It is quite hard to start a business. Most of them will fail and that is definitely scary. It is possible to have a tremendous idea and still fail. You can be really good at business and still fail. No matter the case, when you start your small business, you do invest a lot. In order to help you out to be inspired and lower your scare level, here are some examples of small business success stories from 2013.
Zane’s Cycles
Chris Zane, the man behind the business, convinced family members that owned a closed bike shop to trust him. His adventure started with a loan of $23,000 from a grandfather (15% interest was attached to the deal). What is particularly interesting is that Chris was just 16 years old. It was his mother that actually ran the bike store while Chris was attending schools.
The business was really simple: selling and repairing bikes. Chris Zane’s knowledge was gained from the fact that when he was 12 he started fixing bikes in a garage owned by his parents. The small business that he eventually opened made $56,000 in the first year in sales. In 2014 the expectation is to sell $21 million. That is definitely quite a huge growth.
Oak Street Bootmakers
George Vlagos was a man that shined shoes at his father’s brick and mortar shop on Saturdays as he was young. The father was a Greek immigrant cobbler that had one goal: show his child that hard work can be really rewarding.
George did not do what his father wanted as he did not become a cobbler. He basically started working as a designer and the success was incredible. Just as an example, in the event that you want a pair from Oak Street Bookmakers, you will have to currently wait for an astonishing six years.
Tasty Brand
Nowadays people are obsessed with organic food. Shannan Swanson and Liane Weintraub managed to take advantage of this as they started an organic baby food line. You would expect that the market would be filled with competition but that is definitely not the case. In reality, only some such lines exist. The two tried to cover the niche and after 4 years, profit started to come in. The predictions are quite great: a 2014 with sales of around $2.5 million. Tasty Brand is now carried by Tops, Fairway, Whole Food and various other chains.
Adafruit Industries
Limor Fried is an MIT computer science graduate and en electrical engineer. She started a DIY electronic kit shop that sells various kits with circuit boards schematics, software code and design files. We are talking about a small business success story because of the fact that launch happened with $10,000 and we talk about 200 daily orders.
GasBuddy
GasBuddy is the work of Dustin and Jason Coupal. They created quite a small site at first that let people know all they needed to know about the gas prices. Eventually, the switch was made to mobile apps and this is what skyrocketed the business. Now we are looking at 6 million daily downloads and a site that is constantly growing in traffic.