Archive for Online Companies – Page 8

David Karp – Millenial Entrepreneur & Founder of Tumblr

David Karp is the young millennial who founded the popular microblogging and social networking website Tumblr in 2007. Growing up in New York City, he started learning HTML and designing websites for businesses at the young age of 11 years old. Karp never earned a high school diploma, and worried that this fact and his young age would hinder his career and people would not view him as legitimate. As August 2017 records report, Tumblr hosts over 360 million blogs, and has approximately 555 million visitors each month.

 

Karp began his career as an intern under Fred Seibert at his company, where he built its first blogging platform and was in charge of editing their internet video network. He later started working for a company called UrbanBaby, an online parenting forum up until 2006. Shortly after, Karp jumpstarted his very own software consulting company, Davidville. A year later, Karp and his partner Marco Arment began working on the microblogging website known as Tumblr. Right away Tumblr raised $750,000, and by 2011 had raised about $80 million. In 2011, Tumblr received about $125 million from investors and the money was used to begin advertising and promotion.

 

In 2009, Karp was named Best Young Tech Entrepreneur by BusinessWeek and in 2010 was reffered as, “one of the top 35 innovators in the world before the age of 35” by the MIT Technology Review TR35. Also in 2010, Tumblr was named as a finalist in Lead411’s New York City Hot 125. Tumblr is now used by several celebrities and was the first blogging post to host former President Obama’s blog.

 

There is so much we can learn from Karp’s story and success, one being that you should NEVER step down and let your young age discourage you!

Scott’s Cheap Flights – Save Hundreds on International Travel

Scott Keyes loves travel. In 2016, he traveled to thirteen countries, and yet only had to pay for taxes. Taking advantage of credit card points and frequent flier miles, he accrued enough points to take the trip virtually free. He combined his skill with credit cards with his knack for finding cheap flights and made possible a flight many can only dream of.

His 2016 trip isn’t the only one he has taken, and it did not take long for his travel prowess to catch the attention of his friends and coworkers. As more and more of them requested that he keep them up to date with deals on flights, he slowly transitioned to a newsletter service and then to a full-fledged for-profit business. His website, Scott’s Cheap Flights, does not sell flights but rather sends daily emails with information on deals that cut down hundreds of dollars on international flights.

In a way, it seems like the business fell into Keyes’ lap. However, the success of such a business seems so easily accomplished only because there was both passion for travel savings and a need for people to take cheaper trips. This business flows from what Keyes was already doing, and doing well. His drive to find good deals and love of travel made him both suited for and willing to run his website. Also, the fact that the business started with people he knew means that demand for his service was high. If the individuals in one’s small personal sphere have interest in your business, then it is highly likely that there is interest in the national realm. Keyes found a niche where what he was good at and ready to do met what other people asked for or wanted.

What make Scott’s Cheap Flights so unique is that everything is done manually. Scott himself as well as a few other employees manually surf websites searching for great sales and errors that result in lower ticket prices. No algorithm exists that can find the deals as well as Keyes and his team does. Finding deals online is more of an art than a science, and has not been developing for very long, as the online market has not existed very long. Although increasingly more people are developing skills with credit cards and deals, Keyes was both talented and ready enough to make one of the initial moves on a fairly open market.

In this service, Keyes mixes his passion with a problem. According to his website, “Scott searches for flights all day every day because he has no life.” He could apply what he already did to an area that other people asked for, and now his business serves more than 530,000 people. Scott’s Cheap Flights displays innovation not in software or technology but rather using what one already knows how to do.

The Rent the Runway Revolution: How Two Women Changed the Fashion Industry for Good

In 2009, two young women attending Harvard Business School met for their weekly coffee and business brainstorming session. Jennifer Hyman and Jennifer Fleiss both knew they wanted to start a business together, but for many months they brainstormed ideas which never seemed to stick. However, on this particular afternoon, Jennifer Hyman mentioned to Fleiss that her sister would be attending a wedding next weekend, but had nothing to wear. She voiced the frustration shared by women across America, that it is difficult to justify spending hundreds of dollars on a dress you only wear a few times. As she said this, she came up with a business idea which would solve this problem and revolutionize the market of high end women’s fashion.

