You may love to hitch-hike rides, and even dinners, but have you ever thought of hitchhiking your way to success? There are massively successful tech start-ups who rode the back of successful tech start-ups to their own fame. These start-ups understand the principles of not going the journey alone especially when it is one as dicey but equally lucrative as a tech start-up, if you can get it right.
Here are five outstanding tech start-ups who did and are famous for it;
Airbnb
Airbnb is the disruptive collaborative online marketplace which enables short term lease of lodgings by travellers. These lodgings can include hotel rooms, vacation rentals, hostel beds, apartment rentals, hostel beds, home stays, and a host of other adventurous hideout stays. With over 3 million lodgings in 91 countries and 65,000 cities, Airbnb has become a $31 billion company in less than 10 years.
So how did they pull off such a daring feat? By simply sticking out their thumb on a speed train internet company.
But did the train pull to a halt to let them on board? No. They timed the train and flew into it – literally.
So what exactly did the Airbnb Founders do, in clear terms?
Founders of Airbnb, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia were simple graphic designers and had no programming skills whatsoever. In a bid to earn some cash to pay rent, they turned their living room into $80 per night lodging for three visitors attending the Industrial Design Conference by placing a mattress in their loft and serving the guests’ breakfast. This was the start of a billion dollar tech start-up idea. They saw the potential in this idea and recruited a friend, Nathan Blecharczyk who could write programs for the development of their website. The founders did all kinds of things to enable the take off of the platform but growing user base was quite slow and that was when it hit them.
The Craiglist Hitchhike
The ad listing platform, Craiglist had an enormous user base and Airbnb decided to take advantage of this. The users of Craiglist wanted cheap alternatives to heavy hotel charges and they capitalised on this gap to grow their own user base.
To gain these users, the Airbnb team offered to list advertisers on Craiglist free of charge if they would list on their own platform as well. With some technical integration between the two platforms, the strategy took off like wild fire with the listers preferring Airbnb to Craiglist because of the quality of pictures, description of each accommodation which was more personal than that of Craiglist. These attributes which Airbnb had over Craiglist made users stick with Airbnb. From 2010 to 2014, listing growth on Airbnb had skyrocketed from a meagre 10,000 to 550,000 with a doubling of their revenue base and hosting of 10 million guests.
Airbnb is now worth as much as great legacy hotels such as Hilton and Hyatt.
IrokoTV
IrokoTV now a household name in the streaming of Nollywood movies, Nigeria’s version of Los Angele’s tinsel town, was once just a Youtube dream. From struggling entrepreneur, Jason Njoku, founder of irokotv reels from the success that may never have been if not for Google’s acquired company, Youtube.
How did the irokotv idea come about?
The idea for irokotv came to be as Jason could not find Nollywood movies online for his mother to watch. By enacting licence partnership deals with producers, he began hosting them on his Youtube channel, by streaming for free. The popularity of his channel led to big time profits which got noticed by the international media including giants like CNN and Techcrunch for enterprise news features.
Becoming a tech start-up
First investors in Facebook, Tiger Global led an $8 million investment in irokotv, making it a bonafide tech start-up with global prospects, all thanks to its leverage from Youtube.
Irokotv is viewed in more foreign countries than in Nigeria as the diaspora find it great TV viewing away from home. By operating through a subscription model, irokotv has spread its tentacles as far as the United States, Malaysia, the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany and Italy to mention a few.
IrokoTV has become the world’s largest legal digital distributor of African movies with content distribution deals spreading beyondYoutube to Dailymotion, Vimeo, iTunes and Amazon.
Nasty Gal
The most popular girl fashion brand ecommerce tech startup Nasty Gal rode on the back of Ebay to become world famous. Founder Sophia Amoruso started off by selling used vintage clothes on her Ebay store which she aptly named Nasty Gal Vintage in honour of funk and soul singer plus fashion icon, Betty Davis.
Nasty Gal Collision with social
Latching fast on early social trends, Sophia and her Ebay Nasty Gal store gained prominence on MySpace with a 60,000 followership base she constantly interacted with to sell her fashion pieces. This prominence brought on increased sales and instilled gigantic confidence in her ability to go solo, giving birth to the NastyGal ecommerce fashion store.
Ecommerce store big time fashion brand
From its very little beginnings as one of those many fashion used clothes stores on Ebay, Nasty Gal has gone on to have its own ground stores in some of America’s major cities including Santa Monica and Los Angeles, raising investment funding from some of America’s biggest venture capitalists.
