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Annasha

Annasha Dey is an NIT student, who apart from studying engineering is also a content writer. She has a great interest in photography, writing, reading novels, and travelling as well. She is a foodie who loves socializing and hanging out with her friends. She is also a trained Kathak dancer and a big fashion enthusiast. Dey also loves watching TV series, which includes F.R.I.E.N.D.S. and Big Bang Theory. To be a better writer she prefers to read more

Hootsuite

Hootsuite : A Platform to Manage All Your Social Media Accounts

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Imagine being a food blogger, having dinner with your friends in a beautiful restaurant and putting up a story on Instagram, and at the same time, tweeting about the unsatisfactory service of that place. Well, as much as we love to keep us updated, we also enjoy letting people know what is going in our life as well. This isn’t pretty bad after all, is it? Many of us love following up the newsfeeds in social media platforms. But, there is already plenty of them, and at times, it really becomes a nightmare to manage them all at once. Some of the major social media platforms are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn, and every nine out of 10 people are users of more than at least one social media platforms.

Ever heard of Hootsuite? People, who are smart enough, have already installed the Hootsuite app on their mobile phone, a platform that is programmed to manage all your social media accounts through a single interface. Created by Ryan Holmes in 2008, this social media management platform is serving throughout the globe witnessing more than 16 million users to date. Ryan Holmes along with Dario Meli and David Tedman launched the product in December 2008, and Holmes is still serving as the CEO of the company.

Dario Meli

Meli studied Commerce, followed by graduating with a degree in Digital Media from Vancouver Film School. He joined Invoke (founded by Ryan Holmes) in 2004 and served as co-CEO. Apart from co-founding Hootsuite, Meli is also a co-founder of BrightKit, Foodee and Quietly.

David Tedman

Ryan Holmes hootsuite
Image Source: forbes.com

Tedman also graduated from Vancouver Film School who is an Angel Investor and till date has invested in many companies like Hack Capital, FutureEngine, Hazel, Koho, Foodee (co-founder) and many more. Tedman is mainly focused on tech-startups and hence invests in the new start-ups of the tech domain.

Ryan Holmes

Growing up in a small farm in Vernon which didn’t even have electricity, Holmes really surprised the entire world with his passion-driven a successful career. Holmes started programming from a very young age and also won a programming contest in fifth grade. His first business was founding a paintball field which was followed by opening a pizza restaurant called Growlies in Vernon. But, this definitely wasn’t the aim of his life.

Holmes sold his restaurant in 1999 and moved to Vancouver and learned web development which helped him found his digital media agency, Invoke. And, it was in this agency where Hootsuite tool was built by the employees of Invoke to help the businesses to manage social media platforms for marketing. The product was built in 2008, and it detached from the parent company in 2009 after the Series A funding round.

History and Success of Hootsuite

In 2008, Hootsuite was launched as a tool on behalf of the company, Invoke, and it named the product as BrightKit. Initially, when the product was launched it helped a user to manage multiple Twitter accounts from a single interface. The user interface appeared in the form of a dashboard from where one can manage all the accounts.

In November 2009, the company expanded its management for Facebook and LinkedIn as well. In December 2009, Holmes raised a funding of $1.9 million from the Series A funding round, which led Hootsuite to establish as an independent company. The investors included Blumberg Capital, Hearst Interactive Media, Geoff Entress and Leo Group LLC. By the end of 2010, the company witnessed a major success, i.e., 1 million users. The figure becomes twice in the next year, along with raising $3 million in the capital. In 2011, the company also acquired TwapperKeeper and Geotoko.

2012 was a big year for Hootsuite, as it raised $20 million from VC Omers Ventures, acquired Seesmic (one of its competitors) and reached five million users. After this fund, the company’s net worth rounded up to $200 million. In early 2013, the users of Hootsuite already reached 7 million, and in August 2013, the company raised $165 million in Series B funding. In the same year, Holmes was named one of the most powerful people of Vancouver, with Hootsuite’s growth curve not showing any downfall anytime soon.

In 2014, Canadian Startup Awards, Hootsuite was named Employer of the year 2013 with users hitting the buzzer of 10 million. In this year, the company raised around $60 million and acquired Zeetl. By 2015, Hootsuite became a billion-dollar company with more than 1,000 employees. The next year, the company made a few more acquisitions, and in 2017, it crossed 15 million users.

