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mixer

Mixer : The Story of Two Teenagers, and their Online Game Streaming Startup

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Age is just a number. It has been proved a lot of times before, and the duo who co-founded Mixer is the most appropriate example of that. Matthew a.k.a. Matt Salsamendi and James Boehm became entrepreneurs at the age of 13 and 15, respectively. Built out of curiosity, the two ended up founding Mixer as Beam in 2016, and again as a teenager, i.e. at the age of 17 and 19. Mixer is a video game live streaming platform that enables people to watch their favourite gamers play and get in whenever the gamers need help to defeat their enemies. Today, Mixer is the part of Microsoft, and Matt and James are the lead member of the Xbox team.

Early Life & Career

Matt is a native of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, where he lived with his family. Being a curious kid, he always played with computers, broke them and assembled them. In fact, he had build a few computers that resided in his room. When he was thirteen, he thought of converting those computers into the server and started providing hosting to gamers on Minecraft.

James lived in Atlanta, Georgia, and got to meet Matt online at Minecraft through an advertisement he had posted for his hosting service on the platform. James was 15 at that time. The ad made him interested in a new startup, and he contacted Matt. Soon, the two were good friends and talked about a server hosting business. James was ready to help him with marketing and other business stuff, whereas Matt had to do all the hosting related tasks.

Mixer founders
Image Source: zimbio.com

Soon, the business started growing, and they had to move out of Matt’s house to a new place, a datacenter. As they had already moved out to a new office, they became the owner of an unnamed company, which they then named as MCProHosting. The demand was increasing, so was the business. Within the span of three years, the company valued at $5 million. The company also became the world’s largest game server provider, hosting over 600,000 game servers.

In 2014, Matt was in his freshman year at school, and at the same time, was handling a multi-million company. The burden was increasing rapidly, and he was becoming incapable of keeping the balance between his studies and the business. Finally, after discussing with his parents, he decided to drop out of school.

Founding Mixer

Matt and James have been a video lover, ever since they got to know about it. At the time, the online live game streaming field was getting hot. YouTube and Amazon’s Twitch were providing live streaming to the gamers, but there were a few flaws in both platforms.

YouTube did not offer live chat, and on Twitch, the latency rate for the chat was quite high. Even though people could watch their favourite gamers play, despite a chat system, they could not suggest new moves to them in real-time. This clicked an idea for Matt and James, and they decided to shift their business from the server hosting to live game streaming service, with better features.

The two got their hands on building a website that would allow gamers to live stream, chat with their viewers in real-time with lowest latency rate, take their help, and discover other streamers. They started with the alpha version of the platform and focused on connecting the gamers with other game communities.

They had started working on the website in 2014 and launched it as Beam on January 5, 2016. Soon, there were over 1,00,000 users on the platform. The co-founders took Beam to the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in May 2016, to participate in the Startup Battlefield competition. Eventually, they won the competition and earned $50,000 in equity-free funding for their startup.

The Big Breakthrough

The winning of the competition could be a kickstart for the company, but only after two months of winning, Microsoft acquired Beam for an undisclosed amount in august 2016. Matt announced the news through a blog post, thanking all the community members that had supported Beam. Matt and James remained the lead of the Beam team and moved to Redmond to work with Microsoft.

The company integrated the platform with Xbox, and then later, with Windows 10. In the next year, the company integrated it into Xbox One along with the 2017 software update. In May, the same year, Beam was rebranded as Mixer. The new software update came with new features as well as a new mobile app.

Matt and James are consistently working on Mixer, and as of now, there are not as many users as its rivals like Twitch have. It does not bother the two co-founders as they believe in steady growth. They know that their platform is providing better services to the users, so eventually, those users would end up with Mixer. In fact, Ninja, a famous video game streamer, announced on 1st August 2019 that he would move from Twitch to Mixer on the 2nd August. Within four days of the announcement, Ninja got a million subscribers on Mixer.

segment

Segment : The Success Story of Three MIT Drop Outs

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There are many successful entrepreneurs who are the geniuses with big degrees. But there are also many of the ones who just got off the college and started working on their dream projects, and ultimately, became an inspiration for all. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are some of the names that have proved that skills are always above a degree. The story of Peter Reinhardt is similar to the two, as he also, along with his friends, Calvin French-Owen, and Ilya Volodarsky, dropped out of MIT, and founded one of the most successful startups, Segment.

Peter Reinhardt was born in Seattle City in Washington. He was always curious about the space and loved doing Mathematics. He met Calvin at a summer math class at the University of Washington when he was in 7th grade. Soon after meeting each other, the two shared a friendly vibe.

