Startup Ideas that Began Small and Got Big
If you have an entrepreneurial streak and you are focused on innovation, growth, and collaboration in your niche, you are treading the right path. Pioneers of many great companies and businesses, which we see today started off their entrepreneurial journey from a single storeroom. Some started them as side hustles. But where they are today is inspirational and commendable.
I have recently started my own organic skincare line. I started off with was a partner – also an old friend – and a subscription to Optimum Internet plans. We worked hard on the marketing front by creating catchy social media profiles and then effectively introducing our products. The task seemed daunting especially when there are great organic brands with collabs with impressive influencers. It’s working well now.
So I am here to motivate you to go ahead with your unique idea of business. Begin with a boosted confidence and take the first step. You are not far from creating a legit source of income! The success stories of businesses, which rose from scratch to the gigantic setups, which they are today are always inspirational. Here are some names with global fame. And guess what! They started off as side hustles.
Apple
Who doesn’t want to know Apple’s legendary success story! Even those who aren’t launching a new business would love to know how Apple became what it is today. Two Steves with high school diplomas boosted motivation, and endless stamina for hard work came together to change the world. Steve Jobs, who used to be shaggy and hippie kind of a guy. The other Steve was Steve Wozniak, his friend, and code geek. This Mozart of coding used his spare time to build personal computers with Jobs in the garage.
Wozniak worked for Hewlett Packard and Jobs worked for Atari. If you looked at them back in the days when they created their Apple I, their first desktop computer, you would have never guessed they had already become the pioneers of the hottest tech company ever. That too, in a matter of 5 years.
iPhone 11 is already out. Today, this tech juggernaut has topped Forbes’ annual look for the world’s most valuable brands for the 9th time in a row. The net worth of the brand is whopping $205.5 billion! Notice that it is the first time ever that a brand crossed the threshold of $200 billion.
Amazon
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, remained to be the richest man in the world until recently. He has only moved to the second spot after paying a $38 billion to his ex-wife as a divorce settlement.
Back in 1993, Bezos was the vice president of a very successful Wall Street firm. He decided to quit this secure job and moved to Seattle to pursue something too big to be true. He leveraged the untapped retailing opportunities online in the book industry. He initially named the company Cadabra and then later came up with Amazon.
He literally started off his shop from a garage in Washington. He began to develop the software there. You can google the image of his teeny-tiny garage. In 1995, he launched Amazon.com. Amazon turned out to be a massive success!
Today, according to Bloomberg, Bezos’s net worth is $111 billion. While as a company, Amazon’s net worth is around $797 billion.
Sergey Brin and Larry Page met at Stanford back in the 1990s where they decided to start a company together. In a couple of years, they were able to establish the headquarters of Google in a garage in Menlo Park, California. At that time, Susan Wojcicki was a fresh business school graduate who rented out this garage to them. She later became the senior vice president at Google and is currently the SEO of YouTube.
At present Google provides the most refined and authentic web-based search engine, advertisements, software applications, maps, mobile operating systems, enterprise solutions, consumer content, commerce, hardware products, and so on. The net worth of Google is estimated to be $300 billion while the net worth of the parent company, Alphabet. Inc is $900 billion. Google makes more than $50 million a day!
Dell Technologies
Michael Dell was a pre-medical student at the University of Texas. He began selling the upgrade kits to be installed on personal computers. In 1984, at the age of only 19 years, he decided to take a big leap of faith and began manufacturing PCs. He invested $1000 in this business that he took from his family. The first Turbo PC that he created featured an 8088 Intel processor running as fast as 8MHz. It came with a hard drive of 10MB and it was a milestone back then.
Dell today provides computers, laptops, tablets, desktops, servers, workstations, software, monitors, and so on. It has employed more than 157,000 employees across the world. The current fortune of the company is $27 billion.
Isn’t it a little hard to imagine Instagram as a side hustle! It is perhaps the most popular photo-sharing application that users are addicted to. It only started back in 2010. Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom are the founders of this revolutionary app.Actually, they created a check-in app but incorporated the photo-sharing feature in it. They wanted to take advantage of smartphone cameras. That just clicked and became a massive success.
The app took off when they named it Instagram, with a focus on images taken from smartphones. As of now, Facebook has bought Instagram for a whopping $1 billion. The business has only improved with this change of ownership. No wonder because Facebook is worth $300 billion. With more than 700 monthly users, the app is one of the most used social media apps. Even vendors like Optimum have leveraged this forum for the promotion of Optimum bundles. Because now people have recognized its business potential too.
Ready to kick-start your own business? You shouldn’t surprise if you end up becoming a business giant in a matter of a few years. All you need is the right focus, determination, and hard work. Good luck!
