Stories of the successful

yea know, the guys that sell their little hobby sites for big $$

[skunker]

Hey folks,
I thought I'd start a thread and see if we can share some stories about the rich and...infamous. What I am looking for is the "Everyday Joe" who builds a hobby site and then ends up selling his biz a few years later for $#*$!,xxx.xx

How about Drudge Report? Gamespot?

For example, a friend of mine recently started a WarGaming site for a very popular computer game released last Christmas and he just sold the site for about 200K.

[sidyadav]

Hotmail?

Sid

[skunker]

hotmail?

[trillianjedi]

Yes, hotmail:-

When Hotmail co-founders Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith approached the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson with their idea for a free email service in 1995, the firm praised the idea but wondered how they would attract members and build a company around it...

History of hotmail here:-

[microsoft.com...]

What about Google?

Or slashdot?

Or Yahoo!?

To be honest, there's thousands of them. That's the beauty of the web - for every succesful website that's been created by an enterprise with a mega-budget, you'll find a succesful website that was created by Joe Average in his living room.

TJ

[edited by: trillianjedi at 11:25 am (utc) on Dec. 15, 2004]

[Kolb]

eBay, offcourse.

[giggle]

Soccernet's another good example...

[Sanenet]

Friends reunited. Lastminute. And the list goes on... and on...

God bless the net!

[DaveN]

well I heard that a certain ex-admin from WebmasterWorld has just been formally offered a 7 figure sum for a portion of his Local network...

DaveN

[gopi]

A small list ordered by my appreciation :-

Ebay ,Google, Yahoo, craiglist ,Friends reunited (UK),

Amazon or Hotmail is not in the list because i dont think they are started as a hobby /pet project .

[skunker]

Awesome, here we go...that's what I am talking about.

What about gamespot? ANyone know if that was a hobby site? I know CNET bought them out, whoever it was.

I am seeing more and more game sites being bought my corps. Hint hint.

[sidyadav]

I think one of them could be Copernic as well, founded by the Bouchard brothers -- now acquired by Mamma.com.

I guess there are heaps of others, but those which started of as hobbies, didn't do billions (like Yahoo! or Google; might in the future), but are now a full-time job/project may include Gigablast and FyberSearch?

Sid

[mattglet]

I think broadcast.com might have been a hobby site... not 100% sure though.

*Looked it up after the fact:
Cuban wanted to hear Indiana U. basketball games in Dallas (where he lives), so he set it up to work over the internet. $6 billion later...

[dregs33]

Ricardeo.de

Ran their site with gossamer links software, the free version, bought by QXL for $60 million a few years back.

QXL then went on to have a valuation of over £2 billion in 2000.

Sold last month to its own management for £12 million.

dregs

[agerhart]

[forbes.com...]

[gopi]

Good story agerhart! ...

[grelmar]

A guy I knew in high school, until he dropped out and became homeless, used to float around and couch surf.

His main possession was a bunch of floppies.

Built a program to "vulnerability test" servers, got caught, busted, and as a result sold the software to a major tech security company (that will remain nameless) for 12 million.

He literaly went from homeless street punk to millionaire overnight.

Then went on to found a computer security news/website.

Sold it five years later for 30 million.

Bright kid. Social graces of a fetid slug, but bright kid.