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Teenpro: a new teenage entrepreneurship community
2 points by hannahwilson 4321 days ago
My name is Hannah Wilson, I am 17 years old, and two weeks ago I founded the online teenage entrepreneurship community teenpro (http://teenpro.net/).

I started teenpro because I'm very interested in entrepreneurship but always have a hard time finding any other teens that are also interested. Business is synonymous with boring, suits, and bald white men for most people my age. Even Google and the internet can't help me very much. There are surprisingly few resources for teens in business.

So I created teenpro to be the resource I always wanted. We discuss ideas and talk in the forum, the heart of the community, and we also have a blog and podcast.

I already have interviewed Seth Godin as the first guest on our podcast (dft.ba/-aDrs), and Dan Miller will be the guest for next week.

Do you know any motivated teens who are interested in joining?

2 comments

Building a community is very hard. Good luck!

My advice is to remember to post interesting things in the blog. A few of the most successful communities were bootstrapped with the readers of a blog. For example:

* StackOverflow started with the reader of the blogs of the founders (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ and http://blog.codinghorror.com/ )

* HackerNews started with the readers of one of the founder (http://www.paulgraham.com/ , well it doesn't have "blog post", it has "essays").

* Reddit also had initially many readers of pg, because he put in the essays a link for the discussion in Reddit, because he was an investor. I can't find the exact quote, but I remember a comment that said that HN was an attempt to build a site with a similar level of discussion of the early Reddit and /r/programming .

Also, when you have a long, interesting, unique blog post, remember to submit it here, for example http://teenpro.net/blog/podcast-ep1-seth-godin .

Thanks for the advice! I am definitely trying to have good content, and the blog and podcast are a part of that.

I will post the Seth Godin podcast now, thanks for the suggestion. This is the first day I've ever posted on HN, so I'm figuring it out.

Reconsider your perception of "bald white men"; there are more than a few here on HN, who tolerate you tattooed spiked kids pretty well.

(Obligatory: Oh yeah, and get off my lawn.)

Haha, well, nothing against them. My Dad and inspiration is one, after all. :)

And I am a non-tattooed, non-spiked red haired girl. (That's a mouthful.)

I'll make sure to trample your pansies like I always do next time I walk by your house.