Archive for Websites – Page 3

Alexander Levin – ImageShack Co-Founder

At only 19 years old, young entrepreneur Alexander Levin became the co-founder of a web-based service called ImageShack. The service allows its users, individuals and businesses, to store their photos in one secure cloud location.  Individuals can share photos with one another and businesses to directly transfer photos to their website. Levin did not know that he would be at the helm of a 50 million dollar company in his twenties.

Catherine Cook – myYearbook

In 2005, Catherine Cook and her brother, Dave, were flipping through their high school yearbook to see if they recognized anyone. While looking through it, Catherine thought of putting the whole yearbook online. This idea sparked a multi-million-dollar company in the years to come – and Catherine was only fourteen!

After coming up with the initial idea, Catherine contacted her oldest brother, Geoff, who was a sophomore at Harvard University. Geoff Cook was already on the road to making hundreds of thousands of dollars off his two websites EssayEdge.com & ResumeEdge.com, when his younger sister first told him of the idea. He immediately invested $250,000 into her idea and they began working with developers in India to bring the website to life.

Within one week of launching the site, Catherine & Geoff had 400 people with accounts – and it was confined to their hometown of New Hope, PA. Catherine would wear creative shirts that said things like, “Are you the prettiest girl in school? How about the dumbest? Find out!” By 2006, the website had over 1 million users. It continued to grow throughout the following years until, in 2010, it entered the top 25 most-visited websites.

In 2011, myYearbook merged with the Quepasa Corporation for over $100 million. One year later, they renamed the company to MeetMe. MeetMe still keeps some of the same features that made myYearbook so popular, but it now offers online chatting and connections with other people.

Katherine’s simple idea turned into a multi-million-dollar venture, something she says she definitely did not ever expect. myYearbook is a great example of the possibilities that can arise from a unique idea.

MyYearBook.com

Background

Geoff and Catherine Cook are siblings who created a website called Myearbook.com; I have never been on the website but they are doing really well and is thinking about making their company public soon. Geoff was in Harvard when he sold his first business in 2002 and Catherine was still in high school. A few years later they came up with a yearbook but online. They had a problem when they started looking for people in the yearbook, but they didn’t recognize anyone. They also thought that information was useless, so their idea was to make it more accessible and a easier to use but online.

There now making millions of dollars and merged with another website that was like theres but in Latin america.

 

Cameron Johnson: Entrepreneurial Genius

Cameron Johnson has consistently showed great entrepreneurial potential from a very early age. He first started exemplifying his entrepreneurial instincts when he was five years old as he began selling vegetables to his neighbors. When Cameron was nine in 1994, he launched his first business from his house: Cheers and Tears. This company is dedicated to creating thoughtful and meaningful greeting cards. At just twelve years old, young Cameron was making more than $50,000.00 a year!

Cameron then invested in the purchase of 30 Ty Beanie Babies, a line of stuffed toys first founded in 1986. He then sold the Beanie Babies online for ten times the purchase amount on eBay. Cameron saw this investment opportunity and turned it into an official business idea by purchasing dolls at wholesale from Ty and reselling them on eBay as well has his greeting card website.

With the money Cameron had earned thus far, he has since used it as seed money to kick start his next entrepreneurial venture called My EZ Mail, a confidential email forwarding service. Within just a few months, Johnson was earning $3,000.00 in advertising revenue.

Cameron’s next project was called Surfingprizes.com, an advertisement service that put scrolling advertising on top of web browsers. Two features made this service unique. The first is that Surfingprizes users received twenty cents per hour to have the advertisement displayed on the screen. The second feature is that referral marketing is used to increase word of mouth conversions. This was accomplished through offering Surfingprizes users 10.00% of the revenue generated by each customer that was referred to the service. Fifteen-year-old Cameron was making as much as $400,000.00 a month, making him worth more than $1,000,000.00 before he graduated high school. In college, Cameron started CertificateSwap, an online software system, that he recently sold for a six-figure amount. To date, Cameron is twenty-eight years old and is worth a couple million dollars.

