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Arcane
Stealth • 3m
How did a 15 Year-Old ACCIDENTALLY Build a $1bn+ Business? During our school we all try everything possible to get good grades. This founder was trying to do just that. All the way back in 2005, Andrew Sutherland was a typical 15 year-old high school student. And in his second year of high school, he enrolled in a french class. To study French right? No. It was to impress the ladies. One day though his teacher challenged the whole class to memorize the words for 110 animals in french for a vocabulary test which was to happen the next day. So Andrew decided to build a tool to help him pass this test. He built a simple website which would make each word show up one at a time and used this to study.(Flashcards!) As you would expect, he performed brilliantly in the test. He found the tool incredibly useful and started sharing it with his friends, who all found it very useful. Andrew had just stumbled upon a a billion dollar idea. In 2007 he decided to launch the site publicly before heading to MIT to study computer science. He called it Quizlet. And while he was at college Quizlet became incredibly popular. It became so big and was growing so fast that, like all good entrepreneurs, Andrew dropped out of college. The site continued to grow and by 2009 hit 1 million unique visitors per month and had the world's largest database of flashcards. From there the business kept growing, raising $12m in 2015 and $30m in 2020 to support its expansion. It valued the business at $1bn. Today the estimated revenue is $80m per year with more than 60m MAUs worldwide. And it all started from a single french test. What's the lesson? 1) Even the simplest ideas can transform into huge businesses. They evolve over time. He could have never thought that such a simple tool was the foundation stone of a billion dollar business. 2) Build tools that you, yourself would like to use. That small idea could be your next big thing—start building.
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