Entrepreneur Jeff Cripe, who is 29 years old, is an impressive example of a young innovative thinker. Cripe began as an employee at Birchbox where he was first introduced to the world of startups. Not long after, Cripe had an idea, and decided to take a shot at his own startup. Cripe’s idea was to piggyback off of already existing rideshare services and add a vending component. 
By adding a box full of snacks, along with a scannable QR code that allows riders to make a payment, Cripes company, known as Cargo, added an entire new way to generate profit within the ridesharing market. Already, Cargo has partnered with Uber, Grab, and Go-Jek, all leaders in the rideshare industry. Part of what makes Cripe’s idea so effective is its simplicity. Cargo didn’t require the invention of anything new. Ridesharing has existed for almost a decade, and vending machines much longer. It was simply the combination of these two concepts that was so revolutionary, and allowed for Cargo’s success. Cripe’s story offers inspiration for how simply seeing the potential for a combination of two products in a way that no one else has seen before can lead to the creation of a successful company.
Archive for Great Ideas – Page 5
Ryan’s World
Christmas and birthdays can be a very stressful time of year for parents. Trying to get something that their kids will like can be a challenge. Ryan Kaji and his parents saw this problem and created Ryan’s World to help those parents. Ryan’s World is a YouTube channel, started back in 2015, devoted to testing out toys to see if children will like them. The tester is Ryan Kaji, a nine-year-old now millionaire. While Kaji is the main star of the YouTube channel, alongside him are his mother, father, and twin sisters. Ryan’s World consists of over 27 million subscribers and his videos have generated over 43 billion views. Ryan’s world is in the top 100 most subscribed YouTube channels in the United States. Furthermore, Kaji was named the highest-paid YouTube star in 2018 and 2019.
The Kaji family is one that holds great entrepreneurs. They saw a problem: parents not knowing what toys to get for their kids, and they created a great solution. The solution they created, making a YouTube channel where Ryan tries out different toys, was innovative and profitable. Moreover, the creative skills that young Kaji has and is still developing will benefit him greatly in life. His story is only going to get more interesting and is definitely one to stay up to date on in the future.
Youngstown, Ohio is a smaller city on the outskirts of Ohio that has circulated entrepreneurial ventures in and out of storefronts for decades. A company called the Youngstown Business Incubator developed a program they like to call the WE Program, short for Women in Entrepreneurship. The WE Program “creates economic opportunities for women through entrepreneurial education and training, mentoring, and networking.” Their focus specifically on women branched from a mission to promote “minority-owned enterprises,” which they hope will bring personal and community growth.
The WE Program emphasizes three phases – WE Create, WE Launch, WE Grow – that women can apply for, according to whatever stage in the entrepreneurial startup women find themselves. The WE Create phase is a “four-week program that offers four workshops and educational sessions to help women who are ready to enter the world of entrepreneurship but need help developing an idea.” This phase is for the imaginers, the ones who have the ideas but have no clue where to start and need some structural workshops. The WE Launch phase “includes ten weeks of classes that teach the fundamentals of owning and operating a business.” The primary focus of the WE Launch phase is to take already-started businesses and aid them in launching their product or service into the market. The WE Grow phase, phase III of the Accelerator Program, “gives women four weeks of marketing strategy and tools to grow their existing businesses.” Each phase has an application that can be completed on the Youngstown Business Incubator website, and any woman can apply. Each program applicant is reviewed and applicable to win a grant award from each program, which has significantly changed the course of many women’s businesses within Mahoning Valley. Check out the program for yourself!
Find the website here: https://ybi.org/we/
David Karp started the popular web platform Tumbler, however many do not know about the start of the platform. David Karp became fascinated by technology at a young age. He was born into the family of a teacher and a composer and started teaching himself HTML at the very young age of 11 years old. I don’t know about you, but I personally had no idea how to really even work a computer at 11 let alone teach myself HTML. At age 15 he became homeschooled by his mother so that he was able to focus on gaining an internship at the animation company Frederator Studios. Karp later went on to securing a position at UrbanBaby which is a site that allows future parents to post questions for other to answer.
When David was just 17 he moved away to Japan for a period of time to immerse himself in the technology culture of Japan. Karp returned to the United States and when he did he was moved to the chief technology officer position at UrbanBaby until the company sold 2006. He then went on to raise funds to invest in his own consulting company called Davidville and then later on hired Marco Arment to help with that venture.