Currently, the company’s headquarters is based in Vancouver, Canada, and it has offices in 13 locations around the world.

bluestacks

Bluestacks : A Saviour in the World of Android Application Management

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The usage of smartphones over the past decade has increased at a really jaw-dropping rate. And with smartphones comes the innumerable android apps that keep us involved in this smart device for 24/7. Be it an app for editing photographs or a high-resolution game, Android applications are plenty in number. But at times, there can be plenty of issues while downloading the app on your mobile phone, causing the phone to hang, or maybe you cannot install at all, due to insufficient memory. Most of you can relate to this issue very closely.

But have you ever heard of Bluestacks? Well, for those who already know are chilling in their room playing Android games on their PCs, and for those who don’t, you just unrolled a mystery! Bluestacks is a software technology that enables users to install every Android application on their laptops and PCs, whether a Windows or macOS system.

Bluestacks is an America-based company that headquarters in Campbell, California, the U.S. The company was founded by Rosen Sharma, Jay Vaishnav, and Suman Saraf. It serves throughout the world, and apart from the App Player, the company has also launched GamePop (subscription service).

Rosen Sharma

Sharma completed his undergraduate course in Computer Science from IIT Delhi. He graduated in the year 1993 and made into Stanford University in the same year for PhD in Computer Science. Sharma also went to Cornell University and secured another PhD in 2000.

Before co-founding Bluestacks, Sharma from the very beginning maintained an impressive career. He co-founded VxTreme in 1995, followed by serving as the CEO of Ensim Corporation. He was in the board of directors for Green border, Ugenie, Teneros, Cloud.com and Teros. In 2003, Sharma became the president and CEO of Solidcore Systems and served the company for five years. Sharma also worked for McAfee before co-founding Bluestacks and left the company in March 2011.

Jay Vaishnav

A B.Tech graduate in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Mumbai, Vaishnav later pursued a master’s from IIT Bombay. After completing his M.Tech in 1982, he went to Texas Tech University to acquire an MS degree in Computer Science.

Vaishnav was hired as a software engineer by many companies like ESVEL, Cullinet Software and Tandem Computers. He also worked for companies like Junglee, Amazon and worked for McAfee and Solidcore as well.

Suman Saraf

Saraf is an ex-NITian who completed his B.Tech in Computer Science from NIT Surat. He worked for REC Surat, NetAcross Communications (Developer), Flextronics Software Systems and Hughes Software Systems. Apart from working for McAfee and Solidcore, Saraf also co-founded Blue Whale India in the same year when Bluestacks was launched.

Story of Bluestacks

Though the sale of smartphones has been increasing exponentially, it is impossible to access every Android app from your mobile phone. So, to overcome this shortcoming Bluestacks was founded in 2011. The concept behind Bluestacks was to make it easy to install every Android application on any PC.

Though the alpha version of the product was first released on October 2011, the founders started working on it way before the exposure to press. Since all the three worked together in two companies, they had the idea in their mind for quite a long time.

Success

Within two months after the launch of the alpha version, there were more than half a million downloads of the Bluestacks App Player. They had a great start, given that there wasn’t any prominent competitor of Bluestacks in the market.

After a couple of years from launching Bluestacks, more than 10 million downloads were witnessed which increased to 130 million by 2016. In the same year, Bluestacks also provided access to more than 1.5 million Android games, and 500,000 Flash games. In May 2013, GamePop was released, and in 7th June 2013, the company finally made iPad games accessible.

In 2019, Bluestacks 4 for the 64-bit version has been released, which is more efficient and also uses comparatively less memory than the other versions.

Strategies and Investors

By 2016, the company raised $30 million from major investors, like Samsung, Qualcomm Ventures, Intel and Andreessen Horowitz.

The company is currently focused on increasing the number of users, hence, the founders are attending conferences worldwide. The software is available for free, and Bluestacks also provides custom made tools and services for enterprises, Flipkart being one of the enterprise clients.

duckduckgo

DuckDuckGo : A Search Engine Protecting the Searchers’ Privacy

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After the internet has brought a mammoth size wave of revolution in this modern era, Google has become the most popular search engine since then. Many people also use Yahoo! but the popularity of Google among the population is unparallel. According to the statistics of 2017, only 46.8% of the world population had access to the internet and among this crowd raised 3.5 billion searches every day. It is pretty impressive, right? With the amount of response to the Google search engine, it ensures no competitors at least shortly. But, in 2008 a search engine called DuckDuckGo was launched by an MIT graduate, Gabriel Weinberg. In the past eleven years, the company has made impressive progress, and someday, it might give a toe-to-toe competition to the world’s most popular and dominating search engine.

Weinberg’s first step into his career life was with a different start-up and eventually, through thick, and then, his professional life started shining like a dazzling start in the entrepreneurial galaxy.

