How I Earned $100,000 at Age 16

so i recently just hit a pre-tax net worth of a hundred thousand dollars as a 16 year old kid to put a long story short i was slightly obsessive i got a bit lucky and i put the hours in and if you want more info then stick around because i'm going to be giving you the full journey right now all i ask in return is if you consider liking and or subscribing that's it now enjoy the video so i'm going to start here because i feel like it's important that i give some context on how i got into the space of making money and why i even wanted to become an entrepreneur in the first place so from a young age i've always seemed to gravitate towards doing something creative whether that be filming something making a game online and as i grew to be the ages of maybe eight nine ten there was only one thing that i ever really wanted to do being a youtuber i started my first channel in late 2017 it was your average run-of-the-mill 10 year old trying to do minecraft gaming let's play videos i posted about 58 videos in the space of about half a year but a few years passed nothing much happened but on my 12th birthday all of this changed it was about mid-2016 at this point and you could see from the videos i was posting there was a considerable increase in effort put into them it was around the same time that my youtube channel got monetized meaning that i could make money from the pre-roll ads that would be displayed at the beginning middle and end of my videos and almost a year later in june 2017 thanks to you know slightly clickbait in the fidget spinner trends we got our first bit of money we hit the withdrawal threshold at 60 and that was the first money i had ever made online at the time you know something like that feels like the world it was the proof of concept like whoa i can actually make money from doing this time passed and not much changed but in summer of 2018 the story starts to take a shift this is around the time where i really wanted to make some money i realized that a lot of these kind of get rich schemes and these people trying to sell you courses on youtube all of those kind of frail in comparison to just the classic provide value and make money from that i looked at what skills i possessed myself and almost instantly i realized oh i should go and edit for people the first thing i did is i went to the freelancing website such as fiverr.com up work and peopleperhour.com i made an account on all of these websites and i was basically just putting half an hour every day just trying to find clients and i kid you not when i say it took me over one month one month to get my first 10 order it was a guy on fiverr asking me to edit somebody's video for a birthday gift in five hours of work i earned eight dollars but i got a five-star review out of it and doing that was one of the most valuable things i have probably ever done months went by and although i had a five star review i got no more sales on any of the platforms so i decided to go back to the drawing board and i decided to reformat my gigs my profile and look at competitors see what they were doing and editing it accordingly a day after updating my profile i got another order this time for thirty dollars it was a quick compilation of some wedding shots and it took me around about three hours i got another five star review and thirty dollars to my name a week after that another order came in and quite frankly this one was a nightmare the reason that this was such a nightmare is because i gave this guy unlimited revisions and i probably did around about four or five revisions until i had to tell this guy look my computer is literally dying please no more revisions all right understandably he was a bit upset and uh he gave me a four star review but it was all right because we made 55 this time now okay let me bring you back to youtube because at this point you know i was still on and off uploading on my channel and there's almost like a passion project i decided to upload my short live fiverr experience of the free orders and i posted it and i remember the performance not being great at first it was really below average but later on in the story this becomes a huge changing point in the story now this leads me on to september 2019 where i think i was just watching a youtube video on how to improve your lighting and in my recommended a video popped up by peter mckinnon basically just going over his career as a product photographer slightly intrigued i go huh i got a good camera i mean i'm a decent photographer let me try this out and i kid you not in the space of two weeks this became my most lucrative service i got my first sale on september 21st 2018 for 95 and the best bit i only had to take three photos but once i got the products i spent probably around two hours shuffling my lights around trying to see if there was a good way to take these photos and i eventually arrived on this extremely b tech looking set up and my flawed thought process at the time was that oh just just fix it in post bad idea i mean come on come on what is that somehow it is honestly beyond me but i got a five star review for that and i got the 95 it was also throughout this time that i saw the opportunity to specialize into amazon product photography which not only meant i could sell bundles of seven photos but it also meant that per picture i was getting paid more as buyers would see me as specialized and therefore would trust me more and would more likely pay me money the next two months i made a total of 364 dollars that was after the five or 20 fee now look at this point in time there's something i haven't been telling you so when i originally created the product photography gig i didn't have any of my own work to use so uh i used other people's work work much better than i could ever dream of producing so in early october i had an order for 250 dollars two color variations