After completing high school, Reinhardt went to MIT to gain a bachelor’s degree in Aerospace Engineering. MIT was the place where he again united with French-Owen. The two then met Ilya Volodarsky in 2008, during the campus preview weekend at MIT.

segment co-founders
Image Source: architecht.io

Being into space and maths, Reinhardt took both the subjects as majors at the university. But his two friends were thinking of working on a startup. All the three first thought of building a classroom tool that would help the kids in the class to show the level of confusion they face during a lecture and tell the lecture about their doubts, without interrupting him. The three worked on the project and started the testing for the tool. But for their surprise, most of the students in the class were more engaged to Facebook than the lecture.

The three co-founders had raised a sum of $600K for the project. But they got soon aware of the fact that this idea is not going to work practically. So they tried to pay back the investors. But the investors wanted a better product instead of their money.

The three friends again started thinking of a new project. This time, they thought of products like Google Tag Manager and Mixpanel. It took a year and a half for them to even start the project. By this time, they had spent all the money and to earn some more investment, they went to Y-Combinator in 2011. But on seeing the wastage of time and money, the company refused to help.

This incident made Reinhardt and his friends realise that they were rushing the things, and their idea does not have the strength to sustain. So they took a step back and started more research work. At the same time, to devote most of their time to their dream project, they dropped out of college.

To work on their new project idea, they had to choose between Google Tag Manager and Mixpanel, and after being confused for some time, they realised that people need a tool that would help them figure out which among the various tools is better for their work.

This way, they had a new project idea, and they started working on an analytic tool that would integrate various other tools and provide the users with the right solution. The tool was Segment. Before launching the product, they made it open-source for developers. The platform started evolving and provided the engineers with the facility to integrate various tools at one place and organise their customer’s data in a cleaner way.

The idea became a huge success, as most of the people were facing a problem with what tool to choose for what data situation. The users were able to handle all the tasks from analytics to marketing automation through Segment. Reinhardt and his team used to test every new tool and integrated all the effective ones to Segment. Today, Segment helps over 19,000 companies in 70 countries to refine their toolkit, including Product Hunt, Atlassian and Instacart.

For the success of the company and its product, the company owners relied on content marketing. The company had started with four employees, and by 2017, the company had employed about 130 employees. Segment did not raise any money in its starting years. In fact, the three founders were spending $30K every year on the process of product development. Till 2019, the company has raised more than $280 million in total.

Peter Reinhardt is still very much interested in things related to space. He continuously follows the footprints of companies like SpaceX and Rocket Lab. According to Reinhardt Segment still has to go a long way.

fiverr

Fiverr : A Two-way Platform for Selling and Buying Digital Services

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Every time a new company is launched, the setup requires a lot of pre-requisite. From designing a logo to maintaining a company’s blog, everything needs to be done at a professional level. For doing this, companies generally hire freelancers. Now, instead of looking for individual freelancers and separately hiring them, how convenient would it be to have access to a single platform from where you can communicate with freelance contractors for all your requirements?

Fiverr, which can also be designated as an online virtual shopping mall, is literally the best and most wanted site for any freelancers and business companies. The service provider can earn some extra cash through this, and the companies can also get their job done in a hassle-free manner.

On 1st of February 2010, Micha Kaufman and Shai Wininger launched Fiverr. The company has its headquarters based in Tel Aviv, Israel providing its services across the world. Fiverr is available in 5 different languages, including English, Spanish, French, Dutch and Portuguese.

Fiverr Founders
Image Source: fiverr.com

History of the $5 Fiverr ‘Gig’

Kaufman and Wininger wanted to create something new, which would break the regular credence of working hours from 9 to 5. So, they came up with an idea of creating a website with a variety of online services like logo designing, data entry, digital marketing, voice translation and many more. Here people could work according to their comfort neglecting the 9 to 5 job scenario. So, the two young entrepreneurs created a single platform which is capable of providing almost every digital service under one roof.

The company started succeeding at a very fast pace such that within a year it had grown 600% in transaction volume. The company received its first funding of $1 million in 1st June 2010 from Guy Gamzu and other angel investors. On 3rd May 2012, the company announced that it had raised another $15 million in the second round of funding from Accel Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners summing the total raised fund to $20 million. By this time, the company had 40 employees working in its different offices spread over Israel, U.S and Europe.

The Growth of an Innovative Business Ever Witnessed by our Economy

In Fiverr, the minimum charge for every service is $5 and might extend up to $1,000 depending on the sellers and the quality of work. This system was started in January 2012 and allowed the sellers to earn more in exchange for their services after ten successful transactions. The services provided by Fiverr are known as ‘Gig’.

