Michael Birch was in Dublin yesterday as part of Dublin Web Summit and prior to this event he spoke in the Science Gallery. Michael was in the news recently because he was founder of the social network bebo, sold it to AOL for US$850 million and last week AOL sold it on for a rumored sum of 10 million. Michael pocketed close to US$500 million himself for the deal. But as usual with entrepreneurs he worked very hard to to get to this stage and had a bumpy ride along the way. Here’s a summary of his story.
Michael worked in an insurance company as a programmer but felt there were better opportunities so he left to start up an internet business. He gave himself 3 months to make money and after that he was going to go back to his full time job. 3 years later, after 3 failed businesses and loosing lots of money he was still trying to get a good business off the ground. The first venture where he started to get success from was Birthday Alarm. A simple concept of reminding people about their friends/relatives etc birthdays with an e-card element also. There was a key viral element to this that resulted in rapid growth. For example, to get reminded of friends birthdays you need to find out what their birthday is through a request online and this in turn got them to sign up and get their friends birthdays. They were getting 10,000 signups a day but when they introduced the option to import friends details from the address book they were getting 100 to 150,000 signups per day. Michael talked about how he used to spend about 5 hours a day answering customer support queries and each query that came in about the product he would change the product so that he wouldn’t see that issue again, that was his way of delivering what the customer wanted.
Prior to bebo he registered a doman name called ringo and created a social network similar to Friendster in about 30 days. He promoted it to 3 million members on his site birthday alarm and within 90 days of starting the business he sold it for 2 million.
In early 2005, Michael and his wife set up Bebo using funds from the sale of Ringo. Bebo grew very rapidly and ended up with over 40 million users with Michael selling it to AOL for US$850 just 3 years after it’s inception.
Michael was asked about the future of social networking. He sees it being around for ever more and increasing in importance each year.
His advice for entrepreneurs is to just ‘do it’. If he looks back now he would have joined start up companies earlier, worked with smart founders, learned a lot and then set up himself. It was a short, interesting and entertaining talk and it’s nice to see somebody so well grounded even with US$500 million in his bank account.
Did you get a chance to meet him or hear him speak at the Dublin web summit or National Science Gallery?