My name is Hunter and I am an 11-yr old entrepreneur from Cedar Grove Middle School. This was the first year the TREP$ Marketplace took place at our school and lots of kids participated, so there was some tough competition. I considered opening several types of business before arriving at my final decision.  I originally thought I would brew and sell coffee at the TREP$ Marketplace, but then I learned we were not allowed to prepare food or drinks on site. So it was back to the drawing board.

I couldn't seem to come up with a business that I could get really excited about. Then my whole family spent one evening brainstorming different ideas to help me. My dad came up with one which I knew instantly was for me. He suggested I create and sell my own video games. We researched different websites that allow kids to create video games for free and found one that fit our needs. To keep expenses down, my dad thought I could even email the games to my customers, but I thought customers would prefer a CD with the games on it and nice packaging would help sell the product. That's how my business A.R. Games (A-Rated Games) was born!

The most fun part of the whole process for me was making the video games. Among the games I made were a driving game, a game that resembled Pac-Man, and a game similar to Fruit Thief. The biggest challenge I faced was working on a game I called Alien Destroyer. I just couldn't get the spaceship to shoot lasers on a straight horizontal. It kept shooting them at an angle. It took me nearly a week to figure it out and make it work the way I wanted.

It was much more work than I anticipated. It literally took a solid month to produce all the games  because there were a lot of steps involved. After I created the games, I had friends and family play them and provide feedback on how they could be improved. I created help screens that players could access by pressing the F1 button while playing. There was one final round of testing before burning the files to discs. We learned along the way that the files would not work on Macs. So that was something we needed to disclose in our advertising and packaging. I created original artwork for the covers of the CD cases, burned the discs, and put together the packaging for 100 CDs. To give my customers a really good value, I decided to sell 5 video games on a CD for $2.99.

My total expenses were $31.22 for Slim CD Storage Cases and 100-Pack Spindle of CDs to put the games on. Since my CDs would sell for $2.99 each, my breakeven point would be 11 games sold. I told all my friends about my product and got a lot of "pre-orders" for the game. I was confident that I would be able to reach my breakeven point.

The night of the TREP$ Marketplace it was really hot, and I was glad I was not selling hot coffee that night! I brought a mini laptop computer with me so that I could demo the games for my customers. People who visited my booth said my business was a very cool and unique idea. That kept my spirits up, which I needed since sales were slow to start. As the night went on, business picked up and at times I had a crowd of people gathered around my booth watching me demo my software on my laptop. Before I knew it, I surpassed my breakeven point. Half the people who stopped by said they were going to come back later, but they didn't. I know I lost a lot of sales because many people use Macs these days, but I knew that going in.

In the end, my sales revenue was $135. I sold 45 CDs and made a profit of nearly $104. One of my teachers even bought a disc for her kids. I had a really good experience creating my own business and I plan on participating in TREP$ again next year. I'm already thinking up ways to expand my business. I'll build upon what I learned this year to create even more exciting video games and/or expansion packs for my existing video games.