The $5 strategy attracted millions of customers from around the world, and by the end of 2011, the company was already providing 70,000 gigs. In 2012, the figure reached around 1.3 million with an increasing number of clients as well as service providers. By the end of this year, Fiverr witnessed an increase in sales by 190%, providing 4,000 new services, i.e. ‘Gigs’ daily.

The expansion of this leading marketplace resulted in the opening of a new office in New York in 2013.

Since 2013, Fiverr.com has acquired a position in the top 200 popular sites list of the world, and its Alexa rank is 291. By June 2013, Fiverr provided over 1.7 million Gigs to customers around 200 countries. The number of categories expanded to 120, which even included Arts & Crafts, Astrology and Gift cards. In December 2013, Fiverr launched its iOS app, followed by releasing the Android app in March 2014.

In August 2014, Fiverr raised $30 million in Series C funding from the existing investors along with Qumra Capital and private investors. This funding promised a larger and new workplace, where the sellers and customers can connect at a global level. In October 2014, Fiverr expanded the Gig service by launching the website in four different languages. Realizing the need for global connectivity, the strategies of Fiverr always played the ace in the digital marketplace.

In November 2015, Fiverr raised another $60 million in the funding round led by existing investors along with Square Peg Capital. With this, the company valued $550 million at that time. By now, the main target of Fiverr was to connect with every single freelancer out there and expand its Gig economy side. In November 2015, Fiverr raised another $60 million in the funding round led by existing investors along with Square Peg Capital. With this, the company valued $550 million at that time. By now, the main target of Fiverr was to connect with every single freelancer out there and expand its Gig economy.

In August 2016, Fiverr opened a new office in San Francisco, and the same year, Fiverr announced DCX Growth Accelerator as its new Global Agency of Record.

Latest Acquisitions and Partnership

In January 2018, AND CO came under the acquisition of Fiverr and the freelance software of AND CO was made free.

In February 2019, Fiverr announced the acquisition of ClearVoice, a content marketing platform. In June 2019, the company announced a new partnership with Lily Singh.

In July 2019, Fiverr introduced its Gaming store providing services like game development, game designing etc.

duolingo

Duolingo : The Biggest Free Language Learning Platform

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Even though there are thousands of languages in the world, English has become the main medium of communication. But still, many of the people are struggling with finding a better institute, where they can learn the language at a cheaper price.

Some people want to learn different languages as a hobby, and some need to learn a different language to get a better job. But getting admission into a good college or institution is not easy for everyone.

Thinking of this obstacle, the professor and student duo, Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker, thought of developing an online platform that could help the people around the world learn different languages for free.

Duolingo Founders
Image Source: inc.com

Luis von Ahn is the Carnegie Mellon University professor, who is also the developer of reCAPTCHA. And, Severin Hacker was a graduate and Ahn’s student from the same university.

Ahn is a native of Guatemala, a place where the scope of getting a basic education is only 30 per cent. Ahn was a bright student and wanted to study Mathematics. But unfortunately, there were no resources for studying Maths in the whole country. But if a person is working hard, no obstacles can stop him/her from achieving their dreams. Ahn’s determination brought him to the U.S., and he joined the Duke University.

Ahn completed a BS degree in Mathematics from the university in 2000. In 2005, he received a PhD degree in Computer Science from the Carnegie Mellon University. The next year, he joined the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University as the faculty member.

Ahn is recognised for his researches on CAPTCHAs and human computation. He has won many awards for his work including acclaim as the 50 Best Brains in Science by Discover and one of the 10 Most Brilliant Scientists by Popular Science Magazine.

Severin Hacker was born in 1984 in Zug and was brought up in Zurich. He completed a B.S. from Zurich and then moved to Pittsburgh. In Pittsburgh, he joined the alumni of Carnegie Mellon University and received a PhD degree in Computer Science. Hacker met Ahn at the university, where Ahn was his graduate advisor.

Being from a place where people struggle with the English language, Ahn and Hacker wanted to create a system, that could translate the website language from English to the other languages. This way, the people who did not understand English could access the website in their own language. But the two were not convinced about this idea completely and decided to develop a program that could do two things at a time, i.e., translate sentences into foreign languages and translate simple phrases in documents.

At the time, another language teaching app, Rosetta Stone, was getting famous. But the paid subscription of the app could not get more subscribers, and it was limited to the ones who could really afford it. But as the two co-founders had come from a place that where not all were economically well, they knew that not all can afford to pay for studies. The two knew that there is a larger population that require to learn a new language, especially English, and if they get a chance, it would be great for them. This led the two co-founders to build a simple and free language learning platform Duolingo.