About Gabriel Weinberg

Weinberg went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology for both his bachelor’s and master’s degree. He acquired his bachelor’s degree in physics and graduated in 2001, followed by completing his post-graduation in 2005.

gabriel weinberg founder DuckDuckGo
Image Source: techspot.com

Apart from founding DuckDuckGo, Weinberg also served as a co-author at Traction for five years, and he is currently a co-author at Super Thinking. Weinberg is the present CEO of DuckDuckGo, but before founding this company, the journey wasn’t a bed of roses for him.

Facing the Failure

Right after acquiring his bachelor’s degree, Weinberg launched a company called Learnection. It was a software company that was built to enhance social networking and increase the interaction of parents with students and school as well. He invested all the money he raised from his family and friends and ended up nowhere. He realized that he made two major mistakes, one he hired his friends who weren’t suitable for the job and underpaid them, and second, that he worked day and night on a project that had zero market demand.

In the following years, he worked on another four to six start-ups, and among them, NamesDatabase was a success, and the main reason behind it was creating a demand for it even before launching the product. Weinberg later sold the company to classmates.com for $10million in 2006.

The Idea of DuckDuckGo

The most fascinating quality of Weinberg is that he did a lot of experimenting irrespective of the success of his products. One day, Weinberg found more than 10,000 searches a day for the pages, he created while trying things out. He completely forgot about these websites and noticed that though he wasn’t up to something solid, an audience has already been created.

He was intrigued by the number of searches per day, especially on something which had zero product development. So, Weinberg wanted to come up with something where he will dedicate most of his time to driving traffic and increasing users, and hence, searches and very little to the product development.

So, on 25th September 2008, Weinberg launched DuckDuckGo without any intentions to give competition to Google. He founded the platform only because he thought the users would like it better!

Success of DuckDuckGo

The company was founded in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, and it was self-funded by Weinberg at the beginning. Since Weinberg didn’t create DuckDuckGo, thinking he would do business at least for some decades, but just as a modified version of Google search engine with features that would attract more users. The best part of the business didn’t arrive in the first couple of years, as he got involved more with his family and giving little time to his newly launched product.

But, Weinberg realized DuckDuckGo kicked off the ground quite hard, and it is having a vast potential to grow. He started focusing on the work, and at the end of 2011, the company raised $3 million from Union Square Ventures. The next year, the company recorded 1.5 million searches per day, and the number of visits per day escalated from 39,000 in 2010 to more or less 1,400,000 in 2012.

In 2014, Mozilla added this search engine to Firefox 33.1, and in July 2016, the company started a joint venture with Yahoo! Recently, Google has announced that DuckDuckGo has been added to its search engine in Chrome 73.

Strategies

Since Weinberg’s primary focus was on the interest of the people, and on how to attract more users, he made privacy modifications in DuckDuckGo. Unlike Google, DuckDuckGo avoids the feature of the filter bubble and doesn’t track the search history of the user. This is a very advantageous feature of DuckDuckGo that helped it drive the traffic because once the public feels secure success is bound to happen.

toptal

Toptal : A No-office Startup for the Freelancer Community

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In the recent wave of start-up fair around the world, many entrepreneurs have dedicated their work significantly to the start-up society. The condition of the freelancers have significantly improved in these past years, and there has been an increase in the number of freelancers worldwide. Moreover, the young generation does want to break the conventional pattern of a daily 9to5 job, but at the same time, a stable and continuous source of income is necessary, too. With all these freelancing platforms coming up, and along with that the increasing number of new start-ups that demand freelancers, are playing an ace for the rising community.

Toptal, a freelancing platform founded in 2010 by Taso Du Val and Breanden Beneschott, headquarters in Silicon Valley, California, US. The startup has brought a revolution for designers, developers, programmers and analysts, who were interested to work as freelancers.

Taso Du Val

Val had already been into different jobs and had enough experience before he co-founded Toptal. He worked as an architect in Fotolog for two years, followed by working for Slide and Art.sy as an advisor.

Toptal founders
Image Source: toptal.com

In the founding year of Toptal, Val was working on his start-up for coming up with a real-time chat engine something absolutely different from what he ended up developing. While working in this project, he needed a freelancer. But it was quite annoying to find a really dedicated freelancer with excellent skills. This was when he decided to bridge the gap between freelancers, the newborn start-ups and business firms that wanted to hire them.

Breanden Beneschott

Beneschott studied chemistry from Stanford University, and while he co-founded Toptal, he was a student in Chemical Engineering, Princeton University. Beneschott stepped into the professional world as an intern for Adam’s Group and then for Morgan Stanley. He also served as the CTO for Zandigo and director of technology for Snafue, LLC. He co-founded smsPREP in June 2007, and then, partnered with Val in 2010 to co-found Toptal.

