3 Startup Business Ideas That Became Huge

Posted by cetwin on March 10th, 2015

It is frustrating for a businessman to pass up an opportunity to buy an existing small business which would later turn big and profitable. Investing in such activity is difficult because statistics show that only about half of mergers & acquisitions are successful.

Living with the Past Mistakes

This is a common experience with the likes of Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures and John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins. Wilson rejected Airbnb, a huge home-rental website which is currently worth $2.5 billion, and Doerr spurned Twitter, a very popular social media platform.

Almost all investors make the same mistake, some bigger, some smaller. They saw what these small companies were doing at the start, never on what they could do in the future.

Small Businesses Can Grow Big

It is very hard to predict the future of startup business ideas. You may think that getting a frozen yogurt franchise is not a good idea. In fact, a vast majority of business startups end up dead – leaving their investors holding the bag.

But history shows that it is possible. Perhaps it’s a matter of the right combination coming into the right place at the right time. Here are some of the small startup businesses in recent times that grew big beyond the imaginations of their proponents.

1. Google

Who hasn’t heard about Google? Almost every internet user in the world is using Google to search for information. Only in China is Google playing second. Around the world, it is first among search engine services.

But did you know that it just started as a research project in 1996 by Larry Page an Sergey Brin? They were both PhD students at Stanford University in California at that time. Now, Google is there at the top – all over the world.

2. PayPal

Most of the online monetary transactions are still being coursed through PayPal. It is one of the most used service to transfer or pay money, anywhere and in all currencies around the world.

PayPal was established in 1998 originally as a company that develops security software for handheld devices. And then one year later, the founders shifted the focus of PayPal and used it as a money transfer service of Confinity. In 2002, it generated $61 million when it was listed under the ticker NASDAQL:PYPL at $13 per share.

3. Amazon.com

In Amazon.com you can find almost anything on sale. This is one of the largest online marketplace in the world where you can get the items you need at a discount.

Amazon.com was created by Jeff Bezos in 1994. He resigned from his job as a VP of a Wall Street company to work out a business plan that eventually became Amazon.com. He began with a list of 20 products that he could sell online.

His website was launched in July 1995, and quickly became the number one book-related website. Four months from its launching, it began to rise up in internet rankings.

As of December, 2014, Amazon.com’s total revenue was $88,988,000. In its income statement for that year, it listed $26,236,000 as its gross profit.