These 2 Young Entrepreneurs Seized the Time -- and Success

ake Kassan and Kramer LaPlante, both 24, and the co-founders of the watch company MVMT, met as college roommates in Santa Barbara, an oceanside college town famous for its “work hard, play hard” mentality. But after deciding that the university route wasn't for them, they left their studies behind to try a venture of their own.

Within just three years of MVMT's launch, these two college dropouts had grown one of the most buzzed-about ecommerce watch brands in years. They’ve sold over 100,000 watches and been featured in Complex, Playboy, GQ, Hypebeast and countless other blogs and magazines. (Full disclosure: They're customers of yotpo.com whose blog I manage.)

The Sharing Economy Is Offering to Fill to Your Tech Support Needs

Dedicated technical support teams capable of taking care of everything from a crashed hard drive to a lost Microsoft Word document keep large organizations running. With the average annual salary of an experienced help desk technician ranging as high as $50,000 few smaller businesses typically can afford that luxury.

Many small businesses rely on local IT service providers that charge an hourly rate. They pay only when they need help and often assistance can be rendered by phone, using remote desktop software. However, those options often are still too costly for businesses trying to grow on a budget. For those businesses, the sharing economy provides a new option.

Bootstrapping Is Much More Fun Than Investors

If you really want to start a business your way without a boss or professional investor hovering over you, then just fund it yourself or through friends and family, and grow it organically. It’s more possible to bootstrap today than a few years ago, as the cost of entry continues to go down. According to many experts, over 90 percent of successful businesses currently start this way.

With one of the new free tools and a dose of sweat equity, you can create a website for almost nothing -- and you are on your way to success with ecommerce, your latest invention or personal services. It’s equally easy to go online and incorporate your new entity, register some intellectual property and have some fun with social media for marketing and interacting with customers.

The key to successful bootstrapping is to master the do-it-yourself approach, defer compensation or barter services whenever possible and become a frugal minimalist in all things requiring a cash outlay. Here are the key principles I recommend as an advisor to many entrepreneurs: