To all those people who have never heard of Gadget Flow before, it is the original product discovery platform that keeps its viewers up to date with the latest tech, gear, and most incredible crowdfunding campaigns.
In this article, we are going to talk about how three friends at the age of 21 managed to start their business and make it successful.
It all started with three friends Evan Varsamis, Cassie Ousta, and Mike Chlioinakis were working together to create content for designers and artists. Their job was to publish new content almost every day. Their work was generating a few thousand dollars for them every month from sponsored posts and banner advertising. And that is how they were able to stay creative while at the same time bringing in some revenue.
Well, it was in the start and they were also making some money. But soon they started to have difficulties finding unique content. The best thing about these three was that they never gave up on anything. Even though there were many obstacles in the way, they always tried to overcome them. So what they did was figure out a better way to discover quality products online. And that is how on August 15, 2012 Gadget Flow was found.
The three started this by developing a simple website. They purchased a theme from ThemeForest. They also had a domain name with GoDaddy. Now within a few hours, everything was set and the journey to find new content began.
You would be surprised to know within two days, the three friends were able to discover and publish 150+ products from third parties. This also included Amazon and Etsy.
The idea of Gadget Flow right from the start was to simplify online product exploration. This was done by introducing fresh and new content daily. Every product page had high-quality photos, a title, and a brief description of the product. Then each page was also finalized with a “Buy Now” button. So if you were to be a buyer, you would only have to click the buy now button and that will take you directly to the seller’s website. As days passed by, they were also able to create their Facebook Fan Page, Newsletter, list, and Google Analytics account.
Gadget Flow was able to gain momentum within a week after it was founded. They were successfully able to publish around 300 products on their website. During their journey, they realized they were also able to organically generate more than 10,000 visits to their product pages which in itself was a huge success.
Even after this success, the three friends didn’t stop working hard and kept going at the same pace. Evan started to work on growth hacking techniques, some SEO tools, and cross-promotion with other websites and Facebook fan pages. And this strategy allowed their website to generate an incredible 100,000 visits. How did it happen?
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People love to see new products every day. And this is exactly what Gadget Flow was offering. People got to discover new curated products daily and the readers shared the website so others could do the same.
The next big step was to do some affiliation with Amazon, eBay, Sony, Google AdSense, and Buysellads.com. All this led to the production of a four-figure revenue in just three months of going live.
Then came another year when the team decided to launch a media agency. The purpose of this venture was to assist companies with their digital advertising goals. With that, this agency also took care of different companies’ web development needs and social media strategies.
2013 was their year and they made several changes;
All this made them realize Gadget Flow needed more attention than they are actually giving it and thus they decided to close the media agency and started to work full-time on Gadget flow.
To cope with the website’s demanding tasks they eventually had to hire help. So in the year 2014, the search to hire new people started. They spent weeks trying to find the right people and making sure they don’t make any mistakes in that. They hired some editors and a couple of blog authors that could help them generate content faster.
Then they also felt the need to hire an iOS developer and an Android developer so they did that too. According to Evans, they always hired a new team member whenever they felt like they were at the edge of a burn-out. They didn’t want to waste their money and resources by hiring someone they don’t need. So they had to be 100% sure whether they need to hire someone new or not. This method was applied to every single one of their hires.
Today, Gadget Flow is a team of over 28 people from 5 countries including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Greece, and France. Evans is the CEO of Gadget Flow and he likes to stay on top of things. He always has been and is the impetus behind the UI and development of future versions. He also monitors the operations department and focuses on growth and business development.
So this is how Gadget Flow even in the middle of the economic crisis and having no capital was able to generate more than 500 million visits, hire over 28 people, work with brands like HP, Amazon, Polaroid, and eBay and obtain around 10,000+ customers.
Now, what can we learn from this success story? If we try to provide high-quality content online to our targeted audience right from the start then we can attract more traffic and rank higher on search engine result pages.
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