Introduction
Discover the incredible teenage dropshipping success story of Highland Smith, an 18-year-old entrepreneur from Australia who managed to build a thriving business while still attending school. Starting with just $200 per month, Highland has scaled his dropshipping venture to an impressive $19,000 in revenue in just three days. In this interview, he shares his journey, challenges, and the strategies that led to his remarkable success.
Founder Success Story QnA
How are you? I didn’t catch your name.
My name is Highland Smith.
Highland Smith. That’s a very unusual name. I’ve never met anyone with my name as a first name. I’ve heard of a few people with Highland as a last name, but never as a first name. Agent Smith, are you an agent?
Agent Smith. Okay, cool.
So, Highland, tell me a little bit about yourself. How old are you? Obviously, we know you’re in Australia. Just tell me a little about yourself.
So, I’m 18 at the moment. I’m still in school and running businesses, been inside the real world, and I’ve been having a lot of fun, learned lots of things.
You say you run businesses whilst in school. So, when does your school finish?
My school finishes I think early November. So I’ve got six months left of grade 12.
How long have you been in the real world? What made you transition over into the real world from school?
It’s going to be two years this August. So it was August 2023 when I joined. I was 16 at the time. Well, initially I was 15 when I first heard of it was Hustlers University when I heard of it and there was an acquaintance, one of my classmates was inside and he was a bit of a strange guy. So, I was a little bit skeptical of the real world at first, but then he started talking to me about how he was making money copywriting. And being 16 or 15 at the time, I didn’t know what copywriting was. I thought he was going to YouTube videos and finding people who had illegally used like a Coldplay song or something and made money from that. But no, something different. But the online making money really took my interest. So, I was very keen to join and I ended up joining in August 2023.
So that was through one of your other friends?
Yeah, through one of my friends. Although they weren’t the reason I got in. I actually joined because I’d started a dropshipping store, but I did it terribly. Like my business skills were absolutely garbage. So I did it with a friend. I made the worst website, chosen terrible products and just ran it badly. Zero sales and flopping that made me realize, okay, I need some actual guidance on this. So, I joined the real world.
What was the first thing you went into when you joined the real world? Did you look at many campuses or did you just focus on one?
Well, initially I went through the quiz that it gives you when you first join and that told me to go to I think it was called the hustler’s campus at the time, might still be called that, Dylan Madden’s campus and I went through and went through all of his lessons and that taught me a lot and eventually I transitioned into the business campus with Professor Ano, best professor.
How did that help your own business? How did you transfer those skills to your own business?
From there, I started a social media marketing agency. Well, I was doing marketing. My dad owned a cafe, so I was doing marketing for that. And then through the skills that I learned from Professor Ano, I was able to start outreaching to different clients. And my dad was able to also help me get in touch with a few people. He’d sit me down with someone and then I’d talk to them, pitch them my services. So, I ended up getting in touch with a man who was the Tasmanian Australian of the year, which is a pretty prestigious person around here. And I was doing his videos and social media and created a website with a friend for him all thanks to the real world. That was my first ever business that I had started.
What happened to dropshipping?
So, that initial dropshipping business fell off. It sucked. So I quit that. I’ve started a new dropshipping business just recently, but the majority of the time in the real world I’ve spent running a social media marketing agency, which did all right. It wasn’t great. What I’m doing now has been performing much better.
When did you make your own first kind of money?
I was looking through it today and the first money I received was the 27th of December. So that was a couple months after I joined.
Was that your own personal money or was that money from because you were helping your dad?
Yeah, I was helping my dad, but I was doing all of that for free to just learn skills and to promote his cafe, but the work that I got paid for first was for that other person that I mentioned and I did a video for him and my friend built him a website and that was sort of our first introduction and our first bits of money.
How much was that?
It was around $300 for the website. So tiny budget. And then we got paid maybe another $200 for a few videos. So it was very very small budget stuff. But then eventually we moved on to other clients. I pitched my principal and started doing videos for my school. So that made me a recurring income. Which was still minimal. And then we ended up doing marketing for a few other people which was really good.