Also leaving its vintage effect behind, Nasty Gal has gone on to launch its own fashion line including clothes, swimwear, footwear, denim, lingerie, lipsticks, nail polish etc., in partnership with some of the biggest brand names in fashion and beauty.
Nasty Gal has been named fastest growing retailer by INC magazine although it filed for bankruptcy in 2016, the larger than life image Sophia Amoruso has created for the brand caused it to be purchased by BooHoo group.
From Ebay back store, to famous global ecommerce store selling to over 550,000 women in 60 countries, talk about a hitchhike of a lifetime.
Zynga
Zynga is a social video game service development company which began in 2007 by warrior entrepreneur Founder, Mark Pincus, who is willing to do anything possible to get and keep his company in business; a company focusing on developments for mobile devices using platforms such as Android, Windows and iOS and social networking platforms like Google+, Facebook and Tencent.
The Facebook Effect
The ride of a lifetime which put Zynga on the global map was the launch of its game, Farmville on Facebook which garnered over 10 million daily active users in only 6 weeks becoming the world’s largest online gaming company tailored to social networks becoming Facebook’s biggest App developer.
This grew to over 265 million monthly active users with three out of five of Facebook’s most played games namely, Farm Ville 2, Zynga Poker and ChefVille owned by Zynga with the company generating about 80% of its revenue from Facebook and to credit Facebook, has its vision as connecting people through gaming with Zynga games contributing 12% to Facebook’s revenue in 2011.
Of course with these successes under its belt, Zynga launched CityVille which swept off the impact of Farmville to become the most played Facebook game with 61 million monthly active users and figures like these get the briefcase boys knocking which was so for Zynga which swept up funds after funds from some of the best Venture Capital firms in America including Kleiner Perkins.
This social boost from the largest social network in the world granted Zynga the impetus to go public, though not the biggest success story after this move as its stock share was largely mocked after a slide, the company has however stood the test of time, acquiring other major game brands and portfolios from across the world.
Besides acquiring myraid game studios, Zynga has built its own platform to cater for its fan base outside of Facebook. A bullet ride with Facebook is any startup’s dream and Zynga sure had and still has its fill with the social monster.
Paypal
Hosting some of the world’s most psychedelic tech stars as Founders like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, Paypal, the innovative internet payment company has had its own share of hitchhiking to sit on its golden throne.
Big Companies can hitchhike too
While not a new or down trodden tech startup, the already publicly owned Paypal’s acquisition by Ebay for a grand $1.5 billion really gave it the push it needed to become the over $50 billion valued company it presently is today.
By expanding its services among Ebay users in America and international markets, Paypal rose to become ecommerce giant’s default payment system, an average of one in four online payment transactions were sealed using Paypal allowing its profitability skyrocket out of the roof.
This allowed Paypal to create partnerships with some of the world’s biggest payment brands such as Mastercard and also acquire some of the world’s largest online payment companies like Xoom.
Its access to the user base of these multifaceted acquisitions created a vast international spread for the brand allowing the company to be responsible for over 40% of Ebay’s revenue by 2012, processing payment volume of $145 billion in 2012 alone.
A Trailer within a Trailer
Paypal’s runway success ushered in the need for a spin off from Ebay to create room for greater growth, strategic competitiveness and flexibility for the brand leading to its second IPO valued at over $46 billion in 2015.
From its Ebay acquisition, Paypal has been listed as a Fortune 500 company possessing 197 million active users with registered accounts and operating in 202 countries and 25 currencies worldwide and surpassing Ebay’s $37 billion valuation.
The Paypal ride with Ebay is a once in a lifetime hitchhike dream any startup would definitely die to be a part of.
Starting a tech startup?
If you want to make money and have a tech startup idea, sampling how you can take a ride on the back of already successful tech start-ups may before you go spending all you have and fail, may just be the best move to make.
In this context, a ride is a leverage, something that can easily help you to get to your next level and this leverage does not have to be the biggest start-up, just a very strategic one. A lot today, we see really successful applications built on the back of APIs of other successful platforms, this may just be the way to go.
So think critically, whose back can you ride on before starting your tech start-up?
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Koko
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Disclosure: This review, article or report was first posted on http://www.babeonideas.com blog in 2017. The http://www.babeonideas.com blog no longer exists. Some information may be outdated or a startup may no longer exist in the form or all of its form when it was first reviewed.
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