Archive for Great Ideas – Page 2

Entrepreneur and High Schooler

The Gen Z entrepreneur who I discovered is a young women named Destiny Snow, raised by business owners she started a makeup business at just 15 years old.


Destiny Snow :: millennialentrepreneurs.com


While covid 19 hindered many from living the life they wanted, Snow didn’t let it stop her. Covid pushed her to find new opportunities for her business. She discovered early on that she needed to identify the target market for her products instead of trying to sell to family and friends. She jumped on the growing use of social media for business growth and learned how to sponsor people and companies who attracted the type of audience who she was looking to sell to.

Setting a good example for our declining society, Snow said she forced herself to learn and read about marketing so that she could implement what she learned along with her passion into her business.

Snow not only has started this business, successfully rolled with the punches but also aims to teach other young people today about entrepreneurship and marketing skills. She has done this through writing and releasing E-books and becoming a social media influencer.

It’s no wonder that Snow succeeded so well in the business industry because her mother, she says, is a successful business owner. Snow advises finding a model who you can be inspired by and who shows you how to succeed in your area. For Snow, this was her mother.

For me, the thing that’s one of the most impressive about Snow’s story is how she educated herself on how to succeed using marketing. She read books and described her house as looking like a library because of all the material she read to learn and continues to learn. Snow’s story is inspiring, and it continues to grow. She’s an example of what each of us is capable of.

Matt Mullenweg: The founder of WordPress

Where it all began

Born and raised in Houston Texas, Matt had a seemingly normal childhood to most. He was introduced to the technological world through his father who was acomputer programmer. Eighteen-year-old Matt loved to blog on a platform called b2/cafelog. This site soon was taken down by the owners and this is where Matt decided to launch his own site with the help of his friend Mike Little. In 2003 he and Mike soon built what we know as WordPress, and it was widely received by the public. Matt was only eighteen at the time of founding WordPress and he was still in high school. Due to his chronic migraines Matt was absent from school and this could have kept him from graduating but he was able to push through. After high school Matt continued his education at The University of Houston and chose to study philosophy and political science. During college Matt still worked on WordPress and grew more and more detached from his schoolwork. This lead Matt to drop out of college in 2004 to focus on WordPress entirely.

At nineteen years old Matt was offered a job at CNET in San Fransico which allowed him to work part time on WordPress. He stayed at CNET for only a year as he wanted to work full time on WordPress. Matt began building his team adding former Yahoo! executive Toni Schneider to join as CEO. Over the years Matt has joined several other ventures such as Automatic, GitLab, Global Multimedia Protocols Group, and helped launch Ping-O-Matic. Ping-O-Matic is a mechanism to help notify search engines about blog updates. These ventures led to Matt having an amazingly successful career with WordPress. WordPress powered about 40% of the internet in 2021 so one can only imagine how much it has grown in just three years. Approximately 400 million people visit WordPress sites each month. Overall, Matt Mullenweg is someone that is forgotten by most but as we can see and use in class WordPress is a very collaborative and easy service to use.

 

 

Moziah Bridges-Mo’s Bows

Moziah Bridges loved to dress to his best even at nine years old. Now he believes that a well-dressed man says a lot about them. At nine years old Moziah wanted to make his own fashion company with help from his grandma he moved how to sow his first bowtie. After a while of perfecting his craft, his company started to catch wind after an appearance on Shark Tank. In the six years since creation Mo’s Bows surged in popularity. Moziah even signed a deal with the NBA to supply every team with bow ties. His mother is his business manager that helps him every step of the way. Moziah is very frugal with his money, and often donates to numerous charities. He broke the mold for fashion designers as being a 15-year-old kid and continues to grow his brand up with the greats like Neiman Marcus.  Mo’s Bows: Meet Moziah Bridges, the teenage king of bow ties who just inked an NBA deal – CBS News