and eight photos either color i did the usual i spent a whole weekend planning shooting editing the photos on a monday i got them sent to her a school day passes i don't think much of it but i go to check my phone again and i realized i've got a charge back i'm receiving calls from this lady i pick up one of them and i get her screeching in my ear basically just roasting me saying how amateur i am saying how bad my services were either way i got a chargeback and a two-star rating and this moment right here marked the start of the end of the product photography days but something else was on my mind and taking up my attention span youtube so in the start of november i started up a gaming channel which was originally intended to be a joke i saw these roblox promo code videos getting loads of views and as a bored 14 year old kid i was like hey let's just make dumb videos and there was no intent of making money there it was just it was just whatever this was until this joke somehow started getting me tens of thousands of views a day and in early september of 2018 that exact channel got monetized meaning i was earning money from it and throughout this period on a good day i'd maybe be making two to five dollars and unsure with the future of this channel i decided to look into drop shipping e-commerce and surprisingly enough instagram theme pages after watching some beheza videos i was slightly intrigued by the idea of making money on instagram so i decided to start a few up it wasn't that good i don't really have much experience but one of these would later become known as the cat vibe in february 2019 i released this video called how to get free robux where in short i went over like some ways from like 2016 from some like old blog post it was nothing special it had been done a hundred times before but it must have been my slightly misleading thumbnail or something like that but this video absolutely blew up and in the space of a week it went from zero to two hundred thousand views and this is where that channel really started to kick off february march and april seemed to breeze by and with youtube ad revenue being the only source of income i had february i made 450 march i made 700 and april was our first 1k month at 1050 and at the end of april this was around the time where i started doubling my upload consistency and i also started to take on sponsorships now at the time my videos were maybe getting 50 to 100 000 views a pop and in my business email i had these survey sites which do actually work they're just not that efficient they were reaching out to me saying hey look could you endorse our site for your viewers and say they can own free robux from it i'm being new to this whole youtube game i didn't really know how much they were going to pay me so i remember kind of just asking one oh what are your standard rates i was expecting maybe you know 50 to 100 because you know that that was probably what i was making off most of my videos in ad revenue but this dude said 500 dollars nearly 10 times what i expected him to say and now checking back in with the theme pages i'm just going to be brutally honest here i can't acquit him i just got 2 000 followers on both accounts and i really wasn't seeing the engagement i wasn't seeing the numbers yet and uh being impatient i just decided to kind of let it go and i slowly just lost interest in it and stopped doing it the following months being brutally honest here were literally just spent recycling the old free robux content making different thumbnails adding different titles and somehow it was still working because in may 2019 i hit a hundred thousand subscribers on that channel which is mad because i mean that was like a goal and a dream i dreamed of for like five years beforehand and on top of this due to the introduction of the sponsorships in may june and july i made a total of ten thousand dollars mei bringing in two thousand dollars june bringing in i think three point five thousand and july being our most lucrative month of around five thousand dollars mid august i had around 200 000 subscribers i was thinking to myself you know why didn't i just create another channel doing the exact same stuff so i did and in the space of just over a month at the end of september not only was this new channel monetized but it had 10 000 subscribers on itself it was this time in september where i randomly remembered the old theme pages that i have started up and i decided to change both my content and follow for follow strategy and pick one up again and almost instantly i started seeing results i gained an extra 3 000 followers and gained 2 million impressions that month for my videos which for reposting content 5 minutes a day was kind of surreal october november and december passed and randomly my second channel decided to blow up and in the space of a month it went from 20 000 subscribers to 100 000 subscribers and literally nothing had changed on both channels and they were both doing the best that they had ever done with september november and december bringing a combined total of over twenty thousand dollars and it was in early december 2019 where that old fiverr video i previously mentioned hit the algorithm and blew up after a year and a half of it being published but i think probably the most incredible thing about this all was the amount of money that i got paid for the views i got so typically on the gaming channels that i ran i would maybe make a hundred to two hundred dollars if i got a hundred thousand views but on this channel i made a thousand dollars from the 100 000 views i got that was kind of our opening because i realized oh okay this niche has a lot more money potential plus i enjoyed making them so much more than the stupid free robux videos i was doing so i decided to take up the opportunity and after a year of solitude on the jared west channel i uploaded an updated fiverr