Brainstorm to Buyout – The Story of Threewords.me

Brainstorm to Buyout in 23 days, the story of ThreeWords.me

The internet is a wonderful place, full of opportunity, and the next big thing. Some may call services such as Facebook and Twitter a “waste of time” and “pointless” but with Facebook valued at over $50 Billion (that’s right, billion) and Twitter estimated at around $10 Billion, for the founders of these companies, they’re anything but pointless.

As internet entrepreneurs, we’re often plagued with this stereotype of being geeks, locked up in our basements or bedrooms, writing code into the early hours of the morning. People think of these “geeks” and laugh, but who’s really laughing? Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook is the world’s youngest billionaire at age 26, with an estimated personal fortune of over $12.5 billion.

Obviously, not all of us have success like Zuckerberg, but it doesn’t stop us from trying. Take a personal friend of mine, Mark Bao, he’s founded around 8 companies, and sold three of them. His latest sale? ThreeWords.me, a website that allows users to simply rate their peers in three words. Sounds too good to be true, right?

So exactly how popular was ThreeWords.me? Well, in the 23 or so days prior to its acquisition, ThreeWords.me got around 300,000 registered users, 2 million posts, 7 million unique visits and over 20 million page views. Staggering numbers for a website that had existed for less than a month. (Just to put that into perspective, The Daily Mail, gets around 12.5 million page views a month)

That’s all pretty incredible right? Yeah, it’s not bad. But do you know what’s really amazing, Mark Bao, who sold the site around 23 days after inception netted a cool six-figure amount ($XXX, XXX) from the sale. Not bad for 3 weeks work.

Oh, did I mention, he’s also just 18.

Christian Owens – Corby