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Ask HN: Funding for a teen startup

3 points by gsmaverick ↗ HN
I am 17 years old and have had an idea for a new educational app for almost a year. I have been thinking about it and fleshing it out in my head and I want to go for it. There are a few problems though. The biggest one being capital to build the product. The education industry isn't an easy market to tap and I doubt I would be able to find good sales people to work for equity. I was wondering what I should do? Any advice or suggestions?

11 comments

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thepanister
Apply for funding from ycombinator: http://ycombinator.com/s2009.html

And you will know.

gsmaverick
I thought that ycombinator was more into the consumer web app side of things but I will give it a try. And the other thing is that I don't have a cofounder as of yet.
thepanister
Well, single founder is not good, but it's possible.

Just see if you can do it alone, if you can't, then try to ask one of your friends to do it with you.

pg
It's not a great territory for startups, because the buying decisions are made by such bureaucratic organizations. There's no group of clever, poor early adopters for a startup to start with.
thepanister
Well, maybe if it's about k12/high school education, but if it's about computer education/CBT for example, the situation might be different!

I had a website that I was selling advanced CBT on it, like PHP, C, cisco, perl training videos, and it was doing very good. I had to stop it because the items that I was selling were illegal, and this was the only reason. :)

flavio87
Yeah I can relate to that. Selling to teachers/schools can be very tedious, and they are sometimes "anti-business", they don't want to see someone make profit in the classroom. You migh have an edge since your that young --> people will think it's very cool that you start something and you'll have "junior bonus". Try to capitalize on that.
gojomo
So you need a longer runway and perhaps even friends in the bureaucracy to crack the traditional mass education market... things a teen (or ultra-lean startup at any age) might find especially hard.

But maybe the idea can appeal to the growing nontraditional markets: tutoring, distance education, self-education, corporate training, for-profit higher-ed (U of Phoenix, ITT, etc.).

Also: internet in the schools brings advertising at a level far beyond the controversies that affected ChannelOne/Edison in the 90s. Not all school computers have ad blockers, do they? So perhaps even an ad-supported model would work for a really lean educational web-app startup -- and there's little more lean than a single teen founder.

pg
I think you're better off finding something that can start outside the education market, then have it be adopted by them when it reaches the point that it would be ridiculous not to.
minalecs
build it yourself. If you believe in the idea that much, take the time to learn how to do it.
albertsun
What funding do you really need? Living with your parents takes care of all your biggest expenses. All you have to do is write code. And you have plenty of time to learn how to write code if you don't know how to.