Bella Weems was fourteen when she came up with the product idea called “Origami Owl”.  When Bella was fourteen she started to have the usual anticipation of driving that every teenager has.  All of her older friends had recently got their license and Bella could not wait to join them on the open road.  Bella’s parents made it clear to her that if she wanted a car when she turned sixteen she would have to pay for it herself.  She turned to babysitting for this problem but found that she was not making enough money to make her dream come true.  She started to think of more creative and efficient ways to earn money and decided to start a business regarding “lockets” because it was something she really enjoyed.  To begin her business she had house parties in which friends and family would come over and see her product and possibly purchase something they liked.  After receiving positive feedback, her and her mother set up a mall Kiosk to sell to the general public.  They averaged selling around 60,000 dollars a month during the Holiday seasons.  Origami Owl became a great gift for a friend or loved one.  After this they saw the real potential their product had they decided to launch a website that would further their audience even more.  The company has continued to grow and now they have seven lines in their jewelry collection that people are really seeming to buy into.  Bella is a great example of someone who turned something they loved into a company that is doing great.

Evan Spiegel is the founder of the app SnapChat which was one of the most popular apps that has come out in recent years.  This story is different because I’m not going to highlight how SnapChat got started but something that happen in the midst of their success.  In 2013 Mark Zuckerberg asked Spiegel to meet and discuss the possibility of either merging the two companies or buying them out.  After negotiations, Spiegel did not see any offer worth selling his idea and did not make a deal with Zuckerberg on that day.  Zuckerberg responded with the notion that Facebook would crush SnapChat with their new app called poke which was very similar to SnapChat in a lot of ways.  When Poke launched they were the best selling app for three days but then fizzled out extremely quick because SnapChat was already so well used.  After losing this battle, Zuckerberg contacted Spiegel again and bought SnapChat for 3 billion dollars.  I loved this story because it showed how much faith Spiegel had in his product even though an entrepreneurial giant tried to stop him.  Because Spiegel had faith in what he created he had a huge payday in the end.

Kevin Systrome and Mike Kreiger are the co founders of Instagram.  they launched Instagram on October 6th, 2010 and it has become the most prevalent social media today.  I really enjoyed reading about the story of Instagram because it’s more of an ordinary story rather than a story where these two guys rose to fame instantly.  They both started working on the idea in college while they were working on some other individual process.  The making of Instagram was over a two year process of fine tuning and working out the kinks of the system.  They released to apps before that with very similar concepts to Instagram and they failed miserably.   They were slow and hard to use and never really caught on with the general public.  Despite that, they still felt like a social media app where people can share pictures with friends was the way to go.  So instead of scrapping the idea after their failure, they fine tuned and turned into something some much better.  Two years after that they launched Instagram and it immediately blew up.  They had 25,000 users within the first day (which this was before the big smart phone boom so that number was a lot bigger then) and had to stay in the office the whole day maintaining the traffic as best as they could.  Like I said earlier, I really like this story because it involved a lot of time and learning from their mistakes.  They didn’t just become famous within a night, it was process of fine tuning and knowing what they wanted to do that lead them to success.

link: https://techcrunch.com/2012/04/09/instagram-story-facebook-acquisition/

Chris Pfaff grew up in Akron Ohio and moved to Los Angeles when he graduated High School.  Chris’s second cousin is Rob Dyrdek (another incredible entrepreneur) and Christ got the opportunity to be a character on Rob’s show.  Building off that, in 2009 Chris decided to launch his own clothing brand called “Young & Reckless”.  He started this idea with no experience in business and fashion but still had enough faith in his product to launch the company.  This brand has grown into one of the largest clothing brand in the nation and has distribution in more than 3,000 stores.

