WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO START A SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS LIKE FACEBOOK?

By Matata Mercy

Almost everyone i meet including the ones who are working want to actually start their own business.

 But what does it actually take to successfully start a business and see it grow until it becomes a very well known brand like the likes of Google, Facebook, Twitter and Cocacolas out there.

 I know it is not easy and many of the founders of these companies will tell you they actually did not know that their businesses would succeed since they went through alot of hardships. 

In order to successfully build a conglomerate like the Amazon and Google, you should be in position to know whether this is actually your next thing that you are going to be working on for a long time or it is the end for you. 

 

In other words, you should be able to charter a long term route for building and growing your business.

For the case of Facebook, when it was still in it's early years, Facebook was going to be acquired by other companies and among some of these companies are Viacom, America Online, and also Google. 

But the one that took over the headlines was the offer from Yahoo which offered to buy the company for $1 billion dollars back in the year 2006. 

But the founder of the company, Mark Zuckerberg who was at the time just 22 years old turned down the offer. 

 He had a mission and a plan for the company, he believed that this company could one day become a thriving public company and therefore he had confidence in his abilities to build the company  to become a public company. 

Instead of accepting the opportunity to be snapped up by other bigger companies, he created a 10 year plan and beyond to keep building his business so that his mission of creating a more connected and open world could be realized. 

For aspiring entrepreneurs out there, Are you building just a product, a feature  or you are working on your mission? 

In the year 2008, Facebook decided to launch a new feature that it called News Feed. 

This feature makes it easy for the users to be able to see what is happening around their connections.

For the past decade Facebook has been monitoring the feature closely and also fine-tuning it's algorithm to  ensure that it is providing quality to every unique user. 

If you are planning to start your own business out there, you should find ways in which you can make the world an easier place to live in. 

If you are going to build a successful business like Facebook, you will need to to know what kind of metric you are going to use to measure the growth of  your company or business.

 For the case of Facebook, instead of being overwhelmed by the data, they decided to choose a single metric to measure their growth. 

Facebook looks at the number of people who have found enough value in using their service in a way that they are using this service  regularly. 

With time the company has monitoring the user engagement closely and as a result they have been improving the value of their core product which is called News Feed to deliver value to people by providing a sense of connectedness that their users will always look to about the service.  

For AirBnB, they are using the number of nights that have been booked on their platform by the users. While for the riding hailing platform Uber, they are using the number of rides that are being hailed by the users.

Which metric are you going to use to track the progress of your business? In the year 2012 in the month of April, the photosharing platform Instagram had about  30 million monthly users but it had made $0 in revenue. 

During that time, the photo sharing app that had existed for 14 months had already caught the attention of  Silicon Valley Chief executives like Jack Dorsey the founder of Twitter and also Mark Zuckerberg the founder of Facebook. 

But Mark Zuckerberg was more curious about this app and he looked at the potential growth and engagement. Zuckerberg later acquired the photosharing app for $ 1 billion dollars and the investment has paid off hugely. 

And Mark Zuckerberg began the mission of self-disruption by employing the strategy of multi-app to prove that Facebook was actually a place for the best builders in the world  as he expanded his mission. In business, you should be willing to disrupt yourself before somebody else does. 

It does not matter whether you are building the next Facebook or not but you can apply these key lessons from the early growth of Facebook into your own start up or business.