Courtesy of seo
LiveJournal is a internet blogging and journal platform where users can share and discuss their lives with others as they see fit. The site was extremely popular in the early 2000′s and continues to remain very popular in 2010 mostly with the younger audiences as is the norm it would seem with most social networking sites these days. That combined with the sites overall financial success is why this week in the spotlight we take a look at entrepreneur Brad Fitzpatrick who created LiveJournal. We’ll look at just how he did it and highlight what lessons any upcoming entrepreneur can learn.
Summary:
Name: Brad Fitzpatrick
Age: 30
Location: Iowa
Claim to fame: LiveJournal (Free web journal/blogging social community website)
Initial cost: unknown
How He Did It:
Brad Fitzpatrick grew up in Oregon and later went onto attend the University of Washington in Seattle where he majored in Computer Science. Fitzpatrick started LiveJournal in 1999 as a side project among the other things he was working on, which in time grew to consume most of his time. The idea came from his desire to keep his high school friends up to date on his life. Eventually he quit his day job to work on his LiveJournal project full-time. Fitzpatrick introduced a subscription based service to complement the free service offering perks such as no ads for premium users. In 2005, Brad sold LiveJournal for an undisclosed amount of money though one can assume it wasn’t cheap to say the least. As of 2008, Fitzpatrick now resides as an employee of Google.
Lessons Learned:
- A simple idea can quickly turn into a huge success (Fitzpatrick started the site with personal reasons in mind, and it quickly grew from there as is the case with many start-ups).
- Don’t expect instant success (You should know when to quit, but keep costs low and give your idea time to grow as Brad did with LiveJournal).
- Listen to your users (Sites, products, businesses, etc… all need to change over time and that change should be driven by the customer – aka the one using your product/service).
- Sometimes all it takes is putting a new spin on a old idea (Fitzpatrick didn’t invent the blogging platform, but he was able to put a new spin on it with journaling online attracting many users).
Did you miss last weeks spotlight? Check it out here: The Entrepreneur Spotlight: Chad Hurley of Youtube.
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 me know if you have an entrepreneur you would like to see featured here in the weeks to come.
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