Amazon.com has easily become one of the largest and most successful companies on the internet. It’s a company that started well before the dot com boom and has lasted well past the bust of that period when most other online companies failed. Did you know though that Amazon actually started out of a very simple idea; a small online bookstore. Want to know how the entrepreneur mastermind behind this site took it to where it is today? Well, this week in the spotlight we take a look at entrepreneur Jeff Bezos, who created the popular online shopping website we have all come to known and love called Amazon.com. We’ll look at just how he did it so all you entrepreneurs out there can learn from his success story and do it too!
Summary:
Name: Jeff Bezos
Age: 45
Location: Seattle, Washington
Claim to fame: Amazon.com (Popular online all-purpose shopping website)
Initial cost: < $2000
How He Did It:
Jeff Bezos spent most of his youth in Florida with his mother. He later attended Princeton University where he obtained a degree in Computer Science & Electrical Engineering. Bezos worked at several different companies in the New York City area within the computer science field prior to his full-time role with Amazon.com. Jeff created Amazon.com in 1994 supposedly while on a cross-country road trip. Bezos launched the site as an online bookstore to compete with catalog and magazine book orders, which were popular at the time as he could offer much more of a selection with an online website. The concept was actually quite simple to start and was run out of his garage for some time to come. Amazon.com grew slowly through the late 1990′s and so did its product selection as Bezos carefully grew the site into the mega e-commerce website it is today. Bezos’s Amazon.com now receives roughly 50 million visitors each month and takes in a profit each year well past the $100 million mark!
Lessons Learned:
- Start simple and build your idea out over time (Jeff Bezos started out with a simple concept and grew it into the site it is today – Amazon.com didn’t start out as the giant it is today)
- Develop and business plan and strategy for your company (Bezos planned out his idea of Amazon.com in detail, launched it, and then continued to develop future goals to further grow the site).
- Don’t try to do too much at once – focus on something and give it the attention it needs to thrive!
- You don’t know the true potential of an idea until you try it! (We see here with Bezos and previous internet entrepreneurs that simple ideas can grow into something much larger if given the time and attention needed.)
- Internet entrepreneurship continues to be one of the best (and cheapest start-up) paths for budding entrepreneurs. Find a way to leverage the tools and community the internet provides whether your business idea is internet based or not!
Did you miss last weeks spotlight? Check it out here: The Entrepreneur Spotlight: Joshua Schachter
Be on the lookout for our next entrepreneur spotlight article in this ongoing series. In the meantime, be sure to leave a comment and let me know what you think about the success of this week’s entrepreneur. Also, please let us know if you have an entrepreneur you would like to see featured here in the weeks to come.
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