Hearty Surprise

Unbelievable? Interested to know what business she is upto ? A clue: This 17 year old minor who runs whateverlife.com that provides free myspace layout.  Did you guess who? Be introduced to Ashley Qualls who is the president of whateverlife.com who boldly quit school to run a million dollar business. Her initial investment is $8 for the domain name.

Ashley started the company in 2004 and by 2005 offered the do it yourself myspace layout for people to use. In less than 2 years time her layouts has become the rage of the teenagers.  It is reported that her site receives 7 millions visitors and 60 million page views per month. 

Her earnings is about $70,000/ pm and the best thing is  that the revenue is only through advertisement and nothing through the sale of her product, because her layouts are free. Imagine if she had offered her layout which are grabbed like hot cakes for a small prize. Now please hold on to your jaws. They are dropping.    Not many corporates who deal with her initially know that they are talking to a 17 year old who is not yet eligible to do business as per law.

Just take a look at recently done and todo list as of 20th Sep on her blog:

“… You may have seen me on CH 4 or CH 7 in the past few days if you live in the Detroit area! So that was fun! I just did a photoshoot for StrutMag.com (Women’s publication in Detroit) (got done about 20 minutes ago) Tonight I have the Detroit FreePress, so look out for that! ….  I’m leaving Monday evening for NYC and returning next Sunday! ..  On Tueday morning I’ll be taping for The VIEW! YES! I’ll be on with Barbara Walters, Joy Behar, Whoopi Goldberg, Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Sherri Sheppard! … It’s going to be a 6-7 minute interview and it will air Friday, Sept 28th! …  I’ll be doing some big ad sales in NYC while I’m there- and I’m sponsoring the Ypulse Tween Mashup!  … “

With no guidance, no godfathers/ godmothers in the family with business knowledge , with no academic degree and from a relatively average family backgroud, this little girl had come a long way. But she is strong minded to reject a cool 1.5 million offer for her company. That proves the power which drives Ashley.

This is the amazing power of the internet. Internet Entrepreneurs come  from all walks of life and rise to a level and scale never ever imagined . It is sheer hard smart work and correct timing that matters most.

Good Luck young lady.

Courtesy :  Fast Company

Popularity: 87% [?]

The internet entrepreneur profiled for this week is “Craig Alaxander Newmark”, the person who turned a hobby into an institution.

First, for the benefit of those who did not get the chance to know about craiglist, it is a classifieds site carrying ads on many topics under the sun.It also has a large forum for people to discuss. It is largely non commercial, that is you don’t see irritating popups and screaming banners there. The revenue is generated through fees for the ads posted and that too only on certain categories like jobs, home brokering and only in certain cities.

Flashback

The story begins in 1995 when Craig maintained a list of email address to announce people who were interested to know the events happening around San Francisco. This list gradually grew in size and people were not only interested in knowing about events but selling, renting, services , jobs etc etc until it was no more a small list to manage.

While working at Charles Schwab he started craigslist (the name suggested by his friends, else it would have been called SF Events ) in 1995 to distribute events list more effectively. But today it distributes a lot more not only to SF Bay area but to people in 5 continents across 50 countries who contribute to more than 25 million hits per month. One of the secret to its success is that the company is still run with less than 25 employees.  Big is out. Small is good.

Connection With Ebay

About 25% of craigslist is owned by ebay after its shares was sold by a former employee in 1994.  While both ebay and craigslist are geared towards for the people and  by the people , there is a commercial difference in their business model.  While ebay is commercial , craiglist still retains its essence of giving back to the community.

Thus the craigslist.org which was born out of the genuine interest in reaching out to people remains so till date. That is why it has a devout user base running millions.

 Tidbits

Craig was born in 1952 and is now a multi millionaire. He is also very actively involved in charity work. He is responsible for the customer service at craigslist and personally responds to the mails. How many big shots still do that ?

craigslist , Internet Entrepreneur

Popularity: 77% [?]