video the new year of 2020 rolled around and january again i topped the last month and it was an insane month for the channel three million views combined on both of the free robux channels and it was in january of 2020 where i hit my first ten thousand dollar month and it was also in the month of january where i uploaded two more videos to the jared west channel one being about how to grow on instagram and the other one being about my seven day drop shipping experience and they both performed really underwhelming throughout this month and also my favorite video died out so that meant on that channel i only made around about a hundred dollars that month and also to add insult to injury this was around the time on my instagram theme page which now had around about 50 000 followers got taken down for copyright reasons i'm not going to get too detailed into it but basically lab bible owned several pieces of content on my page but i'm not like this actually sucked so much because it had about 90 engagement so i was getting around 40 000 likes a post and i was getting around about 10 million impressions every single week but like here's where stuff starts to get ludicrous because in the months of february march april of 2020 i made a combined total of over forty thousand dollars and you may be asking yourself was there any radical shifts that i made to earn this forty thousand dollars well no and that was almost the weirdest bit because literally nothing had changed i was still making the same videos i was still posting the same amount the only thing that had slightly changed was the sponsorship prices and obviously the views i was getting it felt undeserved i had done nothing more but i had made a significant amount of money more next month i had huge plans to expand my channel automate different channels i was going to be cross-promoting make my own app make my own platform for the survey site i was almost sure i could make this ten thousand dollars a month easily turn into 20 30 40 maybe even 50 a month but it all came crumbling down on one sunday afternoon so my original roblox channel with around about 750 000 subscribers overnight got terminated this actually run my second channel completely into the ground because as soon as this happened i panicked and i assumed that it might have been a ban wave so i went to my secondary channel i deleted all of my videos off of there only problem is youtube is so heavily momentum based that after uploading a video of all of my other videos gone it got 10 times less views than it normally would and i was stuck with a channel getting maybe 10 000 views with nearly half a million subscribers some may came around and financially it was a huge shift because i went from making around ten thousand dollars a month down to making barely a thousands but the positive of this was that i now had the time and energy to invest my efforts and my energy into this channel right here the first few weeks of may were a grind on this channel i had i think maybe 3 000 subscribers i was getting maybe 500 to 1000 views a video i was on the brink of quitting multiple times but you know i just but i had the knowledge of my other channels knowing that as soon as one video goes you know all the rest of my videos are gonna get picked up by the algorithm noticed and i was right because in late may my how to grow on instagram video started gaining huge traction and by the end of june i had got 10 000 subscribers my other videos were now starting to get recommended and at this point in time we're talking mid-june mid-july i was making around about 40 to 60 dollars a day which you know wasn't terrible but i had my aspirations much higher i then made the decision to transition my videos into more entrepreneur based videos and instead of just making your run-of-the-mill videos every week just doing oh i tried this i was trying to make them feel like a movie feel like a documentary if you will and that leads me to where i am today 50 000 subscribers and i'm making around about 200 to 350 a day from this channel which is honestly ludicrous and uh i yeah i cannot thank all of you who watch and support my videos enough for that and i feel blessed to be in a position where i can say this but around a week ago we hit a net worth or a net total of a hundred thousand dollars in pre-tax money as a 16 year old bullet if there's one thing that i want you to take away from this video is that money is not owned overnight if you yourself have clicked on this video with the intent to try and make money the only way you're going to be doing that is by truly providing value unfortunately there isn't this secret pill or this secret formula to try and make money you have to put in the time you have to graft and you have to learn valuable skills wherever that may be whether that be marketing video creation music whatever that may be you need to produce valuable skills that people will be happy to pay you for instead of focusing on how can i make money focus on how can i provide value to people and in doing so opportunities will come to you they may be imperfect they may be in unsuspecting packages but if you just take on as much opportunities that you can and explore different regions explore different fields one day you'll be able to look back at yourself and go i was such a dumbass back then and on that note i hate to be this guy but if at any point in this video you enjoyed it please consider liking and or subscribing i can promise you your subscription box will not be spammed and they'll always be higher if not the same quality as this video give it a shot yeah i really appreciate it

Channel: Jared West

Views: 1,271,928

Rating: 4.9264336 out of 5

Keywords: $100000 at age 16, jared west, how to make money, money making story, how i made $100000

Id: xnEj8-MPWnY

Length: 17min 55sec (1075 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 28 2020