Hello dear blog readers! To inspire you to accomplish and achieve, I want to tell real business success stories from scratch. About the path companies have taken to achieve development and enter the global market. About how they started and how they struggled with the difficulties that arose in order to succeed. What brilliant businessmen and entrepreneurs led these business projects.
List of the best projects in the world
Apple
Apple was founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 1976 in Cupertino. Their first project was the Apple I, without a keyboard or power supply, which they built in the garage of Jobs’ foster parents. After selling 200 copies, Wozniak began working on the Apple II, hiring enthusiastic assistants and entrepreneur Mike Markulla. In mid-1977, annual sales were $1 million.
In 1979, the Apple II + was introduced to the world, and then the III, which was eventually withdrawn from sales due to defects. Despite the fact that revenues fell due to the failure, after a few years, they still managed to sell goods worth $ 1 billion. But in 1985, Jobs left the company, whose president was John Sculley. This period was difficult for the corporation, it was on the verge of collapse, and the losses reached almost $ 2 billion.
But in 1997, Steve returned, and from that moment the company began to create the latest technology in demand. The iMac came along, then the iPod and the iTunes store for its users. The company began to gain momentum and produce a variety of gadgets, including the iPad tablet, iPhone smartphone, smart watches … Starting from a small garage company, to this day, it has become the most expensive project with a billion in income and the most desired brand for people around the world.
It was founded in 1995 by two Stanford students Sergey Brin and Larry Page. The motivation of the graduate students was to provide an accessible search for information in a huge amount of data. They developed the BackRub search engine, which analyzed backlinks that pointed to any sites from other Internet resources. Initially created as a research project, the guys combined several university machines, without capital investment.
Over time, the project began to work and it was financed by the founder of Yahoo, thanks to which, already in 1998, the guys were able to register it and open their first office. Absolutely all computers are set up and adjusted by employees of the corporation, which allows the system to interact every day with a huge number of servers without failures.
In addition to search engines, an operating system for Android phones, a translator, Gmail email, photo programs, Google docs and Google Chrome have also been developed. In 2006, the online video site YouTube was acquired. To date, Google has the largest traffic among users of any corner of the planet.
Coca-Cola
The cola formula was invented by pharmacist John Pemberton in 1886 as a remedy for depression and erectile dysfunction. Therefore, at first Coca-Cola was sold in pharmacies, causing losses to its inventor at first. In 1888, businessman Asu Grizz Candler acquired the rights to it, who immediately founded The Coca-Cola Company, which to this day occupies a leading position in the world market.
Candler ran the best advertising campaign, mostly selling cola by the slogan «Drink Coca-Cola, beautiful and refreshing», which caused revenues to skyrocket until the first competitor to PEPSI appeared in 1902. Then, for almost 10 years, Asu will actively and successfully fight counterfeit companies, for example, Cold Cola, Candy Cola, Fig Cola …
Soon the company will receive a patent for the bottle itself, which will become a symbol of this drink. Already in 1919, Candler sold the company to Ernest Woodruff, who a few years later handed over the reins to his son Robert, who led it for the next 60 years.
After 1958, Coca-Cola added Fanta and Sprite, which are popular today. Throughout this period, there was fierce competition with PEPSI, which for periods occupied a leading position, especially in the USSR, where Coca-Cola was practically not sold. Now this corporation produces juices, teas, diet cola and has daily sales of more than 1 million bottles worldwide.
Disney
This cartoon studio originally had a slightly different name, Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio, and was organized by Walt Disney and his cousin Roy. At first they had a very hard time financially, and then in defending the copyrights of their cartoon characters. Having successfully released the cartoon «Alice in Wonderland», the guys made a good profit and decided to slightly change the name to the Walt Disney Company.
A little later, the first voiced cartoon about Mickey Mouse appeared, the studio was rapidly gaining popularity. In 1954, Walt opens Disneyland, an amusement park with its cartoon characters come to life. After the death of both founders, the Walt Disney Company survived in the early 80s solely on the income of Disneyland.
In 1984, the Bass family bought out part of the shares, and in a few years they were able to regain the popularity of the company by launching their own cable channel and new cartoons. This brand, which started in a garage, has grown rapidly, opening stores, magazines, newspapers, sports teams and new amusement parks in other parts of the world.
The most powerful and popular social network in the world appeared in 2004 thanks to Mark Zuckerberg. He once hacked Harvard University’s Facemash website, which provided photos of his female students to rate their attractiveness. After this incident, he had the idea to create Facebook, where users could also communicate.
Initially, the focus was on the audience of Harvard students, but gaining popularity, it appeared within the walls of Stanford, Yale, and eventually at all US universities. The development required large investments, which Mark and his new partner Sean Parker successfully attracted. Shareholders included Peter Till, Bill Gates and even Russian investors Yuri Milner, Grigory Finger and Alisher Usmanov.
Since 2005, Facebook has ceased to position itself only as a student network, now anyone can use it. In 2011, the registration of the billionth user was recorded. Browsing was made possible in 68 languages, and various applications were added in the form of games, calendars, tests and shops.
Conclusion
These corporations have gone through a very difficult path, but managed to gain recognition, win competition and defend their right to exist. As you can see, all of them were born without major investments, over time attracting investors for development who believed in the success of the idea.
If you want to be the same purposeful people as the founders of these companies. I recommend that you read the previously published blog post. Here is the link: “Ways to achieve your goal even if the world is against you”
Take risks, believe in yourself and achieve your goals, because these examples prove to us that it is quite possible to win a leading position in the global market from scratch, only with strong motivation.