Should I say he is the author of the recent NYT best seller “The Dip” which talks about quitting and move on to become the best and has written several other best sellers like “Small is the new big”, “Purple Cow” , “All Marketers are Liars” , “Unleashing the Ideavirus”  and 4 more.

• Is he one of the greatest marketer who coined the term “Permission Marketing”

• Is he the founder of Squidoo which is a popular recommendation website where people can create lenses to write, share their passion and promote websites/blog ?

• Is Seth the renowned speaker who is rated as one of the 21 speakers for the next century by Successful Meetings  and whose clients reads like a list of Fortune 100 companies ?

• Is he the philanthropist who regularly contribute his earnings and royalties to charity work ?

• Is he the writer of the famous marketing blog ?

• Is he the visionary and entrepreneur who made it big on the internet ?

Seth is all these and much more combined to one. He holds an MBA degree from the Stanford Business School. He found Yoyodyne an online marketing company and successfully sold it to Yahoo.

Tidbits

Not much of Seth’s personal life is known except that he was born on July 10 1960 and the visible feature that he is bald . Because there is way too much inside the head that things outside or the absense of it serves only to physically identify him.

My salutations to the marketing genius.

Courtesy : Seth’s Blog

Popularity: 17% [?]

You can learn from Catherine Cook and David Cook how to run a company and earn millions when still in your teenage.  They are the whiz teens behind myyearbook.com which is an online year book where millions of school and college students gather to network and socialize.

I was clueless when I was a teen. Ok to be fair enough I just had a goal to get into a good university and join a big corporate.But here is Catherine and her brother David who started www.myyearbook.com in 2005 when they were in high school and now runs a 20+ employee company.  Geoff  their elder brother gave life to the dreams by funding $250,000  to come up with the year book which has become the default social networking site to many school and college children in US. Geoff himself is an internet entrepreneur who has successfully founded and sold ResumeEdge.com and EssayEdge.com

The site looks quite interesting with flashy icons and cools features such as battles, pimp, quiz, match etc.They boast of a user base whose average age is lower than myspace and facebook which makes it quite an attractive place for the young. Most of the features in this site is from ideas from their friends and the development work was outsourced to India.

With a couple of millions members and about 4+ millions revenue this is a remarkable feat. They also generate revenue from ads from some big names in the industry. It is no surprise that these siblings have already made headlines in  Washington Post, Entrepeneur , Yahoo Tech , New York Times, CNN, Business Week and the list goes on. I gues 

Interested to know more . Read on here …

Popularity: 17% [?]

I am sure you would have guessed who the single fish is, even before I proceed to give details about Marcus Frind  who runs the free online dating website called plentyoffish.com .  The once small fish born in 2003 morphed into a giant blue whale in less than a year.

This again is  success story of a single person who did the right hot thing at the right time. While online dating websites already existed when he started plentyoffish they were mostly paid membership. Marcus saw the need for a site offering the service for free. As per his proclamation , this site also let him develop his asp.net programming skills. Boy , what a way to learn and earn ?

So from the humble birth this giant now claims a billion page views per month. We all know more pageviews means good ranking and great money if you know how to monetize your site. While we can’t be jealous of other peoples growth but when Marcus’s girlfriends holds a CAD $901,733 cheque from google, I can hardly stop turning green. This was way back in Feb 2006. I wonder how many folds it has increased now.

Perfection is desirable but not mandatory to succeed 

The interesting fact is, when Marcus Frind started the website it was neither attractive nor perfect, it was not the kind of user interface that people would fall for. Take a look at these archives for the early site design.  He improvised it gradually and did not strive things to be 100% perfect. He was satisfied if the functionality was good and just carried on to bring more features than perfection.  The website was still running off his home computer  for the initial 8 months before moving to a hosting company.

Tidbits

Do remember it is still a company owned by a millionaire aged less than 30. While his website has plenty of fish ,I don’t think he is hunting for one because he has already found one and is happy with his girlfriend.

Courtesy: Marcus Frind Blog

Tags : Entreprenuer , Online Dating, online busines

Popularity: 22% [?]