Behind the scenes

After Val launched the company, he wasn’t really looking for a co-founder. But, he bumped into Beneschott, who was his old neighbour and had signed up in Toptal as a client. Val realized that it would be a nice deal for Toptal if they become partners as Beneschott was more of an expert, loved dealing with customers and strategies. So, Val decided to fly to Princeton as Beneschott was still a student when Val approached him. Both of them worked in a small dorm room in his university, and finally, came up with a bigger plan.

Strategies

When Val searched for a freelancer during the setup of his start-up, he really found it hard to find a skilled one. So, he wanted a thorough scrutiny process and selected only the top 3% per cent of the skilled freelancers to work on behalf of Toptal. After founding the company, he established a four-round process for selection of the candidates, though it was very time-consuming. He focused mainly on the quality as Toptal provides service to many reputed companies including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.

The Success

Since Val and Beneschott lived miles apart from each other, they did not set up an office, but they were still pretty confident to cut through the noise and make it a reputed company. Since they scooped out the top 3% creamy layer amongst all the freelancers, they landed many big clients. They made $1million in revenue in the first year and worked with many talents across the globe, including Russia, Hungary and South America. Since Val was interested in working with the top-class potential stalwarts, he decided to fly to Hungary as the company spotted many excellent software developers from that area. So, in 2011 both of them fled to Budapest and started operating from there.

Initially, the company searched for software developers, business experts, programmers, but from 2015, it expanded and started hiring designers. In 2016, Toptal hired Skillbridge, a freelancer platform that offered services that marketing research, accountant, etc. related to business modelling. It eventually started adding more and more domains, and now, hires freelancers for more than 50+ sub-domains.

Funding Rounds

In the seed round, the company raised $1.4 million, Andreessen Horowitz, Quora and Adam D’Angelo, being the major investors. There was no further news of any other funding rounds since then, and the company has made impressive profits with time. In the year 2016, the company’s annual revenue turned out to be $100million.

peopleperhour

Peopleperhour : Strengthening the Freelancers Community in the UK Since 2007

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With the emergence of companies like Fiverr, Freelancer.com, Superside and definitely PeoplePerHour, the table has seemed to turn for the freelancer community around the globe. Previously, the majority of the working class didn’t support the idea of freelancing because there wasn’t any job security, no fixed earning and definitely not a long-term job assurance. But, with an increasing number of start-ups and SMEs, the demand for freelancers is escalating very fast. Clients prefer hiring freelancers over hiring an entire agency because the workflow is better, assured delivery of work within time and other factors combined it is pretty amazing for both the clients and the freelancers.

Xenios Thrasyvoulou and Simos Kitiris founded PeoplePerHour in 2007 as an online marketplace for the freelances. The company can hire the talents for a minimum of an hour which stretches up as per the need. PeoplePerHour has really increased employment among the students and senior citizens as well.

Xenios Thrasyvoulou

Xenios graduated from the University of Cambridge in 2002 with a degree in engineering, following the conventional way of pursuing business studies at Harvard Business School. Right after he graduated from Harvard, it was the time when dot com boom was becoming history and businesses again started rising. The era of the internet already hit the UK, and Xenios realized that most of the people tend to do their jobs sitting at home and not preferring the daily 9to5. The offline scheduled job was somewhere starting to lose its value. It hit him hard that why not create an entire marketplace for these people. This was like the ultimate turning point in Xenios’s life, and in 2007, he co-founded PeoplePerHour along with Simos Kitiris.

peopleperhour founders
Image Source: thegoodwebguide.co

Xenios has also founded another start-up called TalentDesk.io in January 2017.

Simos Kitiris

Simos also completed his engineering from the University of Cambridge in the same year as Xenios. He joined Amadeus as a Software Engineer, immediately after graduating, followed by working for Accenture as an IT Consultant. He left Accenture in 2006 and started working with Xenios on the PeoplePerHour project. He is the CTO of PeoplePerHour, and apart from that, he worked as an Advisor for SIP-The Tech Investment Club, Hellas Direct and BetaAngels Management LLC. In October 2013, Simos Kitiris founded another UK based start-up, Yumbles.

Founding PeoplePerHour

Dealing with the crisis of freelancers, Xenios realized that there is a huge gap between the service providers, and the clients, which led him to co-found PeoplePerHour with Simos. Founding the company in 2007, it has its office in Athens, with its headquarters based in London, UK. The most unique feature of PeoplePerHour is job or project allotted to the freelancers is hour wise. Unlike other freelancer company, when the project is uploaded along with the deadline, in PeoplePerHour the working hours might extend as long as it needs to complete the work, and the freelancers are paid accordingly.

