Before we start, let’s take a quick drive down the memory lane!
Do you remember what all you were doing in the second year of your college?
Probably partying with your friends, bunking classes and pulling all-nighters before exams?
Nostalgic, right?
But in 2003 as a sophomore, a young man from Harvard University not only hacked into the records of his university using his exceptional coding skills but also created a site that rated the pictures of Harvard students on the basis of their attractiveness.
He named it Facemash. Within 2 days, it saw 450 people vote 22000 times!
Needless to say, it drew a lot of flak from the Harvard administration leading to a quick shut down of the site.
Yes, it was Mark Zuckerberg and this idea served as the cornerstone for the social media giant, Facebook!
In 2004, Zuckerberg along with his friends Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes created facebook.com from their Harvard dorm room. The basic idea behind this site was to have a social connection among all the Harvard students, who could log in using their .edu email addresses. Within 24 hours,1000 people had already registered!
Eventually, it started spreading like a wildfire to Ivy league colleges like Stanford, Yale, and Columbia.
But then creating such a large empire is not a piece of cake. Zuckerberg was involved in yet another controversy. The Winkelvoss twins had approached Zuckerberg to code a similar social networking website, called HarvardConnection. When the twins got to know about Zuckerberg’s plan, thefacebook.com was already popular among students. This was eventually solved with a $65 M settlement. Seen the movie, The Social Network, yet?
By the end of 2004, the site had already gained 1 million users. Angel investor Peter Thiel invested $500,000 in Facebook which made Zuckerberg leave Harvard to run Facebook from its new headquarters in California.
Imagine getting into Harvard and dropping out to become one of the youngest billionaires in the world!
Facebook began from a dorm room and grew to a social media giant now, with a daily audience of over 1 billion active users in a single day. Today people consider Facebook as an indispensable part of their lives.
Zuckerberg cracked the marketing lingo, you must have heard a lot now-
Solving People’s Problems!
Born out of the need to establish social connections within a university became the virality factor for this startup.
Facebook continues to dominate the social media market despite recent hiccups. As of 2020, the global number of users on Facebook is over 1.65 Billion & it’s net worth is estimated to be at $475.45B. Imagine the massive growth year after year.
So if you have been lazily sitting on an amazing idea for a long time now, just remember Facebook’s success story and start working towards your own.
You never know, your idea could be the next big thing!
