Delicious is a popular social bookmarking service that almost everyone in the social networking space is familiar with. It allows you to bookmark and share links to sites that you find interesting with family and friends. What you may not know though is how the guy who invented it ended up with over $15 million for his idea! This week in the spotlight we take a look at entrepreneur Joshua Schachter, who created the popular social bookmarking website called Delicious. We’ll break down just how he did it so you can learn from his success story and use it to help make your own ideas a success!
Summary:
Name: Joshua Schacter
Age: 35
Location: California
Claim to fame: Delicious (Popular social bookmarking service)
Initial cost: < $1000
How He Did It:
Joshua Schachter was born in 1974 and attended college in Pittsburgh where he obtained a bachelors degree in Electrical and Computer Science Engineering. He then went onto work at Morgan Stanley as a Lab Analyst for several years. In September 2003, Schachter launched the first version of Delicious (then known as del.icio.us) where he coined the term “social bookmarking.” In March of 2005, Schachter quit his job to work on Delicious full-time. Later that year Yahoo! would acquire the web service from Joshua. It was reported that the deal was made for around $30 million with Joshua Schachter getting about $15 million. He would leave Yahoo! in 2008 and take a year off before starting work at Google as of January 2009, which is where he currently resides.
Lessons Learned:
- It takes time even for good ideas to become popular. Remember that very few things are instant. (Schachter worked heavily on Delicious for 4 years before it really took off and became a huge hit.)
- You can research an idea to death, but you will never get anywhere until you take some action. Start testing the waters so to speak and see what comes of it.
- Putting a new spin on an old idea is a great way to create something new and exciting! (Schachter took the concept of bookmarking and applied it to the social networking space to create a whole new concept.)
- Remember that you can work full-time doing something else and still pursue other interests as we saw here.
Did you miss last weeks spotlight? Check it out here: The Entrepreneur Spotlight: Gary Vaynerchuk
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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