The two started working on Duolingo in 2009, at the time when Ahn had just sold his startup reCAPTCHA to Google. In November 2011, the two started the beta testing of their product. In the beginning, they used the approach of crowdsourced translations. This gave birth to the early premise of the company, “learn a new language while translating the web”.

A National Science Foundation grant and the Ahn’s MacArthur fellowship sponsored the project initially. Later, Duolingo raised $3.3 million investments from Union Square Ventures and actor Ashton Kutcher’s firm, A-Grade Investments in a private Series A funding.

Ahn talked about Duolingo at his TED Talk in the same year, where he got a chance to reach a bigger number of audience. Though it was not a sales pitch, Ahn talked about the broken education system in underdeveloped countries and the benefits of using Duolingo. The speech received 1 million views, and this way, 300,000 users entered the waiting list for Duolingo signup.

The next year, with much improvements, Duolingo was released for the general public, and the platform included four languages, i.e. English, Spanish, French and German.

The company reported that not only the job seekers and students but the English teachers across the world were also using Duolingo. In late 2012, the company released an iOS app for its users, and the next year, the company also launched the Duolingo Android app. The Android app became an instant hit and had over 1 million downloads within the first three weeks of its launch.

In 2013, Duolingo partnered with BuzzFeed and CNN. The company raised $15 million in series C funding. By 2017, the company had received a total $108.3 million investment.

Though the service is completely free and does not support ads. To generate a certain revenue, the company uses periodic advertising. If the users do not want to see those ads as well, they can pay a subscription fee. The platform offers support for over 25 languages and 30 different courses. On the advice of Hacker, gamification was added to the platform.

The Duoliongo app was named as the number one app on Play Store and App of the Year on Apple Store in 2013. As of 2014, Ahn is serving the company as the CEO. Hacker and Luis von Ahn received the Tech 50 award in 2015.

basecamp

Basecamp, A Company that Created Mystique in the World of Web Applications

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Every business, rising from a small start-up to a flourishing company needs smart management tools to become more efficient and work in a proper hassle-free manner. The main problem that arises when you don’t have appropriate tools for managing a project is the communication gap between the company and the clients. And, this is the biggest threat to any existing business which can lead to extreme loss and even dissolution.

But, how about a web application where everything from creating your schedules to managing multiple chat heads of clients can be carried out? Basecamp, a private company, is one such platform that provides web applications where every necessary tool is combined together in a single software to make your work much easier and better.

Though Basecamp released its first web application publicly in 2004, the history of the company dates back to 1999, when a company named 37signals was formed with just four team members.

basecamp
Image Source: basecamp.com

37signals

In 1999, Jason Fried, Carlos Segura and Ernest Kim founded 37signals in Chicago, Illinois, as a web designing firm. The main motive of the company was to help other business companies improve their websites and make it less complex.

Initially, the company was doing quite well, but as the number of clients started increasing, the founders found themselves in a much-disorganized situation and started losing the demand for its service. As the trend of business communication follows, 37signals also marketed and managed projects through emails. And, this is what needed a very significant change to bring them out of the dealing topsy-turvy. 37signals realized that the method of getting updates via emails isn’t efficient enough, and it hinders proper communication. So, they planned to create a project management tool, which will have features like tracking progress, alerting deadlines, bookmarking important messages, managing emails, receiving notifications and much more. Basically, they started working on building up a web application with an arsenal of perks for every businessman around the globe.

After building the application, they started implementing the features, while interacting with their clients. This way, they received feedbacks of the tool internally, which was exceptionally positive. Realizing the demand for it, the company finally released Basecamp publicly in 4th February 2004. This was the first step towards something way bigger and over the years updated version of Basecamp like Basecamp Next and Basecamp 3 were also released.

The Growth

After the release of the application, they offered everyone one free project, in order to give clients the experience of management. And in case they still wanted to continue, they were asked to sign up for any one of the three paid packages.

Their first target was to make $5000 a month, which means $60,000 annual revenue. But they achieved it within six weeks only. This triggered their determination, and they realised that they are on the right path. Since the business was increasing rapidly after the launch of Basecamp, 37signals wanted to shift their field of interest from web designing to building web applications. So, they stopped taking any more clients for web designing and fully focused on modifying Basecamp. Today, Basecamp is used by the majority of firms and is the best project management tool across the world.

The tool became so popular that everyone starting from the business firms, software developers, educational institutions, and even, the non-profit organizations used this application to make their projects better. In 2014, the company was to Basecamp, after the software package (flagship product) Basecamp.