Jenny Fleiss (left) and Jennifer Hyman (right)

Hyman and Fleiss conceptualized a business model where they would partner with different well-known, high-end designers from around the world and rent these designer dresses out to women for a few days for a fraction of the cost of buying one of these dresses. These two young women started out by buying dresses in their own sizes and going around to different college campuses on the weekends of big events and putting up flyers and sending out emails announcing that the female students could rent these designer dresses for a reduced price and simply return them after the event. With each campus these two went to, their business model proved very popular, and with each event, they continued to refine and adjust their model until they landed on the current business model of Rent the Runway. Since 2009, Rent the Runway has grown from a few designer dresses advertised through flyers on college campuses into a $15 million corporation with an extremely user friendly app and a variety of supplementary services.

One things which makes Hyman and Fleiss stand out as unique in the world of innovation and entrepreneurship is their approach to founding a startup. While many young entrepreneurs look for a problem in their field of study or expertise which they can construct a solution for, Hyman and Fleiss started with a problem they simply observed, despite their lack of knowledge in the fields of fashion or technology.  However, by recording customer reactions to their product and collecting customer testimonials, these young women were able to get the designers on board and soon had enough funding to hire people with expertise in analytics, technology, fashion, and customer relations in order to create the best business possible.

Even eight years removed from its founding, Rent the Runway is an incredible company to watch innovate and expand. Because of the founders’ passion for giving women the opportunity to have that “Cinderella experience” and look elegant, extravagant, confident or professional for an affordable price, the company continues to grow its inventory, expand it market, and offer additional services, such as makeup and jewelry tips depending on the dress or outfit you rent.

Hyman and Fleiss at the opening of their first store

Hyman and Fleiss have also sought to optimize the customer experience by offering free shipping and dry cleaning, along with spending a great deal of time and money on analytics. This has allowed them to find what colors and styles customers prefer, along with how long customers like rentals to last so that they can give the customer the best, most convenient experience possible. Rent the Runway is constantly offering new features, different dresses, and featuring a variety of both well-known and new designers, which keeps their business in a constant state of growth and expansion.

Hyman and Fleiss are truly inspiring to all young women looking to be entrepreneurs. They actively thought about problems, and rather than waiting for funds or investors to back their idea, they eagerly engaged their clientele, pivoted based on the feedback they received, and then sought out investors and designers with confidence in their product and the data and testimonies to back it up. These two women are constantly pursuing excellence, passionate about their product and their clients, and dedicated to inspiring future women entrepreneurs.

 

Kutoa.com – Feeding the Hungry Made Easy

Kutoa’s birth was pretty simple, actually – Joey Grassia saw a problem, and he used the resources he had to create a solution. I’ll explain.

In 2007, Grassia was struck by the severe malnutrition and sickness he witnessed when he traveled to South Asia. A few years after that, he had a health scare of his own, due to his diet filled with additives and preservatives. In marrying these two problems he encountered, he came up with a solution for both. Kutoa (Swahili “to give”) is a website that sells gluten free, sans GMO health bars with no added sugar or preservatives. The best part? For each bar sold, one is given to a hungry child. Having just started Kutoa in 2010, Grassia has already driven it to deliver 1 million meals to children in need.

One thing that Grassia has been very intentional in doing is inviting the consumer not just to buy a health bar, but to be a part of this global change. Kutoa.com connects with its consumers through its blog, which can be found on kutoa.com. The blog highlights various individuals, organizations, and schools in the community that are doing their part in fighting hunger both locally and around the world. Scrolling through the reviews for their health bars (among which you can find Chocolate Espresso Bean, Blueberry Almond, and Cherry Cashew), it is obvious that Kutoa’s consumers are ecstatic about finding a health bar that is truly healthy, and being able to make a tangible difference in an easy way.