In an interview with Chris he explained how is original dream in life was to be a professional skateboarder.  The whole reason why he moved to Los Angeles was to make it big in the sport.  However, Chris had gotten into a skate boarding accident and fractured his skull and was in a coma for four days.  After this injury he decided he would no longer try to make it big in the sport.  He decided he would take a new perspective on his passion and go into a brand associated with the sport.  I like this story a lot because even though it seemed he was at the end of his skateboarding days, he didn’t let it hold him back from finding an area in that sport that he could still participate in.

I saw this article and was really interested to see how this company had started.  My parents have stocked my house with Stevia my whole life because it’s such a better (healthier) option than traditional sugar.  I wanted to see how the inventor got it to be such a huge hit in the US.

Mr. James originally found the idea because this product was being used in Japan with medicine to make it sweeter for whoever was going to consume it.  He tried it out and loved the idea of a healthy option for Sugar.  He went to Paraguay to do more extensive research on the product and make sure it was all the Japanese claimed it to be.  After finding out that it was, he went back to Japan and opened up a processing factory for this product.  He wanted to introduce it in the US because they had yet to see a product like this.  The only thing in the market at the market at the time was ordinary sugar and a kind of artificial sweeter you needed a medical prescription for.

One major obstacle that James May faced was the FDA’s restrictions on the labeling of the product.  They allowed him to bring it into the market but he was not allowed to market it as a “sweeter”.  If he did this they would have considered the product to be “adulterated” and they would remove it from all stores.  This led him to name the brand “sweet leaf” in the hopes customers would understand the product from that.  By 2007 he was able to label it as an official sweetener and the company has sky rocketed since.

I really enjoyed reading this story because it showed a lot of the dedication he had for his idea.  He started this idea in the 80’s and it only came into fruition around 2007.  That’s over 20 years of dedication and research put into his product which is an incredible amount of time and risk to have.  To add, he also did an incredible amount of research on the product to make sure it was all that he was claiming it to be.  He wanted to have a quality (and healthier) sugar substitute and through his research he knew that’s exactly what he was giving his customers.

Article link: https://www.entrepreneurship-interviews.com/interview-with-mr-james-may-the-man-that-introduced-stevia-to-the-us-market/

I read an article on a self made millionaire named Matt Morris.  He is an eight time best selling author (“The Unemployed Millionaire”) on books that involve helping the reader shape his/her life to become successful.  This article is an interview with Matt about his rise to success and the adversity he came through to get where he is at now.  At the age of 21 Matt was homeless and around 30,000 dollars in debt.  He lived out of his car and was unemployed, looking for any opportunity that he could jump on.  When Matt had hit rock bottom, he put in a cassette tape on Tony Robbins and was inspired to start making a change in his life.  He began to read a book on “how to become successful” every 2-3 days and built a large stock of knowledge that he could use when his opportunity would come.  This process of personal development led him to earn a six figure income by the age of 24.  In only three years Matt had made a complete change because he had decided to do something when he his back was against the wall.  He didn’t sit there a feel bad for himself, he decided to make a move and prepare himself for the next big opportunity.

During the interview, Matt was asked what wakes him up in the morning and what keeps moving forward.  He replied to this saying “What motivates me is having the freedom to live life on my own terms. No boss, no fighting traffic, no alarm clock, no having to miss my daughters swim class, no limitations on when I can take a vacation. I am inspired by people who are willing to do what it takes to achieve their dream lifestyle. I was blessed to have found the drive and determination to find a way to win in life.”  Matt’s passion is was pushed him to get this point of success in his life and it is what is keeping him continually moving forward.

He was then asked “what is your advice to young entrepreneurs today?”  He said three things which were keeping your body in good physical condition, proper time management, and setting goals for yourself.  He said if you have these three things then you can become crazy successful, but possessing all three of these qualities is much easier said than done.

Hearing Matt’s story was really awesome for me.  It was cool to see someone who was at “rock bottom” and decided to stand up and do something about it.  I always enjoy a “rags to riches” story and Matt absolutely embodies this mentality.

here is the link to the interview I read: https://www.retireat21.com/blog/matt-morris-interview-the-unemployed-millionaire