Do you know Elon Musk ? Some of you who track Internet Entrepreneurs can identify the name. But if I ask “Do you know paypal ?”  I don’t have to say anything more. Paypal has become so synonymous with money transactions on internet just like we use credit card in real world payments. I wouldn’t be a surprise if one day I walk into a mall and say “Can I pay through paypal?”

Internet Business

Elon Musk is one of the co-founder of Paypal. We will not go around the controversy that he came from  X.com to Paypal and hence the question if he is actually a co-founder or not. Our interest here is totally on internet entrepreneurs. So here is Elon Musk who pocketed a major chunk when ebay bought paypal in Oct 2002 for a whopping US$1.5 billion and is one of the wealthiest millionaire under 40. You think that was cool ?  His first adventure is equally cool too.

Elon started Zip2 in 1995(at 24 years of age, wonder what I was doing then) which provided Internet software and services for media companies and in Feb 1999 he and sold it to Compaq for about US$300 million. With a heavy pocket and a happy sale his next venture was X.com incorporated in Mar 1999.  X.com was to provide varied financial services like checking account , investment options etc through an easy interface  and the ability to transfer money from one account to another all happening on the internet. With his viral marketing techniques he managed to gather a large customer base in one year. 

By 2000 X.com merged with Paypal (started in 1999 as Confinity) which became the biggest email payments company providing service to person to person (p2p), Business to Consumer(B2C) , Business to Business(B2B) community and Elon Musk was the CEO. And the rest is history.

More Business Ventures - Bigger Dreams 

I’ll retire if I have 10 millions in my account.  But Elon Musk worth few hundred millions is not a man who will sit idle on his huge reserve. Being an eco-friendly person he is and the passion to find  alternate energy sources , he started Telsa Motors in Mar 2004 , a company producing electric car and has already sold out a sleek 2 searter sports version Telsa Roadster to people such as George Clooney and Leonardo DiCaprio. This is followed by SolarCity a company selling photovoltaic panels.

His most ambitions project is SpaceX started in June 2002, where he aims to take people into space. Yes,  a commercial service to airlift travelers to space. His Falcon rocket may one day carry you to the outer space. Meanwhile let us get the internet business to speed and gain some money to reserve a ticket  in Falcon.  Who knows what other big ideas are in store and he may come again with a revolutionary internet business.

His Other Side

For those who like to know the personal side of the rich so that we believe they are also humans like us, Elon Musk was born on 28 Jun 1971 in South Africa and left at 17 years of age to skip the compulsary South African Military Service. He holds a physics degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a business degree from Wharton. He lives in Bel-Air, California with his wife Justine Musk and 5 children.  

For additional reading you may follow: 

• An Alternate History According to Elon Musk
• Investing Green

Tags : internet entrepreneur , paypal, business

Popularity: 14% [?]

Have your ever registered a domain on the www?  Yes, there are many out there. Think of a good name, there is a 99% probability that it has been taken up.

Have you ever  sold/sell domain names for a good bargain ? Some of you would have tasted its success while others may have registered domains in a frenzy and dropped them in frustration .

Well how about having a $300 million business whose primarily source of income is through betting on domain names. I had to recompose myself when I read about  Kevin Ham a 37 year old master of domain names. Now, here is a person who maintains low key (how many knew him before reading this ?) but extremely successful in hunting for the choicest domains and mints money of it.  This doctor by academics is fantastic at reading the pulse of the internet community.

Kevin Ham is one of the top beneficiary  if you  wrongly type ‘.cm’ instead of ‘.com’ when you enter a url directly in the browser. Type ‘nike.cm’ and you will be redirected to agoga.com  his treasure trove of sponsored ads. He owns most of the popular names with ‘.cm’ and has a business deal with Cameroon , the country whose office domain name ending is ‘.cm’ .

There is so much and other to his credit from smart business ideas, success, rivalry to law suits and losses . The article here has an exhaustive coverage so I stop my envied ramblings and try to think of some killer internet business ideas.

The man who owns the Internet  by CNN

Tags: Domain Name ,Domain Parking, Kevin Ham, agoca.com

Popularity: 33% [?]