Image result for cameron johnson entrepreneur

Cherie Tan

Cherie Tan at the young age of 14 started freelancing as a web designer. She loved creating beautiful virtual things that she and her virtual friends all enjoyed. Cherie went all in and taught herself Photoshop, CSS and JavaScript with the motivation of creating beautiful websites and this brought her her first paying client. At Newcastle University in the UK Cherie earned a second-upper honors degree in electrical engineering. During this time her freelance career had led her to stating the beginnings of her software development and design firm as well as taking on different challenging project from all over the world. In 2016 Cherie founded Mogul Tech International to help her handle all the requests she had started receiving. Modul Tech is a company where the employees are trained in remote work designing websites, products, growth strategies, and beautiful software for many different companies. Having a remote team has its challenges Cherie says but she says it is rewarding as well and she has seen it pay off many times with clients, the team members, and herself. In 2018 Cherie changed her focus and became certified and registered as an Associate Wealth Planner in Singapore, shifting to the financial industry. Now she is hoping to start a code academy for kids inside Singapore. Cherie is also very active in her community mentoring teens in the local public schools in Singapore as well as volunteering at local community shelters. Cherie Tan demonstrates so many entrepreneurial gifts and is doing amazing work.

Redefining the Language of Code

Vlad Magdalin has transformed the website design industry through the creation of his website design platform, Webflow. Although this creator doesn’t have a rags to riches story, just turning his passion into a business has created ease for many others. As a design freelancer, Magdalin created logos and other branded items. Many of his customers wanted him to turn these ideas into websites or create all out marketing campaigns. As his business grew, he began to get more connected with others and built hundreds of websites. Soon he wanted to find an automated way to let others create websites, as he saw a huge market for doing so. So many people just didn’t even want to try to create websites at the time because it took so much prior knowledge regarding HTML, CSS, and Javascript to create a site that was worth the effort. This was years before website builders started coming onto the scene or were well enough to compete with paid coders. Responsive web design tool, CMS, and hosting platform ...It was seeing this struggle from people who were interested in building websites for others that motivated Magdalin to create his service Webflow. It turns a standard coding platform into a visual editor. Unlike having to write code line-by-line, Webflow gives you all the options out front and then allows you to change only the ones you want, without any prior knowledge of coding or the need for drag and drop. This revolutionary platform has allowed many designers to have the ability to create websites for their clients without spending their valuable time learning code. This has created the website’s trademark slogan: breaking the code barrier. Webflow is a great example of an entrepreneur taking skills that they have learned and turning them into a platform that others can use for their own ease of access.

 

Source: https://www.webflow.com/blog/the-freelancers-journey-interview-with-vlad-magdalin

Benelab

Jack Kim has developed a new approach to social enterprise. On a flight back from a business camp at Standford Kim developed a passion for entrepreneurship and website development. In his freshman year of high school Kim created websites to profit from the web traffic generated by advertisements on his websites.  Kim realized this business model has a capacity for a greater good than clicks and some change.

Kim developed Benelab, a web browser that sends all of its revenue generated by web traffic to charity and other social enterprises.  The company has also begun posting blogs and reports on technology analysis to encourage the flow of web traffic in their direction. Jack Kim has also written articles for the Huffington Post explaining his entrepreneurial journey.

Kim is leading a generation that has not even graduated high school by pushing innovation towards social enterprise instead of commercial enterprise.

The Men Behind Pinterest

Pinterest is a widely used app and website that allows you to get inspired and find ideas for things to bake, make, wear and use! The idea for Pinterest first came to Ben Silbermann in his years post graduation from Yale. In 2009 the project to build Pinterest officially began, but the app itself never took off running until a year or so late. The phrase “patience is key” comes to mind when thinking about the beginnings of this app, and I think Silbermann would agree. Flash forward to the present, Pinterest is currently worth 1.5 Billion dollars, and is used in several countries all over the world namely the US and Asia. The creators of Pinterest are constantly coming out with new ways to improve the app and cater to the interests and desires of the users. With the most recent update being the ability to purchase things off of their app, Pinterest is now becoming a competitor with online shopping sites. According to an article about the app Pinterest recently passed up Facebook in terms likes gained from adds and promotions. In that same article Silbermann makes a point to recognize the hard work that he and his co-founder Evan Sharp had to put in along with the patience and trust that something would come of it eventually. Along with that he says that it is important to realize there is more to life than the project you are working on and it is good to think about those things in addition to whatever your work might be. It seems as if Silbermann has a good understanding of the necessity of a good work/life balance and how not having too much of one or the other can ruin a person and cause them to burn out. It is unclear what the future holds for Pinterest, but there is hope and motivation to continue impacting the world in a positive way through this app.