Perhaps one of the most driving factors in Kutoa’s success has been Grassia’s mindset towards entrepreneurship. He believes that someone doesn’t need to have loads of experience in the business world to make an impact. He or shes just needs have to have an experience. Grassia’s happened to include a life-changing trip and a new diet. In the “Our Story” page of Kutoa.com, Grassia challenges his audience to take a look at the experiences they’ve had, and figure out how we can turn those into ideas that will improve our lives and others’. “Please,” he writes, “always remember that each of us have the power to make a difference.”

https://kutoa.com/

Airbnb’s Brian Chesky revolutionizes a Sleepy Industry

Brian Chesky, the co-founder of Airbnb, found a way to change an industry that hasn’t seen changes in decades. After graduating from the Rhode Island School of design school, he moved to San Francisco with his college friend Joe Gebbia. At the time, San Francisco was having a design conference and hotel rooms were in high demand and the whole area was booked, so the pair came up with the idea to rent out a room in their apartment and give their guests breakfast too in order to make a few extra bucks to afford their rent.  After years of ideation and innovating they slowly scaled the idea into what is now Airbnb. Airbnb is an online marketplace and hospitality service, that enables people to lease or rent short-term lodging all over the world. Chesky is driven by innovation and constant improvement. Currently, he is working on revamping Airbnb into a full-service travel company. Chesky is an inspiring millennial entrepreneur because of his ability to see an opportunity in the market and scale it into an international business that changed the future of travel as well as the hospitality/ hotel industry. I recently stayed at an Airbnb in Manhatten and it was a simple way to feel like a real New Yorker. Additionally, I think that Airbnb is a particularly inspiring company because it allows its hosts to also be entrepreneurs in their own space by renting out their space to other travelers. From Chesky’s story, others can be more aware of problems and freely imagine solutions even if it seems like there are insurmountable barriers because Chesky and his team were able to do so.

Aditya Argawalla: Innovation In India

Aditya Agarwalla- Co-Founder of Kisan Network

Kisan Marketplace is an online marketplace connected to farmers in India through a mobile phone app. The farmers use the app to sell their crops to buyers. This system generally makes things cheaper for both the farmers and the buyers, because it cuts out the middlemen and geography which limits them in India.

This business is unique due to the new rise of cheap smartphones in India. Until recently, smartphones were not commonly available to people in India. But with this recent rise, has come a great opportunity to use technology to help the farmers more efficiently deliver their crops to sellers. Aditya Agarwalla 22, dropped out of Princeton University to start this business with his father, a farmer in India. They have a simple app, which farmers download onto their smartphones, and it connects them with a vast marketplace of buyers, with Kisan Network acting as the middleman connecting the two.

Aditya Agarwalla saw a need to sell crops more efficiently for farmers. He tapped into the technology, which at that point was a relatively unexploited field. As the first innovators in this market, the Kisan Network’s success has been remarkable. They have moved over one million pounds of crops in under one year.

Dropbox- A Coder Turned Entrepreneur

Drew Houston, co-founder and CEO of Dropbox, has all the symptoms of being an entrepreneur! The creation story of his company, Houston claims, came from an idea that came to him after constantly forgetting his USB flash drive during his studies at MIT.  During his time as a student he found a multitude of problems with storage services and decided to set out to solve this problem for himself.  Little did he know that his solution would end up benefiting millions of others as well.

Image result for Drew houston

In 2007, he and his co-founder Arash Ferdowsi were able to secure enough funding to begin the development of the program were soon launched Dropbox. Within 24-hours of its launch, Dropbox “had 75,000 people signup for the wait-list.”  When they were only expecting 15,000, tops.  Dropbox had an enormous success rate, and, by the end of 2013 Dropbox had gained over 200 million users.

So what sets this company apart from others? Well Dropbox is a technology company that claims to build simple, powerful products for people and businesses.  Unlike many other companies, Dropbox is innovative in that they value the creation of products that are easy to use and are built on trust. When people put their files in Dropbox, they can trust they’re secure and their data is their own. The users’ privacy has always been their first priority, and it always will be.  Image result for dropbox images

Houston believed that technology should get out of the way, so there’s no limit to what people can do. And his tightly-knit team seems very committed to realizing ambitious ideas and making technology work for the world, and I’m sure that the best from them is still to come.

“Sometimes you just get this feeling — it’s a compulsion or an obsession. You can’t stop thinking about it. You just have to work on this thing,” words from the entrepreneur himself, Drew Houston.

uBreakiFix

Justin Wetherill built a multi-million dollar business out of his bedroom in Orlando, FL. What started out as a simple problem – a broken iPhone screen – turned into an idea that Justin developed into uBreakiFix, which is now an international franchise operation.

