GrowthHackingIdea - From 0 to $1.6B (by 19-year-old dudes)

Smith and Levie were 19 years old when they launched their company Box Inc. that eventually grew to over $2 billion.

How did they manage to achieve this?

1. While at school, two childhood friends were generating tons of ideas and starting crazy businesses.

2. As a student, Levie noticed a big pain that he wanted to be solved – having to work with lots of documents from lots of computers, collaborating on projects, and accessing files from different places, including libraries, classrooms, and dorm rooms.

3. Levie decided to dedicate his business school project to this problem and to find a solution. This is when he realized the huge potential and decided to create a solution.

4. In 2004, Smith fell in love with the idea, and for half of the company, he invested $20,000 he earned playing online poker.

5. In February 2005, they launched a simple cloud file storage called Box.

6. Levie and Smith sent their pitches to the media and landed coverage on sites like Gizmodo, where they offered free storage incentives for new customers. This is how they landed their first paying customers.

7. Levie convinced two other high school friends, Ghods and Queisser, to get on board to run the engineering side.

8. In the Fall of 2005, Levie sent a cold email to Mark Cuban about Box. Unexpectedly, Cuban responded and invested $350,000.

9. The friends decided to quit school and focus full time on their company.

10. They moved from a garage to a rented cottage where they slept and worked 24/7.

11. Having a goal in mind to go viral, they decided to open up the file storage (1 Gb) service for free.
As a result, Box was getting so much traffic that servers were breaking down.
Within a few months, Box netted a few million users, including thousands who paid for Box services.

12. In October 2006, they raised $1.5 million in funding.

13. In December 2007, the company turned into a platform that allowed developers to create applications and services for Box.

14. In 2007, after the debut of the iPhone, and later - iPad, Box created apps for these platforms.

15. By that time there were 50 other competitors, so they needed to differentiate somehow.
They noticed that enterprise customers were “stickier,” so they decided to focus on enterprises.

16. In 2008, they added a security feature that boosted real growth among enterprise customers.

17. In January 2008, they raised $6 million in funding.

18. In October 2009, Box made its first acquisition, buying Increo Solutions for its document collaboration and preview technology.[6]

19. In 2010, they started to host an annual event BoxWorks targeting IT executives and influencers. It grew exponentially.

20. In 2012, in order to target regulated industries like healthcare and financing they became HIPAA-compliant, got other governmental certifications along with integrating dozens of third-party healthcare software applications.

21. In 2012 - 2014, Box secured $375 million in funding.

22. On January 23, 2015, Box raised $175 million during the IPO and established a market capitalization of about $1.6 billion.

Now about 99% of its tens of millions of users are employees from Fortune 500 companies.

Source: www.techrepublic.com


Cheers,
Charlie Patel ;)



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