Company: HiddenStuff Game Guides
Owner: Josh Abbot
Year: Senior
Home: Westport, CT
Ever since a young age I have always sought to be self reliant. Doing my own thing has always been both rewarding and empowering. The concept of my business came to me at the age of 14 when I realized that there was a huge demand for online video game related products. The fact that I was a gamer gave me huge insight into my target market. People would literally be willing to spend hundreds of dollars on game secrets and virtual items. This is when I began to sell game guides and secrets off of eBay. Realizing that this was actually a great way to make money I continued to expand my offerings. I began selling virtual game items until shortly after eBay banned the sale of such items. However, I still continued to sell virtual game guides. After a few years I discontinued this practice and decided to open up a free guide site for popular online games. This site ran for several years with no capitalization. During which I worked on other projects such as car detailing and car part sales. When I came back to the site just before college I realized that there was a huge amount of profit potential to be had. I began to take steps in order to realize a profit off of it. I tried selling advertising at first and realized that this was not as profitable as I had initially thought. I devised another plan which involved setting up memberships on my site. In order for users to have access to game guides they would be required to purchase an account. This idea has become a huge success and has continued to grow consistently over the past 2 years. I went from selling one membership a day to much more. Guides for new online games will be created in the future as we continue to grow our support and customer base.
