Successful Business Entrepreneurs
If you’re entirely satisfied to create a web venture that makes a small but welcome profit every month, it’s still inspiring to hear about ordinary people who have taken a simple idea and created a website potentially worth millions or even billions. There are plenty of success stories to motivate you.
- eBay – founded in September 1995, eBay is The World’s Online marketPlace, enabling trade on a local, national and international basis. Launched in the UK in October 1999, eBay.co.uk has a global customer base of 233 million.
- Friends Reunited – the website that started out to reunite old school friends was started by Steve and Julie Pankhurst and Jason Porter from a bedroom office in 1999. Friends Reunited was acquired by ITV for $193m.
- Million Dollar Home Page – student Alex Tew needed to find a way of paying his way through university and created a simple advertising page where businesses could buy web-space measured in pixels. Within five months, and through some clever marketing. Alex sold all the space and is reputed to have earned more than a million dollars.
- Mumsnet.com – this popular website was set up in January 2000 by Justine Roberts and Carrie Longton. It has over 15 million visitors each month.
Discover Business Entrepreneurs – Just Like You!
There is multitude of web companies launching every day by ordinary people with entrepreneurial vision. Many of these websites are in their infancy; some are quietly generating a modest income for their founders while others are growing at an extraordinary rate.
Take a look at the following internet entrepreneurs – people just like you – who have ventured online to follow their dreams:
Jon Robins – Meanandgreen.com
Jon worked in offices for big companies for many years. Then in 2004 he decided to escape the rat-race and buy a little run-down army surplus store that wasn’t even on the web. Four years later and he has built a thriving online business that is now being run from separate offices and warehouse space. Jon’s company buy in bulk from around the world and send out a huge quantity of parcels each week!
Christine Lewandowski and Richard Evans – Singlewithkids.co.uk
Aimed at single parents, Chrissie and Richard’s web venture singlewithkids.co.uk provides a valuable service for many parents who spend their evenings at home alone while their kids are in bed. The emphasis is on mixing cyber support with real life contact – and the online venture is working famously. Realising that cash is a problem for a large percentage of the UK’s 1.9 million lone parents, they aim for low cost trips that bring a lot of single parents together (over 100 on a recent camping trip), and there are events all over the country every month. The club is funded by membership payments and also an online dating site and is growing rapidly in popularity due to a very large need.
Alison Berry – Theidealpresent.co.uk
In 2004 with 10 years experience in the toy industry, Alison Berry launched theidealpresent.co.uk – a free online gift advice service – to help people find the right presents for children aged 0-10. Alison’s objective in setting up the business was to use her skills and experiences, whilst having a career which genuinely fitted around family life and looking after her own children. With a real gift for choosing presents that children loved, theidealpresent.co.uk was born.
A few years on and theidealpresent.co.uk offers a great service, advising what to buy for children, and where to buy it – from 10,000 ideas from over 200 retailers. The web venture continues with critical acclaim from the BBC. Their Click programme described theidealpresent.co.uk a ‘great website’. The business model is one that provides an income stream with next to no overheads or running costs. A model that many other business could only dream of! As the largest publicly available database of toys and games in the UK, Alison is deserved proud of the venture’s success.
Paul Gunter and Andrew Shorten – BusinessMarketingBook.com
Friends and business partners Paul Gunter and Andrew Shorten have run their own web business (individually and combined) for several years, starting out when they were in their early 20s. With a passion for business and running ventures in internet marketing and domain name trading, they created an information products – domainprofitguide.com – which to date has generated over $50,000 in sales. Their web venture has been promoted using various internet marketing techniques, joint ventures with some of the UK’s top internet marketers and from speaking at entrepreneur conventions. The inspiring partnership has since written a book about online and offline marketing for business, which was published early 2009.
Kate Haines – GreenFinder.co.uk
Kate Haines is an ex-teacher who decided to set up a green pages style website called GreenFinder after a lifelong interest in eco living. Interest in the environment has grown tremendously in the last few years so when GreenFinder launched in 2006, the venture developed rapidly. As a passionate environmentalist Kate was keen to use her skills to communicate sustainability and to help inform the public on living a green lifestyle. Kate features over 150 green business clients on the website and a green showcase stall which stall which she takes to events. The website pro-motes everything green from cardboard coffins to eco wedding dresses and green cartoonists!
Elio Assuncao – Yodspica.com
Cardiff-based Yodspica.com specialises in infomation technology solutions and web design. The business was established by Elio Assuncao. Despite having excellent skills, Elio was at the time unemployed and decided to accept a Job Centre Plus incentive programme. He started Yodspica.com with no grant, no bank funding, no loans, no savings, and basically no money at all! Today, the company provides in advanced web design, research, IT, multimedia, graphic design engineering support, among others.
Now if you are feeling motivated to become an online entrepreneur, the next step is to think about the type of website or blog that you would like to begin. You may already have a clean concept mapped out. So what are you waiting for?
It was a usable post. Thanks for sharing, it was a huge help. Especially to my newly build business.
Thank you for reading it. More to come stay tune.
Hi Amrik, Thanks for sharing the great success stories of business entrepreneurs.
Glad you liked it Ehsan!
True – These people are not out of the ordinary. And if they can make their dreams come true, then so can anyone who has the guts. People are quick to think that there is always one or another remarkable inhuman reason why these people make such a huge success online – Meantime all they did was to put in hard work and enough dedication – Just like most people earning a living.