Ryan Hickman-Founder of Ryan’s Recycling

Ryan Hickman fell in love with recycling at just 3 and a half years old when his father took him. He wanted to continue to do it, and eventually created his own company called “Ryan’s Recycling.” He spends most weekends as CEO of the company with his father picking up materials needed to be recycled from residents and taking them to the recycling centers. He has collected over 1.6 million bottles and cans since being in business.  All of the money earned from this recycling company is going towards his recycling fund, but he plans to have this business as a career long after his college graduation. Apart from the commercial enterprise Ryan has started a nonprofit called “Project 3r.”He uses from donations to promote beach cleanups and environmental education. Ryan also makes hats and t-shirts that the profits go to the Pacific Marine Mammal center. Through his company he has promoted environmental efforts that even got attention from Ellen DeGeneres and Jennifer Aniston. This young entrepreneur has clearly made a large impact on his community and environment by doing what he loves.  Ryan’s Recycling Has Recycled 1.6 Million Bottles, With 12-Year-Old CEO (greenmatters.com)

Fraser Doherty- Creator of SuperJam

At fifteen-years-old Fraser Doherty loved to cook jam from one of his grandmother’s old recipes. He began to sell local to neighbors and such. His infant company soon began to grow too large for neighbors, and Fraser set his sights on bigger objectives. He borrowed his father’s suit, and he set his mission to pitching his idea to a well-known supermarket in his local area. They rejected Fraser, but that did not kill his spirit. He took improved upon their critiques, and searched his country for a factory that would take a chance on him. All but one said no. Fraser came back the next year with all of his improvements, and he got the deal to distribute his product across all the supermarket’s stores. His company blew up from there. He quickly increased his production to over 20,000 units of jelly. Everyone can take note of his dedication and persistence to never give up on his entrepreneurial goals. The Story of SuperJam: How Fraser Doherty Built a Multimillion-Dollar Jelly Empire (web.com)

Smashing the Standard

 

The prosthetic limb market has seen very little innovation since almost its inception. Prosthetics provide necessary balance and stability to those without the corresponding limb, but they are brutally stationary. When we think of pirates with their wooden peg-legs, or Olympic athletes sporting their curved “blade runners”, and any other replacement limb, we basically think of dead weight. The prosthetic is immensely helpful, but it can’t move and, compared to the original, fully-functional limb, it is quite sad. But this market is finally changing with the Esper Hand. In an article in Time Magazine, Leslie Dickstein says, “Esper Bionic’s prosthetic hand is the first AI powered, cloud-based, robotic prosthetic that gets smarter over time. I love the next sentence: “Esper Bionics CEO and co-founder Dima Gazda, a medical doctor and engineer, sees the prosthetic market as ripe for disruption—and setting the stage for a bionic future.” Using AI and the vast amount of technological resources available, Esper Bionics have built a hand that moves like a human hand and evolves to better help the user the more he or she uses it. When I went to their site, the first thing Esper says about the company is fascinating. They state that “Human augmentation is set to transform the way we live, enhancing our physical abilities and unlocking longer lifespans. We are building the first bionic ecosystem of connected devices to push the boundaries of human potential.” I think this market is begging for innovation and I believe Esper Bionics is the company to provide it. What do you think?

Lily Born and the Kangaroo Cup

Lilly Born was eight years old when she struck upon her innovation gold. Her grandfather had Parkinson’s and was constantly spilling his drink whenever he tried to set his cup down. Her grandmother had to do so much cleaning up, and Lilly wanted to do something about it. That’s when she came up with the Kangaroo cup, a three-legged cup specifically designed to be easy to set down and hard to spill.

The kangaroo cup was a simple response to a simple problem. It is a great example of the typical, “Everyone saw the apple fall, but only Newton wondered why.” The innovation was not necessarily technological, but rather a repurposing of existing technology. She created a cup with three handles, which also doubled as legs to keep the cup from spilling when set down. Anybody could have done this, but nobody had the wit or bravery to do so until Lily.

 

 

Lilly has since sold $100,000 of kangaroo cups through crowdfunding sites like Indiegogo. She founded her own company, Imagiroo LLC., to handle the distribution of the cups.

Her ongoing message is that she thought of this idea as only an eight-year-old. If she could do it, anybody can.

