhaps we are too quick to look at the company they are building and ask whether it is any good.

There may be another business under construction.

It doesn't have a website. It doesn't have customers. Nobody can invest in it. Its value will not appear in revenue figures, podcast downloads or the number of parcels leaving the bedroom.

It is the young person themselves.

And if that is true, perhaps some teenage entrepreneurs really are building the wrong businesses.

Just not in the way we first thought.