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AIPROPX ReportFortune · 2h ago
Meet the 18-year-old junk remover who vibe-coded his own pricing calculator and makes up to $15,000 a month
Carter Grandbois was 16 years old, working for a junk-removal operator in Johnstown, Colorado, when he noticed the cash. His boss kept a thick stack of it in the center console of his truck. Grandbois went home and talked to his dad, and within days, they bought a trailer. The first job paid $500 for 30 minutes of work. “That was kind of an eye-opener,” Grandbois, now 18 and working for himself full-time, told Fortune .
Carter’s Junk Away bills as much as $15,000 a month in peak season, Grandbois said. His W-2 employees are his high school friends, but he admits that he wasn’t able to scale up and reach profitability until he created a pricing calculator, started tracking data, and started using systems to get consistent lead flows.
“I’m really into vibe-coding and creating software,” he explained. “After that, we were able to be profitable on every single job,” he said proudly. “When our team is out… they’re bidding jobs spot-on every single time. So every time they complete a job, I mean, we’re making anywhere from $50 to $200 without being on the truck.” He said he earns about $125 to $1,000 per junk-removal job and he is increasingly overseeing the business from home as he scales, which is what he means by not “being on the truck.”
Grandbois wants to share the wealth, too, via social media. (He’s on TikTok at american.junkremoval .) “I was like, ‘Hey, like everyone else could totally use this for their business.'” Now he has two calculators—a universal one for everyone and another, “private junk-removal calculator,” which he described as detailed for a “more experienced junk-removal business.” When asked about potentially creating his own rivals, he shrugged. “That is one of the things with giving away stuff for free. You never know who’s watching the content. But at the end of the day, I know I’m doing something good for anyone else who’s trying to start.”
After all, he explained, it was his inspiration. Where another generation might have read about, say, Warren Buffett in Fortune magazine, he reflected, “it’s probably just like Instagram reels where you’re scrolling and you’re like, ‘That guy has a Lamborghini. That dude has a McLaren. Why can’t I have one of those?'”
Sam Pillar , the 44-year-old CEO and co-founder of Jobber, a home-services software company that serves over 100,000 businesses and 400,000 service professionals, sees a connection. “I think a lot of people would like to be influencers,” he told Fortune . “You kind of own your own business. You control everything.” There are a lot of overlaps, he added, between the life of an influencer and starting your own business in a blue-collar industry. (Grandbois is a Jobber client himself.)
Pillar didn’t want to “scratch too deep” on Gen Z’s famously socialistic political identity, but he does run a SaaS company for blue-collar entrepreneurs, many of them 20-somethings. He said he thinks they’re “frustrated” that “there aren’t as many opportunities to participate in the upsides of capitalism.” So they’re figuring out a new path, one that often skips college and goes straight into earning cash, with a large side dose of social media.
“One of my favorite ones is poop-scooping,” Pillar said. If you’re a 16- or 17-year-old kid with some ambition and some drive, maybe ride your bike over to a rich neighborhood, “pick up dog shit in rich people’s backyards, charge them money, you know, put the crap in their own garbage, in the garbage can. That’s a very low barrier-to-entry opportunity.” Jobber serves businesses like this, he added. “They’re million-dollar businesses now. And they were started just in that kind of a way.”
The CEO who has to replace 80% of his staff every school year
Levi Boyd has lived the overlap from both sides. The 20-year-old founder and CEO of Algo Landscaping started posting on Instagram around the same time he made his first $10,000, and says the exposure “pushed me further than anything.” He claimed he answers “every single comment, every single DM,” walking newer operators through basic questions such as which lawnmower to buy, while he also comments on bigger creators’ posts for advice.
The landscaping CEO recalled riding in a truck with the landscaper he apprenticed with as a teenager, watching the older man from another generation seethe. “He’d look at another landscaper and be like, ‘I hate that guy. Why is he working over here?’ Just pure hatred for for the other guys in the industry.” Boyd said that actually inspired him to go the other way—he’s mentored contractors that he’s never met in person, including one operator in Chicago who went from nothing to a “big truck, trailers, employees, fancy equipment. He’s doing basically what I do.”
Boyd shrugged when asked why he’s so benevolent on social media with his ostensible competitors. “There’s no shortage of work,” he said. He has grown his business tremendously with AI tools and social media, he added, disclosing revenue of roughly $28,000 (Canadian dollars) in year one, $110,000 in year two and $323,000 so far this year, figures confirmed by Fortune . “I really want to do a million,” he said, “That’s the goal. We’re gonna do a million next year, for sure.” Boyd added that he was a finance major and many of his friends from school stuck with it. “They’re working at banks now, and it just sounds miserable.” He said he thinks he’s making more mowing lawns, at least for the time being.
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