Redesigning the Way We Study: Andrew Sutherland

Get to know Quizlet on Android: Learning apps & games for ...Our education system has stayed pretty much the same as it was two hundred years ago. This is not a bad thing, considering that there are only a small amount of proven ways to actively engage student’s learning abilities. As technology advances, educators are now trying new techniques to improve the ways that students learn in the classroom. With this increase in technology, students are finding it easier to memorize terms and concepts thanks mostly to one of the fastest growing education sites in the world, Quizlet. Quizlet was founded by Andrew Sutherland in 2007 when he was 22 to be a resource to help student study for test and exams. His initial idea for Quizlet came when he was 15 when he created a platform to help him for a quiz. Since then, it has grown to be one of the top 100 sites used around the world. Not only does the company bring in over $10 million per year, it has seen exponential expanses in its user base year over year with a 2 million user increase every month.

Sutherland’s story is one that many young entrepreneurs seem to face. By creating something that either a small group of people want or that they are passionate about, they realize that they can turn their idea into a large business. After creating Quizlet in high school, Sutherland saw its success and made the difficult decision to drop out of MIT in order to grow the business into what it is today. “I knew I wouldn’t be able to do both well,” he says. “I saw how big Quizlet was getting, how many people were using it and how big an impact it could have for millions of students.” Not only does the platform target students like it did back in 2007 at launch, it has introduced teacher tools that can be accessed through various subscription models. Sutherland’s willingness to bring an idea that he had into reality has created him overwhelming amounts of success and the difficult choices that he has made throughout his life continue to drive him to make Quizlet the best platform it can be.

 

Sources:

www.studybreaks.com/college/talking-andrew-sutherland-founder-quizlet/

www.mogulpedia.com/person/andrew-sutherland/

Warby Parker: A New Way to Look at a Problem

Nine years ago, Jeffrey Raider, Andrew Hunt, Neil Blumenthal, and David Gilboa founded a company called Warby Parker, a company which they hoped would address the need for eyeglasses in a different way.

A simple issue that eyeglass customers often face is a cosmetic one: they do not know if they will like the eyeglasses they purchase, or if the glasses will look good on them. When trying on glasses at the eye doctor, or at an eyeglass store, it can be hard to tell what the glasses will look like when you where them out. It can also be hard to even know where to start with glasses. There are so many options but a customer does not always know what will look good on him or her.

Warby Parker wanted to address those issues. What if there was a company that allowed you to try on the glasses before you had to commit to them? What if the company helped you figure out what glasses would look best on your face? The Warby Parker business model was born. The company is primarily an online business, doing most of its business through its website. The website in its current iteration begins with a short quiz of sorts that asks the customer various questions from face shape to their preferred material of glasses. From there it will give the customer a series of suggested eyeglasses and from that list, the customer can select five different eyeglasses that they would like to try on. A few days later in the mail they will receive a box in the mail. This box will contain those five eyeglasses, and they have a week to try the eyeglasses on and then return them.

This model allows the customer to get a feel for the glasses, to decide if they like the look, the feel, and the function of each pair. There is no pressure to make a quick decision with Warby Parker, unlike at an eyeglass store. Customers are encouraged to take their time before committing to a pair.

Though Warby Parker is primarily online, they have begun to recently add some brick-and-mortar stores, with these popping up in the United States and in Canada, though they still strive to adhere to the same business methods.

The founders of Warby Parker did not want to simply create a business that helped people with figuring out which pair of glasses to wear. Though this is an important niche and they have found a smart way of addressing it, they wanted to add something deeper to their business: an element of social entrepreneurship–entrepreneurship that gives back. With that, they began this model: for every pair of glasses sold, they would donate a pair to a company that distributes eyeglasses in developing countries to encourage forward-thinking for individuals and startups there. This way they would not just be giving something away in the form of charity, but they are empowering individuals by providing certain resources (eyeglasses and reading glasses) that promote an individual towards autonomy and self-direction.

Warby Parker is a good example of a business that saw a problem–in their case, an insufficient method of trying on and fitting eyeglasses–and established a new and thoughtful solution. They are also a good example of then taking that new business model and making it into something that gives back to communities in need, in a way that does not harm these communities more.