![]() RSS Feed Reader on RSS.com (2013)īen managed all the customer interactions on the site and had several great ideas for improving both the product and experience. At the time, Google Reader (the world’s largest RSS feed reader) was shutting down, and as a result, was creating a new ecosystem of paid RSS feed readers. Ben rolled up his sleeves, and took on the challenge of finding a developer to help him build an RSS Feed Reader product on RSS.com. Inspired by his fellow students success, he started looking for a domain of his own to purchase and flip into a healthy profit.Ī stroke of luck and serendipity struck when the domain RSS.com became available and Ben jumped at the opportunity to acquire it in June 2013. Of all the great things he learned in business school, two of particular note sunk in deeply: a fellow student had purchased an internet domain () and sold it to Microsoft for a reported one million dollars and concurrently, another student at the university had secured the rights to a phone number that he was using to sell contact lenses (1-800-Contacts). Reality soon set in, however, when the neighbors in his South Texas neighborhood chose to sharpen their knives the old fashioned way (fancy old can-openers all came with a sharpening stone).īen’s next endeavor was a pressure washing business in South Texas that he grew and ultimately sold to focus on completing a business degree in entrepreneurship at Brigham Young University.īen attended BYU during the middle of the dot com bubble. ![]() He started his first business, Aztex Sharpening in 1996 after seeing an older gentleman in the streets of Teramo, Italy sharpening a set of scissors. Throughout the 90s and 2000s, Ben was learning a lot about running a company. Meanwhile on the Other Side of the World … In 2019 he delegated development and maintenance of PG to the open source community and still maintains a role of stakeholder in the project.įast forward to December 2020, and PG has been downloaded more than one million times, and still powers tens of thousands of active shows. He was also realizing that PG could become much better and more powerful if it was moved to the cloud and offered at scale. During that time, he received and responded to hundreds of support and feature requests which gave him insight into what podcasters really need. Announcement of the first release of Podcast Generator on SourceForge (2006)Īlberto actively developed and maintained this free software on his own for more than 13 years. ![]() He decided to distribute his work using an open source license and call it Podcast Generator (PG), a web-based podcast publishing platform that allowed anyone in the world to download and use it. After its launch in April of 2006, a full year before the launch of iTunes U, hundreds of organizations and institutions all over the world started to use PG. In 2005, while Alberto was at the Italian University of Bergamo, he started working on a software that would allow teachers to share their classes as podcast episodes for students to listen to and refer back to. Alberto Betella and Benjamin Richardson built and launched RSS.com from two different continents without meeting in person for three full years. ![]() That’s exactly how the co-founders of our podcast hosting company started. Now imagine doing it as a passion project while maintaining a full-time job. Imagine for a moment launching a business with a partner you’ve never actually met in real life.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |