Archive for Websites – Page 8

Blue Apron: A better way to cook

In 2011, investment firm associate, Matt Salzberg, and his computer programmer friend, Ilia Papas, decided that they wanted to create a business.  After quitting their jobs, they tried to establish several different start-ups, but they were all unsuccessful.  It wasn’t until they drew upon their combined love of food and cooking that they found success.  As Salzberg stated, they both “liked trying new ingredients, new recipes, new techniques, but [they] found it really inaccessible to cook at home.  It was expensive, it was time-consuming and it was difficult to find recipes that [they] trusted.”

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Their company, Blue Apron, named after the aprons French chef apprentices wear, was able to solve these common problems associated with cooking and trying new recipes.  Blue Apron develops delicious new gourmet recipes for its subscribers to try and creates videos on how to make the recipe.  The ingredients needed to make the meal are measured and sent to the user so there is no waste involved.  All of the food comes delivered that day in refrigerated boxes.  Some examples of recipes for this week are North African-spiced shrimp and couscous or mushroom brown butter cavatelli – food most people wouldn’t dare try to make on their own.  Check out their website and other menu options here !

Salzberg and Papas had no experience in the food industry, so they enlisted the help of a family friend, Matthew Wadiak.  Wadiak had worked as a wholesaler of truffles and avocados and was familiar with the food industry.  He became Blue Apron’s food expert and COO, while Salzberg became the CEO and Papas the chief technical officer.  This diverse founding team was key to the company’s success.  Each person had very different backgrounds and talents, which allowed the company to pursue more opportunities early in the founding process.  It also allowed them to access very different networks in which to market their idea.

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Since its start with only some family and friends as customers, Blue Apron has expanded significantly.  They now ship more than 5 million meals per month across the United States!  After being in business for only 3 years, Blue Apron is worth more than a billion dollars!  Clearly, they were able to identify a common problem and provide an easy (and delicious!) solution!

Sword & Plough – Bridging the Civil-Military Divide

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U.S. Army 1st Lt. Emily Núñez and her sister Betsy Núñez grew up in a military family, so for them, living on military bases and eating Thanksgiving dinner with hundreds of soldiers in a military mess hall was the norm.  However, when Emily went to Middlebury College, she realized the huge divide between military life and civilian life.  Most of her friends had never met someone in the military and had no idea what military life was like.  During this time, both Emily and Betsy began to realize how difficult it was for veterans to find work as they transitioned from military to civilian life.

These two problems  culminated into a business idea when Emily attended a social entrepreneurship symposium at her college, where the speaker talked about incorporating up-cycling into a business.  Emily had the idea of recycling military surplus into fashionable bags and accessories.  Emily quickly brought her sister, Betsy, on board and Sword & Plough was born.  The name, Sword & Plough comes from the phrase “to turn swords into ploughshares” from the book of Isaiah.  For Emily and Betsy, this means taking military technologies and materials and applying them to peaceful, military applications.

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Every stage of their business (from design, to production, to quality control, to sales) is done in the U.S.A. and done by veterans.  They even buy their supplies from companies owned and operated by veterans.  Emily and Betsy want their company to empower veterans and help in their transition back to civilian life.  They donate 10% of their profits to support veterans.  They also want to have their bags be a conversation starting point to strengthen military-civilian understanding and to bring to light veteran issues.  In fact, on their website, they have a “Wall of Heroes” to feature a different military personnel every week.

So far, Emily and Betsy’s idea has been a huge success.  They’ve been featured on shows like Good Morning America and the Today Show, and on sites like Business Insider and Forbes.  I encourage you to check out their website (click here!) to learn more about Sword & Plough, its products, and its mission.  I think that this company is poised to make some really important impacts in the near future.

Sean Coughlin

Sean Coughlin is the CEO and one of the co-founders of FaithStreet. FaithStreet is a website that allows newcomers to areas to find and connect with the churches around them. It also allows congregations to reach out using the internet. Currently, FaithStreet has over 17,000 churches across America on their website, and their next goal is developing a simple way to give money to the communities their members serve. Sean’s story for the startup of the company is interesting. He graduated from Harvard College and University of Virginia School of Law, and began working for a top law firm. He left his job however because he felt the need to start something big and new. This success story of going from a law background to a tech startup is inspiring to me. It shows his faith and his willingness to take a leap in it to follow his calling.

Benelab: A Search Engine for a Higher Purpose

BenelabBenelab is a search engine created by Jack Kim that donates 100% of its revenue to charity. Kim transformed an everyday task like web search into a vehicle for good. Kim learned HTML and website design as a freshman in high school and enjoyed it so much he began designing his own websites. His first website was a search engine that averaged around 2,000 visitors per month. And Kim made around 200-300 dollars per month with this elementary search engine. That is when Kim realized how easy it was to make money on search engines with relatively few visitors. From this experience, Kim realized he could use a search engine to generate money for charity. Benesearch.com was launched and it simply rerouted searches to Google and generated revenue, or in this case donations, on a CPM basis.

