Like a Boss

By the time Buster Scher let his parents know what he’d been doing every night up in his room, his basketball-fan website was attracting more than 500,000 visitors a week. “I just hadn’t had a need to tell them,” he says. “I was handling it on my own.” He had started the site the summer after freshman year, in 2012, when Buster’s family moved from Brooklyn, New York to Connecticut. “When you switch schools, you don’t have a crazy social life. I wasn’t playing any sports yet, for instance,” says Buster. But he was a sports fan, especially of fantasy basketball. And he noticed that, unlike other fantasy sports, like football, basketball didn’t have a great online gathering spot. So, with time on his hands, Buster created one on Facebook: “I was spending a couple of hours a night writing and posting long stories about fantasy basketball,” he says. “Even back then, I think I would have said, ‘That’s not a good strategy, because no one reads long on Facebook.’ But I was doing it for fun, so I just did what I wanted.” In fact, the site did start getting some play, and eventually, it became Hoops Nation, an all-basketball, all-the-time web hub covering everything from high school teams to pros. “Whatever was awesome, I wanted to cover,” he says. Last March, Hoops Nation’s Facebook page alone was reported to have a reach of 35 million. Buster now oversees a web of writers, all paid through advertising, and manages partnerships with clothing brands. Plus he gets sweet perks: free sneakers, passes to games, and he's met (and texts!) star athletes. “When I told my parents what I was up to, I had about half a million views a week,” says Buster. “They were in full support. I think if you’re starting from scratch and tell a parent you’ll be on your social media page a couple of hours every day, they might think it’s better spent on schoolwork, but if you’ve already gotten a little recognition, it’s easier to accept.”

The road wasn’t without bumps: For a while in sophomore year, Buster had tried to branch out into other sports leagues—the NFL, MLB—and hired friends to write the content. But when those sites puttered along at a mere thousand views a week, he made a business decision to lay his pals off. “I wanted to be a more legitimate, professional company, and I decided to dial back to my strengths,” he says. “It was a lot of painful trial and error. But I have dyslexia and ADHD, and I like to learn by doing.”

Blowing up while still a teen, he says, hasn’t been a problem—“just a little more annoying.” His mom or dad, for instance, has to sign his legal contracts until he turns 18 next year. Then, he may have even more time to dedicate: “Touring colleges showed me that the traditional system of studying rather than doing might not be the best thing for me. So my plan is to take a gap year, do my thing, and see where it takes me.”

As long as she can remember, Madison Greenspan has been a maker: “My friends and I used to craft decoupage boxes, make soda can earrings—a lot of recyclable stuff,” says Madison. When the slime craze hit, the then-sixth grader went all in. “I thought it was really cool how you could make it so many different ways, fluffy, glittery—however you wanted,” she says. “It became a passion.”

But one of her preferred ingredients, the clear glue used to make crystal-clear slime, was sold only in small bottles—and it was flying off store shelves. One Saturday, after unsuccessful trips to three different craft stores, a frustrated Madison found herself asking her dad, who owns a consumer products company, whether they could just make the glue instead. “He told me, ‘That’s actually a good idea,’ but parents say that to their kids a lot, so I thought he was joking,” she says. “I was really surprised when he came home with a test bottle!” From there, though, it was game on. Madison tested all the possible formulas for slime-ability: “There were a lot of glue failures,” she says. “It started out really watery.” She worked with her dad on developing her branding and product design, and setting up a web page: slimemaking.com. When Maddie Rae’s Slime Glue (named after Madison’s nickname) was launched at the end of 2016, it was picked up by the Paper Store and Amazon. Thousands of gallons were sold in just the first few months and got rave reviews. “I was still doing normal things, like school and Scrabble Club,” she says. “But I also ran our Instagram account and I’d ask my dad for the sales figures every day.”

If it hadn’t been for the gifted and talented program at his elementary school, Jaylen Bledsoe might be living a whole other life. “They had a whole technology program,” he remembers. “They showed us what was involved in music and video production, graphic design, crime scene investigation. I was like, ‘Hey, this is powerful and cool.’”

When he started getting paid $150 an hour, Jaylen realized he was making as much as his mom—though she didn’t know it—and decided to formalize the company. That was when he ran into his first roadblock: A banker refused to open up the checking and investment accounts Jaylen wanted. “The only ID I had was from my middle school,” remembers Jaylen. “He kicked me out of his office, and I went home pretty upset. But I live under the motto ‘GPS’: If I get off track, I reroute.” He cold-called a local business attorney who, impressed by Jaylen's moxie, offered him free legal help in exchange for tech services. It was a deal. “He helped me map out the legal premises of my business, Bledsoe Technologies. It was in the name of an adult family member until I was 18, when it automatically rolled over to me,” Jaylen says.

The experience also led to a new line of work: By age 13, Jaylen had expanded into consulting for small businesses—helping them pick the right technology for their needs—and hired two consultants. By 15, he had 150 contractors under him around the country, and was said to be worth over 3.5 million dollars. These days, Jaylen runs the Jaylen D. Bledsoe Global Group, but he also spends time as a motivational speaker. He’s especially inspiredby talks with underprivileged kids and teen entrepreneurs. “I believe success is only as big as we can dream,” he says. “Kids in kindergarten always think that they can be astronauts. By the time they’re in high school, they forget that. We need to keep those dreams big.”