After working as a staff accountant for a few months out of college, Justin quickly realized that he didn’t want to be stuck behind a desk for the rest of his life. He and his friend David Reiff tried their hand at a few different business ideas, including an online custom t-shirt business and a custom gaming computer business. Neither of them picked up much traction though. It wasn’t until Justin dropped his iPhone 3G and broke the screen that the idea for uBreakiFix was born. Not wanting to pay $200 to have the phone fixed by Apple, Justin ordered some parts online and decided to learn how to do it himself – and proceeded to break his phone even worse. But that didn’t stop him. He went on to buy a bunch of broken phones on eBay and learned how to fix them through trial and error. David built a website to advertise their services. For $79.99 you could mail in your phone and they would fix it and mail it back. The business took off, and they quickly realized that customers wanted same-day repairs, so they opened up a storefront. In the first month, they made $18,000 in revenue and $28,000 the second month – Justin quit his job in the third month.

The business expanded from one store to two quickly. Justin would hire and train his friends and paid them $10 an hour with a deal that if they worked hard for six months, they could own a store. Within three years, uBreakiFix went from zero to 47 corporate stores and a revenue of $27 million. Currently about 15% of the stores are owned by former employees.

Justin’s story shows that entrepreneurship is a lot of trial and error and learning to get back on your feet when something goes wrong. It’s also about accepting risk – the reason why his company was able to grow so fast was because they put almost all the revenue back into the company, betting on the fact that their idea would be successful.

To read more about Justin’s story, see this interview with him in Forbes.

Respawn

On March 1, 2010 Activision reported the firing of two senior employees to the Security and Exchange Commission. One of these employees was Jason West the Infinity Ward president, game director, co-CCO, and CTO. The other was Vince Zampella the CEO and co-founder of Infinity Ward.

They were dismissed and replaced by Activision, the same company who helped fund their own company Infinity Ward during the golden days of their Call of Duty franchise.

-Jason West on left and Vince Zampella on right

On April 12, 2010, the Los Angeles Times wrote an article about West and Zampella’s new ambitious venture. They were forming a new game developing studio called Respawn Entertainment.

West and Zampella got funding from Electronic Arts (EA) while keeping all intellectual property. After hearing about West and Zampella leaving and starting a new project, a bunch of their old employees from Infinity Ward left to join thier LLC, Respawn.

In June 2013, they debuted Titanfall their new and revolutionary take on first person shooters. The game was released on March 11, 2014 only for xbox. By October 5th of 2015 IGN reported that Titanfall’s sales passed 10 million globally (awesome for a game only on xbox). Recently they have been even more successful with their multi-platform sequel, Titanfall 2.

-Respawn developing team

Official site: http://www.respawn.com/

Los Angeles Times article on Respawn: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/apr/12/entertainment/la-et-ct-callofduty12-2010apr12

IGN article on 1o million in Titanfall sales: http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/10/05/titanfall-sales-pass-10-million-globally

 

StyleSeat

Have you ever received a bad hair cut? Melody McCloskey has, and she turned this experience into a business. McCloskey in the founder and CEO of StyleSeat, which is an app that connects hair stylists and customers looking for a haircut.

McCloskey was tired of the hassle of booking hair appointments. She found it frustrating when she called a salon sometimes stylists wouldn’t answer the phone or when they did, you just received a random appointment with a random stylist that wasn’t even good at what she wanted to be done. McCloskey decided to fix this problem with her app. StyleSeat makes it easy to book hair appointments with specific stylists. You can search for stylists by where you are and even by what the stylist specializes in. This is such a wonderful tool not only for people in need of a haircut, also stylists. Stylists can promote themselves for what they are really good at and what they prefer to do.

Melody McCloskey really stood out to me because she experienced a problem and made it into a successful business idea. This is such a great entrepreneurial quality to have. I love how she tapped into an industry that pretty much everyone utilizes and made it better. The cosmetology industry is already a saturated industry, but McCloskey found a way to innovate and come up with something new.