How did you source your clients? How did you pitch them?
Yeah, so we ran some Facebook ads to get some clients. We also sent out a bunch of emails, but the social media stuff we’re not doing it currently. We finished up with all the advertising there. We’ve moved on to different things. But yeah, it was mostly us reaching out via email and that was taught to me by Professor Ano. So I was using his templates, his writing styles to get clients and that worked pretty well.
You said you’ve got multiple businesses. Where have you branched off to?
So we branched into this business at the start of this year. One of someone that I knew a while ago saw that I was doing business stuff and he came to me with a product and was like, “Hey, do you want to try drop shipping?” So I was like, “Sure, let’s do that.” and we ended up setting up a business with four of us dropshipping portable batteries, like lithium-ion batteries. And we did $23,000 in revenue, but the guy that was running it who I wasn’t super close to, he ended up wanting 50% of the business and he wasn’t running it right. So, I ended up leaving and me and a friend replicated the business, which is what we’re doing now. And we made $19,000 revenue and four and a half in profit just in the last three days.
Is there another one or is it just those two that you’re focusing on at the moment?
So, right now that’s the only one that I’m really focused on. The dropshipping.
What would you say is the hardest part about your whole journey?
It’s always a little bit of a struggle when to let an idea go, especially when you’ve been like I was doing the social media stuff for probably a bit over a year and it’s like, okay, this isn’t really working. Let me try my hand at different areas. So, it’s a little bit hard to sort of let that go and be like, “Okay, it’s time to move on.” But when you do move on and you find better things to make money with, then it’s so much easier. And it’s really great that now we’ve got stuff to do.
What would you say is your biggest doubts or failures that you yourself can now recognize?
For biggest doubts or failures probably when a lot of the clients that I was working with for my social media marketing agency had very tiny budgets because I was working with such local businesses. So a lot of times results for Facebook advertisements would be very slow and clients wouldn’t be particularly happy because you know they weren’t spending much, they weren’t seeing many results but to them their small ad spend of $150 a month was a big investment for them. So it was really quite tough then to have people angry at a 17-year-old. So 17-year-old me was not particularly happy with that but we’ve moved past it and that’s a good thing.
What would you say is your biggest breakthrough or turning point?
One of the coolest things that happened to me since joining the real world was because of the social media marketing agency that I was able to start, I got in contact with the owner of the largest company in Tasmania and I got to shadow their marketing team for a whole week and to learn how they did all their marketing. And because of that, one of the people that work in their marketing team saw how diligent and how capable of a worker I was, and he’s now employing me to do some marketing for his own agency. So, that was a really cool opportunity that came from me just reaching out and saying, you know, can I come work with you guys? And, yeah, having the skills that Ano taught me, I was able to show up and then write some ad copy for them. The guy that’s now employing me, I was working alongside him and he asked me to write some advertising copy while I was with him for a week and he looked over it once I’d written it and he’s like, “Oh, is this chat GPT?” He looked up the top because he thought it was super professional, but I was like, “No, I just learned that through an online course. It’s mine.”
How would you say your life has changed since joining in the real world, not only in business but yourself as well?
Yeah. Well, I think it all ties together. It’s made me so much more confident and because of that, I’ve become a much better leader. So, my school has made me school captain two years in a row just because of how I’ve been able to just change and act. I was a little bit of a turd during grade 10 when I joined the real world, but now I’m much more professional. So the school is able to have me do speeches and to lead people. So that’s definitely my confidence has grown and I’m able to speak like a grown-up to other people.
Did they notice a change in you and ask you how you changed, why you changed, or did they just roll with it?
It’s strange because it all happened. It was quite slow as it happened but I was working for the school just before they made me the school captain. So that was sort of a lead in. I sat down with the principal and I pitched him and I was able to speak to him like a grown-up responsibly and then I have a hunch that it was because of that and because of that display of professionalism that I got the role as school captain and then they asked me to do it a second year in a row.
How would you describe to someone that doesn’t know anything about the real world how it has changed your life?
I’ve spoken to probably four or five of my friends about the real world and one of them is now my business partner. So him and I work on this