Just as any other typical millionaire John Snow was a poor kid insure what to do with his life as a teenager. Sounds familiar right? Well in fact it is not your typical millionaire story as once again we are going to take a very self determined man and see how he got there.
Would a 13 year old John sitting with his card in a school library on a break imagine earning tens of millions of dollars of websites? No but it was surely his encounter with the Internet and it’s algorithms that gave him a head start.
Becoming a self described young programmer for the first few years of his road to success, in his own words:
“So I didn’t know what I was doing, I was just reading books and I found the hack that if I read the reference books, like the For Dummies books, they were considered a 10 out of 10 points but they had a lot of pictures in them. So, I was able to rack up a bunch of points by reading these dummies books and I’d always been interested in computers even though we didn’t really have them growing up, I was always fascinated by them. So, put two and two together, I started reading these how to build websites For Dummies books and I said, wow, this seems like something I could actually do. So I started building my first few little websites and blogs and I didn’t even know really what I was doing, but I just was putting stuff out there and I was blown away that people started commenting and from all over the world, I didn’t know where they were at. So that just like, it blew my mind. I was like, “Whoa.” Then once I found that I could make money from it, well, I could make websites for other people and they would pay me to do that, that’s when it all clicked and it happened for me at a very early age.”
As soon as that phase ended be immediately delved into actually developing websites. This love for digital was what ultimately would lead to his current net worth:
“So I had to really like finesse that deal because I was working 16 hours a day, seven days a week. I had gained like 80 pounds running that business. I was working a lot. I’m in charge of a lot of people’s money. I had an expensive office, lots of employees. It was really, really hard. I don’t know if I didn’t sell that business, it would have been really tough for me to keep going. Once I sold that business, six months later, I went through a burnout and depression. But that’s from 13 years old to not knowing what I’m doing to 21 years old, multimillionaire and to depression/burnout, a delayed burnout to where I’m at now. It’s been… lots has been going on.”
But how did he get from a successful webmaster to actually owning the Internet’s most popular oral care brand Snow? Well, humble beginning, personal experience with oral care and family values have played a very big role in that.
“Yeah. So, I’m obviously known for Snow. At Snow is the Internet’s most popular oral care brand. We’ve worked with all kinds of celebrities and all of that. That brand has really taken off. I think it’s a refreshment in a dormant category, a very large category like oral care. It’s traditionally very tough to break into an industry like that. I chose that market and that industry because I wanted difficulty. I had been going through some tough times again. So this was like a… it’s funny how you get these realizations through adversity and speaking through with the time we’re going through right now with adversity, I think it gives you time to pause and think sometimes and really prioritize what matters. For me, I had sold my software company at 21 years old and I had more money than I would ever imagine. To me, I was a billionaire, in my head, right? I was like, “Oh my gosh, I made it.”
Next goals after such a tremendous rise already? After even Corona sales drop defeated successfully by his business with sky’s the limit!
“Now, I’ve learned delegation and having a great team because you can only do so much yourself. Nowadays I spend most of my time on the phone, in meetings, travelling to close deals. I spend time doing that but I can still get my hands dirty. I can go and… I can develop, I can go write code. I feel like too many people are afraid to do those things. They’re like, ah, I’m not a math person. Ah, I’m not this. It’s funny because everybody is a money person when the money comes around, but nobody wants to be a math person and nobody wants to be a programming person and nobody wants… you’ve got to be an everything person if you want to do it well and you want to be big. If you want to be respected by your team, you have to kind of do it all.”