Where I find inspiration in this story is the fact that it was not an insane technological innovation, or social revelation. Instead, she took a typical item and applied her observation to it. It gives me hope that even if the idea I have is small, it can still be successful so long as I put effort behind it.

From this story it is apparent to me that we must observe others, not just ourselves, to get a full picture of our entrepreneurial space. Sometimes the sight of someone else struggling with a problem can either give us an idea or bring up a dormant idea we forgot about and give it new life.

 

Kyle Giersdorf: Gamer entrepreneur

Kyle Giersdorf others know him as Bugha which is his in-game user name. Kyle was born on December 30, 2002, and grew up in Pottsgrove Pennsylvania. Bugha’s entrepreneurial venture started when his father mentioned an up-and-coming game called Fortnite. Bugha fell in love with this game and later started to stream on Twitch. Twitch is a gaming live stream platform that allows watchers to donate and subscribe. Bugha was so good at the game that slowly more and more viewers started to join his stream and he started to make a ton off the money of the subscriptions. Bugha also started to win many tournaments and even qualified for and won the Fortnite world cup in 2019. After this, he blew up and created a youtube that now has 4.28 million subscribers.

Bugha, after he had a very big following on all platforms, started to create affordable PC accessories like keyboards mouses and even some PCs. He created these products because when he was young keyboard was so expensive and he could never buy them so now with his products he changed that for many young kids that want to games. Bugha taught me many things throughout his entrepreneurial venture. The first thing I learned is to find something you love instead of trying to do what other people want you to do because then you won’t put your all into your venture. Bugha’s family was very hesitant about his idea of trying to pursue gaming as a job but with some good persuasion, he finally got their approval to chase his dream. Bugha’s story really encourages me to go out and do what I love and hopefully make as much money as he did.

Benjamin Kickz

Benjamin Kapelushnik was born on October 14, 1999, in Brooklyn New York. Benjamin got into sneakers when his mBusiness Is Boomin: Benjamin Kickz for Grailed | Grailedom first purchased him some Nike sneakers in middle school. This is when Benjamin Kicks was born he started to get involved in the sneaker resell market. Ben started to purchase one pair of shoes and flipped it for money. He then used that money to buy two pairs and then eventually he was buying hundreds of sneakers at a time. Ben was one of the first in this sneaker reselling Industry and became the “plug” for sneakers.

Ben gained a lot of success when he first met DJ Khaled and created a very close relationship with him. His clients kept getting better since DJ Khaled Ben really created his name in the sneaker industry and also in the music industry. At the age of 16, Ben reached the achievement of one million dollars in sales of sneakers. Ben was also seen on many TV shows like Complex, CNN, Business insider, and The Daily Show. He also won the SHorty awards finalist in 2018. One thing that Ben teaches me is that he is a hard-working man and when he had his goal set to resell sneakers he was laser focused and worked up to a millionaire. Ben also showed the world that no matter your age if you are confident you can achieve anything.

Ben Pasternack

Ben Pasternack is an Australian technology entrepreneur, and he is the CEO of three businesses. The three businesses he runs are called simulate, flogg, and monkey. It all started when he was just 14 and got bored in his science class so he decided to create a fun app to pass the time. He created the app called “impossible rush” and this had over 2 million downloads. The best part of his story was what he put in his locker at the end of eight grade that read “If you’re reading this, you really f—ed up.” He said he wanted to never go to school again and wanted to make money with his apps. His most successful business is called simulate and his signature product is NUGGS which is a plant-based nugget simulation. I thought that his story was very interesting because he was not the type of kid to pay attention in any of his classes in school. I respect how he found what he was good at and just focused on that when starting his own businesses. His journey is inspiring because at the young age of 16 he had to move from Australia to the United States by himself. He said there were times he felt very lonely but fought through it by focusing on his passion of developing new apps. I also thought it was clever how he uses different social media platforms to reach his customers. He takes full advantage of the web so he can optimize his success for each of the businesses he owns.

Ben Pasternak - Wikipedia