The Success

The launch of PeoplePerHour turned out to be a great success as the employment of senior citizens in the UK increased by a great number. After retirement, many people still have the zeal to work but maybe not a 9to5. PeoplePerHour worked wonder for them, and according to the report from the UK Office for National Statistics, 358,000 people aged above 65 started working after the launch of this online platform. The mostly the retirees showed a keen interest, and by 2012, the percentage of senior citizens searching for a job increased by 137%. In this journey of 12 years almost, PeoplePerHour has served more than 1million clients and paid over £100 million to its freelancers.

Investors and Fundraising

After the opening of the beta version in 2007, the company kept expanding, and within a year, PeoplePerHour announced that their freelance community comprises of 40,000 freelancers. One of the biggest investors of PeoplePerHour is Index Ventures, and the amount of fundraising in the interim funding round was undisclosed. In 2010, the company raised funding of £425,000 from its founders and Michael van Swaaij. The company secured a fund of £2million from Index Ventures, and along with that, also launched its new iPhone app in October 2012. In the same year, PeoplePerHour was featured in the magazine, Wired UK as one of Europe’s 100 Hottest Startups of 2012.

The company today comprises of around 100 employees, with Xenios as the CEO and Simos as CTO. Even though Simos has recently opened his own start-up, he still keeps serving the community of PeoplePerHour.

yell

Yell : The Success Story of an Online Marketing Company

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Initially, when the internet had just started gaining popularity in our world, very fewer people possessed the idea of its true potential. And, the one who channelled its power in the right direction, emerged out as very successful entrepreneurs in today’s world. Yell is one such company that has acquired firm ground on the sphere of online marketing. The company was founded in 1966, long before the internet had a massive impact on us. Today, Yell helps small companies drive traffic to their websites and do marketing for them.

History

How many of you have heard about Yellow Pages? If I am not wrong, almost the majority of the world knows about yellow pages being a telephone directory of businesses where contacts are arranged category wise and not alphabetically. Yell was founded as a company to publish these yellow pages as a part of the General Post Office in the United Kingdom. Even today, the company is exclusively for the people of the UK selling a digital version of yellow pages.

The company was founded in 1966, but the website yell.com launched in January 1996. The first step of Yell in the business was when General Post Office included yellow pages for its Brighton telephone directory. After getting added in 1966, it eventually started expanding to other parts of the UK.

yell
Image Source: glassdoor.co

After the website was launched in 1996, Yell started helping out small businesses by advertising on behalf of them. One of the most important parts of a newborn business is to drive the traffic towards their website. When Yell.com was launched the company noticed that most of the companies absolutely had no idea about how to create a website at all and driving traffic seemed far-fetched. So, yell just provided the service of advertising and marketing.

Growth

In January 2001, the company announced that it will be spinning out from its parent company BT Group which followed Yell’s acquisition by Apax Partners and Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst in May 2001 for £2.1 billion. The company started a joint venture with Google from 2005 to make local classified content available in Google’s search engine. In January 2008, the company incorporated Apptus technology in its software to enhance the capability of its search engine.

Yell.com released its iPhone app in October 2009. Since the company’s primary product was publishing yellow pages, and with time, The company started using recycled products. From February 2010, the company started using smaller papers, unlike the conventional yellow pages to conserve resources. The very next year, Richard Hanscott was appointed as the CEO of Yell, and since then, the business is escalating even faster. In the financial year 2018, a year before Hanscott stepped down, the company announced £200 million digital revenue and £60 million EBITDA.

In 2012, Yell’s parent company, Yell Group decided to change its name to Hibu which was again back to Yell by August 2014. The company re-launched its website after incorporating many updates, including pay per click (PPC) advertising. Today, the company handles the PPC operation of more than 14,000 UK businesses. They have also launched a lot of promotion packages for their clients.

In 2016, Hanscott was rated as one of the top CEOs in the entire UK by Glassdoor who was eventually replaced by Claire Miles, current CEO of Yell.com. In 2017, the company announced that they won’t be publishing a hard copy of yellow pages anymore and hence digitalized the directory from 2019.

Yell, Today

Yell has been ruling the territory for quite a long time now, and like every other business, Yell also faces criticism. Though Yell.com has become UK’s number one company for providing digital marketing services, over 100 small businesses share their horrifying experiences with Yell.com in social media. The company is growing every second, and with more than 1500 employees, it will surely look into the crisis of its customers and serve well.