One of the startups previously mentioned on my blog has been receiving great press lately. While Tweetphoto's initial foray into the market went relatively unnoticed, the press has recently picked up on their incredible story of exponential growth in a rapidly growing--yet often misunderstood--market. If you're interested, check out the latest piece from the Wall Street Journal.
The founder, Sean Callahan, is a former student of mine and an alum of California State University San Marcos. In class, Sean's keen ability to spot opportunities made me believe he'd succeed in the real world. As Riva Richmond, the author of the article reveals, Sean continues to spot opportunities:
"Mr. Callahan also found that Twitter can be useful for spotting and exploiting weakness in the competition.
When TwitPic's site went down on April 15, Mr. Callahan used keyword searches to gather the Twitter names of everyone who complained about the outage and sent messages inviting them to try TweetPhoto. Several people bristled at the tactic, but more than 800 asked for beta invites and, by April 16, there were only 716 spots left ahead of TweetPhoto's April 27 launch."This new startup has also had some growing pains, including having its iPhone application rejected by Apple. To read more on this, check out what TechCrunch had to say about it. The good news for Tweetphoto is that their iPhone app has recently been approved and they're off and running with it. The way Sean harnesses the power of his social community is admirable and speaks to his entrepreneurial mindset. He doesn't accept the status quo, he keeps working away at a concept until it works.
Sean is clearly using his creative problem-solving skills to build his business. What lessons can you remember from your experiences in school that you could use at your workplace today?
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