In 2004, David Heinemeier Hansson, partner at Basecamp, created Ruby on Rails, a free web application framework which was later released as open source.

In 2015, Basecamp 3 was released which the founders claim to be the best ever version of Basecamp with maximum modification and features.

When Basecamp was released in 2004, only 45 clients signed up for it. But the numbers started increasing so gigantically that by the next ten years 1,544,456 clients signed up, and, the number has almost doubled by now.

The Success

Basecamp and Ruby on Rails are two of the most successful products of 37signals (now Basecamp). Most popular sites like Twitter and GitHub use the Ruby on Rails framework.

Today, Basecamp has around 54 employees dealing with a diverse population working for the same goal that is creating better projects. Several books have also been published by this team like Zero to One and Rework.

UrbanClap

UrbanClap : One of the Most Successful Hyperlocal Startup in India

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The past decade has been the decade of startups, and India has been one of the booming industry for them. From Flipkart, Paytm, Yatra, Oyo, Faasos to Unaccademy, all are some of the names that are the most successful startups in India. Their unusual idea helped them emerge as the biggest companies in India. UrbanClap is a similar startup that is originated in India and was one of the newest ideas in the field of startups.

Early Life & Career

Like every other freshly graduated person, the bug of entrepreneurship had also bitten the co-founders of UrbanClap Abhiraj Bhal, Varun Khaitan and Raghav Chandra. Bhal and Khaitan were college friends, who always thought of starting up their own business. After graduating from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, the two started working for Boston Consulting Group (BCG) at their U.S. office.

During their time at BCG, Bhal and Khaitan often talked about starting their own business, but none of them had a clue that what they would be doing. Instead, they used to casually ignore the thought. But one fine day, they decided that if they want to do something, they have to start it very next second. They just can’t only daydream about it.

UrbanClap Founders
Image Source: livemint.com

The two had no idea what would be their startup based on, but after working for two years in BCG, they had figured out they want to start an ‘enduring business’. Both were ready to take the plunge. So in 2013, 0they left the job and came back to India to start their business.

Bollywood and movies being the biggest interest in India, Bhal and Khaitan launched their first startup named Cinemabox. The company made entertainment devices for public transport like buses, trains and planes. They invested about INR 10 Lakh in the startup on their own.

On the other hand, Chandra received an engineering degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley. After completing his college, he worked for some major companies like Infosys, Yelp, and Twitter. Chandra had a similar dream as of Bhal and Khaitan, so he also came back to India, in 2013. Here he started an online-autorickshaw booking platform Buggy.in.

But both the startups could not do well and were shut within seven to eight months of their inception. Despite the failure, the three budding entrepreneurs were not in the mood to quit and were still looking forward to establishing a successful startup.

Most of the times, the better startup ideas are the result of the necessities one faces in real life. This way, the foundation of the startup is always strong, and the results are the most fruitful. After failing once in the business, they were looking for that necessity-driven idea.

Meanwhile, during the wedding of Khaitan’s sister, Khaitan faced a lot of problems in hiring people and local vendors for various tasks. This hit the pinpoint, Khaitan and Bhal were certain that creating a platform, where people could find service providers at a reasonable cost will be their next startup idea.

Founding UrbanClap

The two now needed a tech guy, and eventually, got to meet Chandra through their common friends. The three of them discussed the idea, and after, contributing INR 10 lakh each, they started UrbanClap in October 2014.

They met with professionals from the different fields and shared their idea with them, such that to make them register to UrbanClap. Upon meeting those professionals, the three co-founders got to know that these service providers also faced various problems with their customers and payments.

The Success

The company was an instant hit, As you could hire people from various fields, like a Yoga teacher to a plumber, through the UrbanClap app. In two years, the company expanded to six major cities of India, including Kolkata, Jaipur, Chandigarh. UrbanClaps received its first investment of $10 million from SAIF Partners, and by 2015, it had raised $37 million, SAIF Partners, Accel, and Bessemer Venture Partners, being the major investors. In December 2015, Ratan Tata from Tata group also made an undisclosed investment in the company.

The UrbanClap app lets the customers book a particular service through the app, the professional go to their home and complete the task. The customers make the payments for the service through the app. The company deducts 20 per cent of the payment and rest go to the service provider. This way, many of the registered service providers even make a lakh a month.

In 2018, the company expanded to Dubai, UAE and also closed a $50 million Series D round for expansion. By this time, the company revenue started growing three times a year.

The three co-founders seem to have no plans of going public in the near future. They want to make the company, and its services, future-ready and with their hard work as well as their strategies, it looks quite promising as well.