Imagine a world where helping people could be as easy as searching google. Well, this is exactly what Jack Kim is attempting to do with his company Benelab. Benelab is a search engine that donates 100% of its profits to various charity organizations around the world.

During Jack’s freshman year in high school he learned how to code HTML and build websites. He thought that it was really fun, and he thought the idea of making something online would be very exciting.  Unlike most people however, Jack didn’t just think about doing something, he actually went ahead and did it. He researched things like AdSense and other online money-making strategies and with this knowledge he created his very first basic search engine. This proved to be a small success for Jack and his simple search engine ended up providing him with a monthly income of $200-$300 with a relatively small group of 2000 visitors a month. This was certainly not an extraordinary amount of wealth, but it did show Jack that search engines had the potential to create large sums of income with a relatively small user base, and this is what led him to continue creating new search engines.

Jack created another search engine that same year called Benesearch which was a search engine dedicated to donating 100% of its profits to charity. However, the search engine still had a long way to go before it would be considered a success, and Jack began giving up on the project. That is when Jack attended a business program at Stanford where he was taught the basics of entrepreneurship, but more importantly, he found professors there that motivated him to give his idea another shot. Jack reworked his search engine and renamed it Benelab and began working with a team made up entirely of motivated kids like him.

Today Benelab has made some traction in the search engine industry seeing about 1,000 searches a day, nothing compared to sites like google, but it is a good start. With this small success they have been able to give hundreds of dollars to various charities like World Concern. Although this is great, Jack is still ambitious for more and has made it a goal to raise $100,000 through Benelab before he graduates from highschool.

Benelab is a very inspiring story that has a lot of important lessons for entrepreneurs. One important point this story highlights is the ability of anyone to turn their skills and passions into an idea that has the potential to affect the world. Jack was just a 16-year-old kid that only knew basic programming and had a love of charity work, but he was able to turn these things into a successful startup. The other important lesson this teaches us is that idea creation/development truly is a process. Even though Benelab is the same at its core to Jack’s original search engine idea, there were many things that had to change before the company became what it is today, in fact Jack had to totally revamp the engine before it began to see any success and even beyond that his team of teenagers made certain aspects of development challenging. Despite these challenges, Jack and the Benelab team continued to persist and eventually they saw some success. Jack and Benelab both certainly have a long way to go, but with all the lessons he is learning on this journey, there is no doubt that the value created through this process will be with Jack and his team for the rest of their lives.

https://youtu.be/P6C6Tyy0hPE