In 2007 David Karp launched the site Tumblr as a platform for short blogs, pictures and other forms of media. The site gave the user control over making the themes to their posts customizable to them or they had the option of using preset ones that were already on the platform. Tumblr became popular not only for everyday users but for companies to partner with the platform and create effective feeds that would market to their specific companies.
As time passed Tumblr became more and more popular. About 5 years after it was first launched the platform hosted approximately 70 million blog posts and had a staff of around 100 people. About a year later the company was purchased by Yahoo! for around $1 billion but Karp remained as the CEO. Currently Tumblr is now owned by Verizon and David Karp is no longer the CEO.
Even though Tumblr is no longer a popular platform it still was something that a generation will remember when they hear the name. What is interesting is how young Karp was when he started down the path that would lead him to Tumblr. It goes to show that you are never too young to start working towards something big and that even a small idea like a blog platform can turn into something much bigger.
Matthew Mullenweg grew up with hobbies like coding, art and economics. A fun mix. One of the main founders of WordPress, his hobbies and skills throughout his life led to many amazing web related ideas. In 2005 Matt left school at Houston and a consulting job to start his overhead business, Automattic. This later led to a slew of other companies that used Automattic as a launch pad, including WordPress. He was just nineteen when he decided to change the way people use the internet to publish.
Automattic and all of its resulting companies has turned into a completely virtual company of over 1,100 employees in more than 62 countries.
WordPress, which is used by many authors and writers to publish blogs, was started because of the closure of b2, the only other open source platform option at the time. Having used b2 throughout his life, its end was a pain for Matt. The idea and plan for WordPress started when Matt was approached online by a fellow coder after he had talked about the lack of a publishing space.
Using b2 as a starting base and template, the two entrepreneurs proceeded to build upon the main idea while improving any faults. A classic mash up of ideas and innovation, WordPress is now used by over 31 percent of the web. It is only one of many successes Matt made for himself, but it very much added to the open source world of the web.
He works on it constantly and takes joy from the benefit people receive.
From educational to professional, WordPress has added levels of simplicity, convenience, and efficiency to the way people work. Matt has an entrepreneur’s spirit, and from his career history so far, it is easy to see he looks for problems to solve and thrives in finding solutions.
Everyday, someone somewhere has a new idea they want to share. However, very few make it to market, or even make money for you. Getting your idea out there is hard, so hard in fact it is what separates entrepreneurs from dreamers.
Gerard Adams, CEO and founder of FOWNders social-impact accelerator in Newark, NJ to speak at TEDx September 28, 2016. (PRNewsFoto/FOWNders, Inc.)
It is hard. Ask Gerard Adams, an entrepreneur himself and founder of Elite Daily, how hard it is. He logged many hours into coming up and laying the ground work. He thought this would be the hardest, most time consuming part; however he was wrong, way wrong. His hardest part was taking that idea and publishing it and getting it noticed. It took time, time that he wishes went faster. So after a lot of thought, time, and energy put into one idea, he did what every entrepreneur does: threw it away and started all over. He had another idea, bigger, better, and one that benefits more than just him – Fownders.
Elite Daily founder created a place that is a safe for young entrepreneurs to go and publish their ideas and share what they want to start up and create themselves. Fownders takes your OWN, orginal idea and gets it out into the world for you. It serves as a place to bounce ideas off each other, connect, and expand on new or old ideas. The website has connected many entrepreneurs, some of which combined ideas and made it big in half the time as others, say Gerard Adams. It even offers ways to help many young individuals create new ideas, and start ups that go on to make millions. So if you have a good idea that you are struggling to share, get out there with it, try Fownders. 
John Goscha founded IdeaPaint, in the early 2000s. He and several friends, Andrew Foley, William Gioielli, and Alex Galperin, developed this idea through their college years. Seeing a need for dry erase walls first, when John and his entrepreneurship hall mates posted large sheets of paper up and down the walls of their hall. They eventually ran out of space on their idea sheets and had to continually replace them. Goscha decided to try and find some dry erase paint to make their lives easier. To his chagrin, there was no such thing!
John, Andrew and William started developing the business plan for IdeaPaint, and researching options and paints to test their product out. They made the walls dry erase and when students and faculty started using the walls, they realized this had an actual market. IdeaPaint received seed money for Babson, and the team began working to creating their product. After graduation, the team split up, but John Goscha kept at his idea. IdeaPaint has several setbacks finding a paint that would actually work commercially. They eventually found the perfect product, and received investors and are now a very successful company. Many large companies and universities, including Chick-fil-A, MIT, Go Daddy, Evernote, Welch’s, Google and more use IdeaPaint around their campuses.
