Ann Wang and Jessica Willison realized that there are many people around the world with products to sell and that there are also numerous markets in the U.S. to which these people could sell their products. However, the sellers were separated from these U.S. markets by oceans and tens of thousands of miles.

So Ann and Jessica started a website called Enrou. Enrou works with 31 vendors in 57 global communities to provide artisans in other countries and continents with a market for their goods in the U.S. They tailor payments for the goods to the individual vendors’ needs and amenities. “Wages and how we structure payment to artisans really depend on local customs and community needs,” says Jessica Willison. The pair’s main goal is to help the less fortunate in other countries make a better living for themselves. Ann Wang summarizes, “Makers on the ground usually don’t have access to build a future for themselves. Our company is based around giving individuals access to provide a future.”

In addition, Ann and Jessica want to give their customers a window into the lives of the artisans. For each product they sell, Ann and Jessica provide a story about the place and people from which that product originated. It’s a unique aspect to their company that humanizes the workers who produce the products that American consumers take for granted.

Enrou is still young, but Ann and Jessica hope to continue to grow the company and partner with larger organizations to aid their vendors in better ways.

Jarrett Bauer’s grandmother rebounded back and forth from her home to the hospital due to complications from chronic heart failure. Frustrated at his grandmother’s situation, Jarrett resolved to improve hospitals’ patient care systems. He and two colleagues, Rohan Udeshi and Dan Priece, developed a software for patients to do self-monitoring from the comfort of their homes. Eventually, Health Recovery Solutions resulted from their software.

Health Recovery Solutions is an organization that partners with hospitals and clinics to reduce patient re-admissions by using an innovative patient monitoring technology. When patients are discharged from a hospital or clinic after a surgery or some other medical procedure, they are provided with a few things. The patients are given a tablet connected to several Bluetooth monitoring devices, such as blood pressure cuffs, pulse oximeters, thermometers, etc. The tablet comes pre-loaded with a specific treatment plan for the patients to follow or their caregiver to administer. In addition to tracking all the patient’s vital signs, the patient’s diet intake, pictures of wounds, and other medical information can be entered into the tablet. Doctors at the hospital can view everything entered into the tablet and be alerted if the patient displays unstable vital signs. Overall, Health Recovery Solutions makes self-care easy for patients and their caregivers, which reduces hospital re-admissions and, in turn, decreases costs and the drain on medical resources.

Jarrett Bauer recognized the difficulties that patients with chronic conditions face and the inconvenience of frequent hospitalizations. He also realized the drain on medical personnel and resources that these patients present. Consequently, he stepped in and filled a need. Now, his multi-million dollar company, from its Hoboken, NJ office, serves over 15,000 patients, works with 60 agencies, and continues to grow. It will be intriguing to see how Health Recovery Solutions and its monitoring system will keep revolutionizing the healthcare industry.

http://www.healthrecoverysolutions.com/

It started with a few friends at Stanford University. Bobby Murphy, Evan Spiegel, and Reggie Brown designed a photo messaging app in 2011 with a unique feature: the photos you send are viewed once and not saved. They called their app “Picaboo” and mostly marketed it toward female users; as their product description put it, “Picaboo lets you send photos for peeks and not keeps!” However, they soon changed the app’s title to its current, household name: Snapchat.

By 2012, Snapchat catered to 100,000 daily users, but was only available on the Apple App Store. Later that year in October, Murphy, Spiegel, and Brown expanded their market to Google’s Android platform, causing their daily users to jump to over 1 million. Even though the company continued to grow and add new features and users to its app, it still had not made any profit by 2013. In addition, Reggie Brown left the company after a dispute and lawsuit. Things were not exactly fine and dandy for Snapchat. At this point, entrepreneurial powerhouse Mark Zuckerberg contacted Murphy and Spiegel and offered to buy Snapchat for $3 billion. Murphy and Spiegel refused.

Over the next few years, Snapchat included more features, such as “My Story”, image filters, geo-filters, Lenses (dog ears, rainbow vomit, etc.), and Discover. The first few of these aspects of the app increased user interest, and the Discover feature allowed journalistic sources publish their content on Snapchat. The year of 2016 brought the launch of voice and video calling and stickers to the Chat feature, and Memories allowed users to save snaps and stories. Snapchat also incorporated Bitmoji, an avatar component, into the app, and they reached the milestone of 150 million daily users.

As of now, Snapchat is valued at about $20-25 billion. Bobby Murphy and Evan Spiegel took an idea from the ground floor to a multi-billion dollar company in less than six years. They did so through many factors, but most importantly through patience and strategic marketing. With the addition of geo-filters, Murphy and Spiegel allowed outside companies and individuals to sponsor filters for snaps. Furthermore, the Discovery component opened Snapchat to journalistic sources to publish their content on the app. Both of these innovations brought in immense amounts of revenue and new users for Snapchat. Murphy and Spiegel could have easily given up hope after not making any profit. They could have sold their app to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook and walked away with a huge lump of cash ($3 billion). But they didn’t; they persevered. They knew that they had created a unique, marketable app, and they marketed it successfully. As a result, the pair ended up making seven to eight times (and counting) what Zuckerberg offered. Their creativity and innovation not only revolutionized photo messaging apps, but also gave birth to a whole new form of social media. Some might say their patience paid off.