Two teens plug into Internet success
Twins co-founders of Net’s HitCents.com advertising company
April 17, 2001

By Deborah Highland, The Daily News

Hundreds of dot-com companies have pulled the plug during the past year, but two 17-year-old Bowling Green High School students have maintained one of the Internets most profitable companies.

Twins Clinton Mills and Chris Mills are founders of HitCents.com, an Internet advertising company they coown with their father, and have been honored by the U.S. Small Business Administration as Kentucky’s Young Entrepreneurs of the Year. The award is given annually to a business founder under the age of 36.

“Since the company launched about 16 months ago, it has turned a profit of more than $200,000,” Clinton Mills said. “The reason we’re doing so much better than these other companies is that we have such low overhead,” he said. “A lot of the work we do ourselves, and our entire family helps out with it.”

The boys parents, Ed and Chrystal Mills of Bowling Green, supported them as they worked to get Hitcents off the ground and now are helping as the company continues to grow, Chris Mills said. “Mom answers the phone while were at school or whatever, and the people who call don’t know that were a family,” he said. “They think we’re a big company with lots of employees, and she doesn’t tell them we’re still in high school, either.”

The twins became interested in computer programming around the age of 10, when their father bought them a computer and they learned the BASIC programming language, Clinton Mills said. A few years later, after moving to Bowling Green from Texas, they learned Perl, a language used by many Internet sites, he said.

They got the idea for Hitcents when they used a company to supply banner ads for their own Web site a few years ago, Chris Mills said. “We were making a little money by having the ads on our site, but we realized that we could make even more by selling the ads ourselves,” he said. Using Perl, the two boys wrote the code for the site and launched. The boys company since has blossomed into a national operation, with three servers in West Virginia and salesmen in New York, Los Angeles, Boston and San Antonio, Chris Mills said. They hope to take the company public within two years, he said.

“They’re really remarkable kids,” BGHS Principal Fred Carter said. “They had a good idea and they put a lot of time in to make it work.”

Each of the boys also recently bought new vehicles a 2001 Chevrolet Corvette for Chris Mills and a 2002 Cadillac Escalade for his brother which they paid for with profits from Hitcents. “Needless to say, the other kids are more than a little jealous about that,” Carter said. “But these kids deserve it for the hard work they’ve put into this project.