Ali Abdaal went from Cambridge medical student to NHS junior doctor to a multi-million-dollar creator business — by teaching what he had just learned, one video at a time.

Brett Malinowski started editing videos at 13 because he wanted to be a YouTuber. By 14 he was charging $20 an edit, by 15 he ran an agency, and at 16 he dropped out of high school. Today he says his businesses make $1 million a month — built on other creators' audiences, not his own product genius.

Noah Kagan was Facebook's 30th employee and was fired within nine months, then fired again from Mint. In March 2010 he started AppSumo with $50, selling someone else's software by email — and turned a weekend experiment into a business he says is worth $100 million.

Peldi Guilizzoni spent 20 years learning to code and build software before he launched Balsamiq in 2008. With one year of salary saved and no investors, his $79 sketching tool made $100,000 in five months and $2 million in 18 months — and is still going, nearly two decades later.

Amanda Hocking spent nine years writing 17 novels that every publisher rejected. In April 2010 she self-published them on Kindle for 99 cents, hoping to raise $300 for a trip. Eleven months later she had sold over a million copies and signed a $2 million deal with St. Martin's Press.

Laura Roeder built MeetEdgar from a spreadsheet habit into a bootstrapped SaaS doing $4 million a year, on essentially one $49 price plan and no venture capital. Then she sold it for seven figures to a buyer she found by cold email — and had already started her next company. This is the story of a founder who designed her business to be sellable from the start.