The summer after creating the website, Kim attended a business program at Stanford where he learned the fundamentals of entrepreneurship and he decided to take another shot at his search engine idea. He relaunched the website as Benelab.org and routed the searches through Bing this time. He created his team from friends at his high school. Kim wanted the company to have a young entrepreneurial feel with all young business partners.

Jack Kim innovated in an industry that is dominated by Google, Yahoo and Bing. And the idea of a charity search engine isn’t knew. But Benelab is the first search engine to donate 100% of its revenue to charity. If only 1 in 1 million people switched to Benelab, the non-profit would be able to donate $250,000 a month to charity.

 

Freaky Fast Food

For the last decade, Amazon has claimed the title of king of the online shopping world. With the company seeing 2 billion orders from customers in the past 2014 fiscal year, they dominate the online market. While Amazon continues to announce further upgrades and innovations to their overall experience, the process of implementation and usage has been another matter, and many, smaller, smarter, and ambitious companies are hungry to accommodate customers in light of Amazon’s failures.

Putting a spin on Amazon’s concept, young millennial entrepreneur Max Mullen started Instacart in 2012 to provide customers with a simple and quick option for buying their groceries online. Mullen, who studied entrepreneurship at the University of Southern California in Los Angles, created a startup that partnered with stock grocery warehouses, and a fleet of branded vehicles  to deliver the goods to customers on an order basis. In some cases, the delivery occurred within 12 minutes of the customers order! Investors quickly took notice of Max’s success, as by 2014 he received a 2 billion dollar valuation, and had already expanded to 15 major metropolitan areas.

Grocers are recognizing the power of the application as well, as customers purchase 2.5 times more product when shopping online. The software predicts similar grocery items the shopper may want, and as such has improved impulse buying for all grocery chains involved with the app. Instacart is already looking to innovate, as in April they added Petco to their retail roster. Instacart has realized that they can be so much more than just a grocery service, and is looking to the future in hopes to provide a better and quicker service than many of the larger online shopping companies.

Max Mullen showed the world that innovation doesn’t have to be an idea that nobody else has stumbled upon, on the contrary, he saw the need to improve on something that was already good, but could be made better with some slight tweaking. Just like the grocery market, there are other industries begging to be improved by the right person. Mullen defied those who said his idea would never work, and pushed through until he could claim success.

Adam Horwitz: 18-Years-Old, $1.5 Million, 3 Days

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I love reading about any young entrepreneurs, but I’m especially captivated by extravagant success stories. 18-year-old Adam Horwitz has one of those. In just 3 days, his online course “Mobile Monopoly” made him $1.5 million.

In an interview with Income Diary, Adam explains that he first got interested in digital entrepreneurship when his father took him to a seminar about online marketing one day.  “That kind of opened the doors to me to see that there is potential out there for making money online,” he says.

Before “Mobile Monopoly”, Adam sold a few other online courses, such as his courses “Tycoon Cash Flow” and “Cell Phone Treasure.”  Each made him around $100,000.  “Mobile Monopoly” was his first million dollar program.

His success sounds unreal and unmatchable, but he lives by business principles that are actually pretty simple.  He says that his biggest tip to anyone in the online world is to take their business one step at a time.  “I think a lot of people’s struggle is they set up like eight different campaign [at once].”  Instead, he urges people to start with one and wait until it is successful before they spread their focus out to other projects. “If you just do a bunch of different products… you’re not going to make a sale for any of them.”

His other big tip is just as simple — make your content easy to consume.  People have short attention spans, especially when going through information-intensive courses like the ones Adam makes.  “The best way to do it is through video,” he says. “[People] don’t want to read a lot, they want to watch you talk.” I think this can be applied to anything.  I feel the same way about websites and social media posts — I’d rather see a video or an infographic than lines and lines of dull words.  If it looks like an essay, I’m probably going to click out.  People are busy and they want to hear what they need to hear quickly and easily.

The last point that stood out to me was how Adam views all of his success.  When asked if he likes being his own boss, he said that he doesn’t even think about it like that.  “I don’t think of this as work. This is fun, this is what I’m doing.”

Adam is in college like all of us in Entrepreneurial Mind. His friends have minimum wage jobs while he has made over a million dollars, simply because he had an idea and the drive to do something about it.  I think Adam showcases the possibility and opportunity of entrepreneurship, specifically digital entrepreneurship.  He’s a reminder to me that being successful is always possible, no matter what your age, other commitments, or circumstances.

Hype Machine

Many entrepreneurs get their start from solving an everyday problem that can benefit vast numbers of people. Anthony Volodkin is one of those entrepreneurs. The idea of Hype Machine originated in Volodkin’s desire for a better way of finding cool new music.

Volodkin was really solving his own problem with the music industry. He would constantly travel to Philadelphia or Boston attempting to find new music. There wasn’t a reliable print source available due to marketing bias, and it just meet his standards. Hype Machine was born in this distress. In between classes at college, Volodkin started building a website that showed recent posts from a selection of music blogs. He would sample songs and let people know what was popular and what was good. The result was a way to find new music by crowd-sourcing. In its most basic form, Hype Machine shows music to users that they might like but may not have ever found.

Hype Machine took off after getting attention from industry leaders, but Volodkin learned from the mistakes of Napster.  He made sure that his site was not competing with artists by linking to iTunes or other sites to purchase the songs. This well thought out business plan is what made Hype Machine well known in the internet community and its start up story can inspire young entrepreneurs today. Anthony Volodkin’s entrepreneurial journey shows us that it is never too early to start making our ideas reality.

Michael Nardy: The Business Man

Michael Nardy has always been the businessman. From a young age he was always wanting to work, and was one of the first adopters of computer technology. He showed his entrepreneurial spirit as young as 12, when he channeled his passion for tennis into a profit by stinging racquets. His interests shifted towards medicine but then quickly shifted away after a few months of experience in the field. He attended Boston College in the 90’s and graduated with a double major in English and History. He says now, looking back, that his education was fare from the merchant services industry, but that he always “felt that you should do what you want that the pieces of your career will fall into place as they may.”

Nardy started EPI, an IT company doing Web programming and database development, in his dorm room that gained quite a few international clients. When he closed deals, clients would often think it was a huge business and no idea that Nardy was still in college. After Nardy graduated, EPI moved into his own house then into a sublet office then into an office building down the road from that.

Nardy is quick to act and admits that it is both his greatest strength and greatest weakness. Because of this he is always trying to keep EPI ahead of his competition. He strives to keep the small company atmosphere in the office and works alongside his employees. “The more accessible to your staff, the more cohesive the vision for your company can remain,” he says. “So being accessible is integral to the operation of my company.”

He is always looking for ways to grow the company. Nardy wants the company to earn more, sign more deals, and build a better business. It is this drive that always keeps EPI ahead of the game.

Looking at all that Nardy has accomplished should be proof to all entrepreneurs that you don’t have to be a veteran of an industry to be an industry leader.

Angelo Sotira – DeviantArt

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Back in the early days of the internet, a young business man named Angelo Sotira started one of the first social media sites that allowed artists to come together to upload and present people’s art. That site is DeviantArt.

Angelo Sotira is an American entrepreneur most well known for the creation of DeviantArt, but he was doing some big things even before that. At the age of 15 he created a music file sharing site called Dimension Music. Dimension Music was bought by Michael Ovits, the previous president of the Walt Disney Company. After Sotira had sold Dimension Music, at the age of 19 Sotira went on to create DeviantArt with Matthew Stephens and Scott Jarkoff. The three of them created DevientArt for people to share their photography, digital art, traditional art, literature, and filmmaking with a community of other artists.

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 DeviantArt is the 13th largest social network with over 28 million members who have posted over 265 million images. The site is sent around 140,000 submissions a day! To this day DeviantArt is still the largest internet art platform.

Through DeviantArt, Angelo Sotira has made over 75 million dollars. The website continues to thrive as more and more artists want to express themselves and get feedback from other artists. Sotira reached out to a market that had not yet been given attention on the internet, and it proved to be a worthy market to enter.

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Bizchair

Now you have heard story from story of people starting business from their garage, well Sean Belnick is way different; he started his from his bedroom.  The only thing this 14 year old had was $500 and a great idea he got from his Stepdad.  His Stepdad worked in the office furniture business and Belnick always heard him talk about the lack of quality of office chairs for a good price.  Like all great entrepreneurs he saw a problem and thought of a way to fix it.

His idea for fixing it was locking himself up in his room until he came up with BizChair.  Although his business started small by selling chairs from his house, the word spread about how amazing BizChair’s prices and great quality chairs, Belnick had to get a new place.  After he raised up enough money, he was able to open up a new place.

Over the years, Belnick had become more and more successful and is doing great today!  Bizchair not sells office chairs, but, he sells office furniture, restaurant furniture, school furniture, home furniture and more.  For something today we would think so simple to sell and that anyone could do it, Sean Belnick thought of the idea right on time and is now making lots of money.  Thanks for reading, happy blogging!