YouTube was founded by three former PayPal employees who realized the need for a decent service that made the process of uploading, watching and sharing videos hassle-free. The story goes is they were at a party and video-taped a clip they wanted to share with their friends but didn’t know how to share it. Thus they created a website that would solve this problem, so they saw a need and fulfilled it. They registered the domain YouTube.com on February 15th, 2005 and developed the site over the following months from a garage in Menlo Park. In May 2005 they launched in a public beta, and in November, YouTube made its debut with an $3.5 million of funding from Sequoia Capital.
To start, these entrepreneurs had great ideas for how to attract people to the site initially. To get a decent start and attract the initial crowd they were looking for — teenagers, college students, hobbyists, film-makers — they came out with a contest that promised to give out one iPod Nano to a random member each day, which ran for two months. This contest worked on a point-based system, for example one point was rewarded for signing up, one for inviting others, another one for posting a video, etc. The more the points you gained, the higher the chance of winning you had. This was a significant action that got YouTube noticed by the masses and gave it a headstart as per the signups.
The result of these entrepreneurs hard work was becoming the world’s fastest growing website: YOUTUBE.
Information for this blog was found at:
http://entrepreneur.com/worklife/successstories/ebusinessprofiles/article168764.html and
http://www.rev2.org/2006/10/02/youtube-the-complete-profile/
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