Very true. The people who succeed are the ones that actually get down to business and make things happen. Successful people aren’t lucky, they just work harder and don’t take no for an answer.
Hi Amrik,
Really inspiring post, After reading this I’m sure everyone would like to set up their own online business. However I feel if you’ve any unique idea then you can easily get huge exposure for your business and can grow it more quickly.
Hi Amrik, that is truly a set of good motivational stories. I wish I had the time to visit all of their sites and try to determine what is working for them.
It would be interesting to see if there was a common denominator or two that pointed toward their success.
I was amazed to hear that the friend finder site sold for 193 million. They must be pretty happy that they started that site.
$193m for friends reunited?! That’s MAD! Does anyone even use it? There’s so need when there’s Facebook!
Thanks Amrik for posting about these entrepreneurs’ stories. The amount of time these people must have put in to get their ventures up is in itself an inspiration for aspiring entrepreneurs of this day and age. Says a lot about patience & persistence.
Hi Amrik! Thanks for sharing stories successful entrepreneurs and it was a great motivational post for me.
With diligence, a good idea and the right marketing the Internet can be a very profitable place.
Thanks for highlighting some fantastic examples…
Ryan H.
There are many people that think starting a successful online business requires a lot of money, or at least use this as an excuse. Your examples illustrate perfectly this concept, as we only need a great idea and perseverance.
I’ve never seen Million Dollar homepage before but it is a really cool idea. Before AM, I was selling on eBay and I made decent money but I’m trying to move onto bigger things in the next year
Nice post Amrik. It’s all nice to read about people who have succeeded for inspiration.
The Friends Reunited story has always been my favourite. 🙂
This is inspiring. Working with some small, web based companies myself, I can say that half the battle is having a good idea. The idea should carry the marketing.
I am really impressed about your idea, sharing such content like this gives a lot of marketers and entrepreneur a happy feeling. it proves that they are honored by other people.
great idea. meeting other people and sharing ideas and strategies really does a lot in building experience and knowledge. we cannot over emphasize that.
inspiring post. I agree with you these entrepreneurs starts their business as we often starts however their strong commitment and hard work takes them at very high rank and now they are earning huge through them.
Very inspiring! Love reading these success stories because it gives me encouragement to pursue innovation at all costs and to think creatively about potentially revolutionary concepts. Just shows you there’s still hope for regular folk like me.
Most of them is starting off selling stuff and really thanks to your inform, I figured out these people are really need time to grow their business. Most are 4 years, 2 years and even month, they are clever.
A lot of the successful businesses around the world started as a dream and a plan to make money. If someone wants to succeed he should have the plan clear in his mind. Success does not come like someone giving you spare change into the tin cup of your life. You work hard for it so as to make all your efforts worth it. Thank you for the great post!
So true John.
Unlike many of the internet marketing teachers, I’m not going to tell you that ANYONE can successfully run an online business.
The fact is that it takes hard work to build a business, and there are certain abilities that will greatly increase your chances of success.
All those mentioned where able to think something out of the box and then they implemented it.
I hope you will start implementing it and share your experience with us. Good luck.
it was good idea to meet all successful business entrepreneur. so we can learn new lessons from them and implement it in our unique style.
Yes Shenoy…
You know what I always read articles of some popular blogs to find how they write what they implement on their writing skills. Those people inspire me most.
You are right we must implement unique style in our writing. It doesn’t matter how many impressive words you can fit into a paragraph if people are bored and don’t know what you are talking about. Writing with uniqueness and style are essential elements in any written material.
It’s really good to know those kind of stories, stories that someone like me can never imagined like that happening to myself. We can actually become entrepreneur but it’s not always possible to earn millions of dollars in a very short time. Maybe perhaps, slowly but surely until million of dollars knock on our door and say hi to our life. ^^T
You are right Kristine,
There is nothing like overnight success. Slow and steady win the race. Hi 5 😉
Hi Amrik,
This is wonderful article, you have shared a great amount of your experience. I would certainly adapt some and move on.
Thanks Suraj and nice to see you around. Yeah I love sharing my experience with other. Glad you loved it.
It has been a hope of mine for the past few years to create a successful website that creates a simple revenue stream throughout the year. These links were absolutely great references for brainstorming! I’ve found it really hard to come up with any type of for-profit web schemes that are not editorial based. Can you think of a good example of a non-editorial website model (other than e-commerce) that generates revenue? Thanks for the post!
Amrik , that’s called a brilliant article. The links and ideas you have shared here are really very helpful for everyone. Thank you very much for this article.
Glad you liked it. Don’t forget to visit BBT again.
Hi Amrik,
Thank you for sharing these 4 specific examples. I find the Kate Haines example particularly telling of many sucessfull startups that gain legs and generate money. Many of these people do not even start out with the initial goal of mnaking a profit, mever hire a search engine optimisation or any type of marketing company, but rather build their websites based solely on the quality of their offerings. These are insipring stories and one key takeaway for me is to follow what you are possationate about and the consequential income is a often a nice bonus.
one day i wanna be also a successful business entrepreneur.
Well but i think that there is always one or another amazing inhuman purpose why these individuals create such a millionaire on the internet, Meanwhile all they did was to put in effort and enough commitment, Just like most individuals generating money…Thanks for sharing me..