I was a teenage dot.com millionaire. I'm not now, and not just because I'm 27 years old.

In the dot.com boom I founded Jewish Net (later soJewish), an early social network before the term really existed, and later CyberBritain a pre-Google search engine that was charging for sponsored listings back in 2000.

I'm not going to go over the painful history (you can read that here if you're interested). Instead, I wanted to consider what would have happened if I was starting my business today.

When I started work on JewishNet back in 1998, aged 16, building a website was quite a laborious chore. There were a few point and click services such as Tripod and Geocities, which built quite hideous looking websites, but in general you needed to start "real" sites from scratch.

The first version of the site was written with raw HTML, and was pretty basic. I think just synagogue listings, an "Ask the Rabbi" feature and an Agony Aunt. But I knew from the start that I wanted to create a website that was interactive, part built by the user and one that would enable social features.

So I scoured the web for free to use scripts to enable me to launch a business directory and a dating feature. What I found wasn't that great -- it didn't quite do what I wanted to -- so I decided to teach myself the programming language Perl. I couldn't code that well back then but because I had some basic scripts to start with and then through trial and error I eventually built a social network (of kinds). We had a "Jewish yellow pages" where businesses could add listings (I figured they'd eventually pay), and a dating site crudely called "Kosher Sex", which had basic profiles and a chat room.

It took so long to add the features that I didn't really have time to think carefully about how it would eventually make money. But it was more advanced than either of the two British Jewish newspapers could manage. Back then they just had a couple of static pages of news content, which I don't even think was archived. I eventually handed JewishNet over to Jewish News, on which almost £1m was spent developing it.

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-02/09/meet-ben-cohen-the-27-year-old-teenage-millionaire.aspx