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Biz whiz kid: New Bern teen starts profitable online enterprise [Sun Journal, New Bern, N.C. :: ](Sun Journal (New Bern, NC) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) July 15--Anthony Rocco Jr. is a normal everyday 15-year-old -- just like any other teen whose bedroom doubles as his business office. That's where Rocco runs Anthrocraft as part of BulletAnt LLC, a computer gaming company that he started with $250 he borrowed from his parents. Over the following two years, Rocco has generated $140,000 in revenue. Anthrocraft is linked with the popular game Minecraft, in which players build things out of digital blocks to create all types of structures. Rocco's website, anthrocraft.net, offers players purchasable upgrades for the characters in the game, as well as kits and ranks they can upgrade to. Rocco's father, Anthony Sr., who lives in the Oak View subdivision near New Bern, gave his son $250 to begin his enterprise back in 2012. "I did all of the custom coding myself. I broke off on my own and started Anthrocraft after a buddy and I started a different server related to Minecraft," the younger Rocco said. "I thought 'I can do this myself,' then I got the initial money from my dad to buy the first server and it has been taking off ever since." He has servers set up in Illinois, California, New York, Germany and Romania. His servers provide an online location where Minecraft players connect and play together. "The way my servers are set up, it is a POP-Proxy. That means that whatever server is closest to you, that's the one you use to play the game," he said. Rocco says his most popular sellers are his mystery crates, which contain different items for players to use in the game. He sells 20 for $10, which players purchase in batches of 50 or more at a time. He also sells a Divine Rank upgrade, which increases the players' levels or ranks of play, for $200 a pop. All of those sales produce nearly 100 percent profit for Rocco because he did all of his own coding and creating. He pays for hardware upgrades as he needs them such as RAM (random access memory), servers and processors. He has made as much as $2,500 in one day. "It's amazing what he has done with it. I couldn't believe it when he started making hundreds of dollars a day," Anthony Rocco Sr. said of his son. "It's very time consuming for him and it's a lot to do, but it's what he loves to do." Rocco's mother, Tammy, said that every morning when her son wakes up, his cell phone has alerts and messages waiting on him from online sales. "Every time someone buys something through him, his phone dings and it's doing it all night as he sleeps," she said. "His most popular customers come from Turkey and Australia and places all over the world." Rocco said that Minecraft is a game mostly played by people under the age of 16 or so, but he has sold upgrades numerous times to men in their 30s and 40s. "My servers take a single-game script and change it into multi-player scripts, so that more than one person can play together," he said. "A server bill for me is about $700 per month to get it running." Rocco, a rising sophomore at The Epiphany School, said his goals are to make $500,000 profit before he graduates high school and then go to a computer college to continue growing his venture. "I want to take this into something much bigger one day and have my own gaming company," he said. "It just takes time, though. You have to keep getting your players up on your servers and they buy upgrades from you and you make more money. Once I get my hardware to where I can carry up to 2 or 3,000 players at one time, I could make as much as $15,000 per month." He has also developed a program called TeamSpeak3 in which players can talk to each other while playing Minecraft, similar to how Xbox Live works on the Xbox. Rocco has programs on his laptop that track his expenses and profits and pie-graphs the information out to where he can easily track it. He saves the majority of his money, what he doesn't use to put back into the company and the small amount he spends every once in a while for advertising, which he estimates at $4,000. He also enjoys playing the game with the players who fuel his company and responding to message board posts on his forum and reviews that are written, more of which are positive than negative. While Rocco is already a successful entrepreneur at 15 years old, he sums up his business model with just two words: keep growing. Jordan Honeycutt can be reached at 252-635-5670 or you can follow him on Twitter @JHONEYnbsj ___ (c)2014 the Sun Journal (New Bern, N.C.) Visit the Sun Journal (New Bern, N.C.) at http://www.newbernsj.com Distributed by MCT Information Services |