John Goshca, came up with an incredible product idea, when he and his entrepreneurship buddies found a pain they were experiencing. He joined together with a few other classmates, realizing that working together would help him find a better solution, than if he had been working on his own. John did not let setbacks keep him down, but pursued his idea throughout the decade until he reached success. He has benefited so many individuals and companies through his hard work.
IdeaPaint now have many different options and products, including magnetic surfaces, dry erase + projector surfaces and others that allow lots of flexibility, and it all stemmed from the need to stop replacing paper on the walls of John Goscha’s dorm hall.
Potato Parcel is a business that was started by 24 year old Alex Craig, a mobile app developer that had recently graduated from the University of North Texas. The business concept is fairly simple, you can have a potato, with 140 characters or less written on it, mailed anonymously to any address. As it turns out, there was actually a decent market for this service.
After going viral on Reddit and Twitter, Potato Parcel quickly began making profits of $10,000 – $13,000 per month. By the end of the year, the business was sold to Riad Bekhit for $40,000. Bekhit expanded the product line to allow you to ship potatoes stamped with the image of someone’s face. The business was even able to secure an investment on Shark Tank, further growing its market. Potato Parcel has the value proposition of being an alternative to boring greeting cards. The goes to show that if you know how to position yourself in the market, you can build a successful business out of nearly anything.
Daniel Fine shows that no age is too young to start a business as he created four different companies by the time that he was in college. As a senior in college, Fine has been recognized for his great entrepreneurship by many outlets, including Forbes, TIME Magazine, The New York Times, and even the President of the United States by earning the President’s Volunteer Service Award. While Daniel Fine has made many impressive accomplishments in his young career, he continues to give back to the community in a way that he enjoys.
Daniel Fine started his professional career at seven years old when his brother Jake was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. Daniel realized that he could help to give back to the diabetes community by launching Team Brotherly Love, his first business. To this day, Team Brotherly Love has been very successful and has raised over two million dollars towards Type 1 diabetes research.
Fine later launched another company called Match Tutors in an attempt to provide innovation in the tutoring industry. He noticed that when a tutor and student had similar interest, the session usually yielded better results. He decided to create Match Tutors so that any student would be able to find their ideal tutor to “increase engagement and achieve greater results.”
Glass-U, one of Fine’s successful businesses, seeks to market fully foldable sunglasses in a unique way. Daniel Fine took a new perspective on the sunglass industry and created sunglasses that are fully foldable to be even more easily stored. Glass-U’s marketing technique is unique because it appeals to college students. Glass-U is licensed by many different colleges and universities and even extends to fraternities and sororities to make customized sunglasses. Glass-U has been featured in the Rose Bowl, Lalapalooza, and the FIFA World Cup.
Along with Team Brotherly Love, Daniel Fine also decided to give back to the diabetes community by creating his company Dosed. Dosed is a smartphone app that tracks the insulin dosage taken by a Type 1 diabetic. According to the Dosed website “Dosed improves patient compliance by providing direct access to data that can facilitate behavioral modification.”
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In 2005, 21 year old Alex Tew created the million dollar homepage to fund his college education. The website had 1 million pixels and they would be sold for $1 in blocks of 100. The buyer could use the pixels to put a slogan or message and a link to a website of their choice. Sounds like a pretty dumb idea right? Well it actually turned out to be extremely successful. Within a year all pixels had sold, and the last 1,000 actually sold on an eBay auction for $38,100, bringing the revenues of the site to $1,036,100. It started with some of his family members purchasing pixels, but as word of the website spread and it got more attention, many businesses started buying pixels for advertising. At first glance, it makes no sense why people would spend money on this, but they saw it as a simple, yet clever idea for a young man to pay for college. Because they found it humorous and cleaver, some people where willing to pay for pixels, which started a chain reaction with the site becoming increasingly popular and the pixels becoming more valuable as a advertising tool. Alex was actually a talented entrepreneur and not a one hit wonder. Since raising this money to pay for his education, he has put his degree to good use and is no the co-found and co-CEO of Calm, which is currently the number one app for meditation and sleep that is designed to help people relax. Alex shows that you do not necessarily have to have a life-changing idea to be a successful entrepreneur, you just have to be creative and relate to people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage