Immediately after earning a BSc in economics at the University of Toronto, Steve El-Hage went on to found his first company, Massdrop. Massdrop serves doubly as a social community for all-kinds of enthusiasts and a niche online retailer for group purchases. Users of the website can vote for, discuss, and review a wide variety of products, mostly those intended for enthusiasts or devoted hobbyists. Then, users can join together to buy certain products they would either unable to buy individually or else at heavily discounted rates.
The most exemplary aspect about El-Hage is both his quick move to begin the company, but also his enormous success within that company. El-Hage was certainly skilled to be able to found a company immediately after leaving university, and then continue to make the company profitable, leading tremendous growth. Often, it takes a different person and set of talents between the startup phase and large business phase of a company, but for El-Hage, accomplishing both with guile was no issue.
Steve El-Hage and his cofounder Nelson Wu conceived of the idea when noticing the enormous quantity and popularity of a vast amount of enthusiast forums. Specifically, they explored the forums with enough depth to notice a trend of users collaborating to buy and share a certain product. Massdrop’s combination of social interaction with large group purchases of niche items is what makes the idea so great. It concentrates enthusiasts and gathers traffic from the enormous userbase of forums, while providing a convenient, hassle-free, and intuitive system for buying products as a group. Their innovation comes from the interesting mashup of social forums and group buying, integrating the two ideas together and increasing the overall ease and functionality of the entire process.