1 billion in revenue after 5 years.
To most of my fellow wantrepreneurs, I just read an article about Hamdi Ulukaya and his tremendous success (0- 1billion in revenue in 5 years) with his greek style yogurt company. The article illustrates how Ulukaya took a loan for just over a million and bought an old yogurt plant. His ultimate goal was to develop premium yogurt. Previously, I had read an article posted on WSO about the not so sexy entrepreneurs who own gas stations etc, stressing the importance of predictable and obtainable cash flow. I don't think entrepreneurs necessarily have to invent something new or innovative, nor do I think that any new idea/venture has to revolve around a website and an app, which is contrary to the school of thought of most my fellow colleagues.
Theres a few lessons that I have learned, from other entrepreneurs as well as my own experiences:
1. Ask questions, solve problems. Be efficient and figure out a way to make someones life better = create value.
2. Do your due diligence.
3. Fail forward. Learn from your mistakes, and try to debunk your idea/strategy from the start. It took Edison 1000 tries before he figured out the light bulb. He failed 999/1000 times= succes rate of 0.1%.
4. Follow your passion. If Edison didn't have passion for that damn light bulb, he would have given up after the 10th or 11th try, like many of us would have.
5. Consider the cash flow segment. How is this thing gonna work and how are you going to implement it?
And finally a quote that contradicts most of what I just said, just to keep things fresh:
"If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have responded, we want faster horses". -Henry Ford
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/the-yogurt-company-growing-as-fast-as-goo…
Inventing something new is not necessary or even the best course of action. More often than not slick marketing has a far greater upside than a new idea.
not necessarily always "slick marketing", but also taking an old idea and making it only slightly better with a new twist. Either that or having incredibly low customer acquisition costs...the only reason WSO can survive is that the customer acquisition costs are low enough through Google organic search (since e have such a wealth of infomration for free, built up over 8 years = we get a lot of organic search traffic).
So even though we don't make too much $, we make enough to support a small team and continually reivest back into the community and make it better.
Except Edison stole the lightbulb and screwed over everyone else involved with it.
That's nothing new, as Pablo and Jobs said, "good artists copy, great artists steal."
That's the other way to be successful and probably the best.
Edison as a role model example? His passion? Thanks to that guy and his ignorance, we haven't developed at that time anywhere near our potential. Greedy Tesla-jelly-hater...
And read more about theory behind discoveries and their timing. In short, if someone doesn't come up with some discovery, others usually will, shortly after. If you check what other great minds were working on at that time, you'd see that many were just in front of the same discovery.
Does anyone have any idea who some of the investors in Chobani are?
The article says he owns 100% of the company.
He's selling yogurt, so zero new idea there. Not too sure how it ballooned that largely and quickly but I'm sure there are millions of people who tried something in a similar vein and failed miserably. Seems like he got incredibly lucky to be honest, basically won a lottery of sorts. One could be tempted to be inspired if able to completely ignore survivorship bias.
As I stated MARKETING was the key here. He did have a differentiating factor as well. At that time Greek yogurt was not big in the USA or really even found anywhere. So he broke into a market with a new but not really new product and people liked the marketing and the hype. Product took off like a rocket.
What likely drove his success was being part of the upswing in a new trend. People found that greek yogurt is high in protein and therefor somewhat healthy, and it became a new craze. The tough part is knowing when a craze is about to happen before it actually does. For example animal hoodies, silly bandz, crossfit, ect.
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