It’s been amazing to watch the evolution of the Internet over the last couple of decades. What started out as a way to share information progressed to e-mail and games. Then came online shopping, which has grown into a multi-billion dollar business. It wasn’t long before more people saw the potential of Internet commerce, and began to get more creative with the online businesses they started. These are just a few young entrepreneurs who are using the Internet to build successful businesses.
Matthew Inman
The Oatmeal.com
At just 27, Matt Inman has proved that a successful online business doesn’t need to include a staff. He’s making a name for himself on his own, and doing quite well at it. In 2007, he designed an online dating site with no outside help, and he did it in 66.5 hours. The result was Mingle2. He promoted the site, and in just four months, it was the number one Google result for “online dating,” beating out dating sites that had been around longer, such as Match.com and eHarmony. In July of that year, Matt sold the site to a competing company, JustSayHi, which allowed Matt to move on to an endeavour he really enjoys—creating comics.
Matt is also known as The Oatmeal, and his eponymous website, launched in July 2009, receives millions of page views every month. He creates comics based on his own life experiences and observations, like “What It’s Like to Own an Apple Product,” and sometimes just from unconventional ideas he has, like “6 Reasons to Ride a Polar Bear to Work.” Matt has progressed from asking visitors to buy him a cup of coffee via a PayPal donation link, to turning his comics into posters, prints, and other merchandise, and selling them in a store on the site. Earlier this year, he was approached by Andrews McMeel, the same company that has published books of comics such as Calvin and Hobbes, Dilbert, and The Far Side. Matt is now working on his own book, due this fall.
[Photo credit: Randy Stewart]
Rob Kalin
Founder, Etsy.com
Five years ago, Rob Kalin was a 25-year-old high school dropout, trying to make a living from his small Brooklyn apartment by designing and selling furniture. He thought the best way to accomplish this would be online. But when hours of searching revealed there was no site geared toward his handcrafted creations, he decided to build one, and Etsy was born. In addition to allowing artisans a space to sell their handmade wares, Etsy provides a community where people can share their business and design challenges, and support each other’s work.
To get things going, Rob designed the site and wrote all the copy himself. He asked two people from New York University to set up the servers to support the site, and one of his furniture customers provided $50,000 in startup capital. The investment paid off many times over. Today, Etsy is used by a quarter of a million artisans and crafters, who sell millions of items to millions of registered members. Nearly 25,000 orders are processed on a daily basis by Etsy’s 65 employees, generating a 3.5 percent commission on each sale. In 2007, Etsy’s sales totalled $26 million. Last year, that number more than tripled to $87.5 million. In 2009, Rob stepped down as CEO, and hired Maria Thomas, a National Public Radio digital media executive to succeed him. He stays on as chairman and chief creative officer while he pursues his latest venture, Parachutes, Inc., a company dedicated to changing how people teach and learn.
[Photo credit: TCDisrupt]
Neil Patel
Founder, CrazyEgg.com and KISSMetrics.com
Neil has been an entrepreneur for about eleven years now, since his first year of high school when he began selling burned CDs, bootleg movies, and cable black boxes to his fellow students and their parents. After a short time, he realized there wasn’t much profit in being a pirate, and turned his attention to legitimate endeavours. He’s had some failures along the way, but has used those as learning experiences in his successful ventures. One of those lessons, after six month of pitching a company to uninterested venture capitalists, was that to make something profitable, he’d have to do the work himself.
That first profitable company was CrazyEgg, an Internet marketing data firm that helps web publishers learn what their visitors are interested in by displaying click patterns on maps which overlay the site’s pages. From this information, publishers can improve areas that don’t get much attention, and maintain the ones that do. Once CrazyEgg got off the ground, Neil went on to create KISSMetrics, which provides similar data, but through more interactive means, like popups that actually ask site visitors why they’re there, and whether they found what they were looking for. Neil also makes it his mission to share what he’s learned with other entrepreneurs via his straight-talking site, Quick Sprout, which proclaims Neil as “kind of a big deal.” It’s not immodesty when it’s true.
[Photo credit: Sean Dreilinger]
Shawn Hessinger is the blogger and lead moderator at BizSugar, a social networking site and community serving small businesses.
