Get inspired by these 15 examples of successful online businesses as you learn how these businesses started and what is their current status today.
If you are an online entrepreneur, you know that there are those times when you feel like you’re not making any difference or succeeding in your business.
It can be overwhelming when you look over your online business and cannot seem to pinpoint particular breakthrough events.
Something as basic as waking up to face the day can be frustrating if you don’t have something to look forward to.
This article is written to inspire you and show you examples of what you dream of your business to be like when it’s successful.
Some of the thriving online businesses that exist to give you some motivation for your online business include Netflix, Nexon, PokerStars, and GoDaddy. Each has its own specialty and each is famous for its own reasons. All these businesses started out small and are now ruling the world.
We will show you models of businesses that started from scratch too and have become successful as online businesses.
You can draw inspiration from these businesses and even find useful lessons from them.
Here we go!
Table of Contents:
15 examples of successful online businesses:
1. The Meet Group
The Meet Group is a brand dedicated to providing an environment where users can connect and interact with each other safely.
The Meet Group is known for its high standards and adopted industry-leading practices and its constantly improved class safety updates.
Every month, they help millions of users find connection and community within their portfolio of mobile applications and services.
Many users have met their spouses on the different Meet Group Apps and others have become longstanding friends from the platforms set up by The Meet Group.
The Meet Group continues to scale upward with total revenue of $90.3 million, which is a 74% increase from the second quarter of 2019, an increase of $38.3 million from $52.0 million in the second quarter of 2019.
Their GAAP net income for the second quarter of 2020 was $10.4 million compared with the GAAP net income of $2.2 million in the second quarter of 2019.
The Meet Group works to meet the universal need for human connection and inspire startups all over the globe.
2. Rakuten
Rakuten is derived from the Japanese word “optimism,” and this philosophy lies at the core of the Rakuten brand.
Rakuten is Japanese electronic commerce and online retailing company based in Tokyo.
Ratuken’s B2M e-Commerce platform is the largest e-commerce site in Japan.
The company operates Japan’s biggest internet bank and the number one credit card company by transaction value.
It is often referred to as The Amazon of Japan.
Rakuten currently serves users worldwide through businesses based in 30 countries and regions.
The Rakuten Group has 70+ businesses and almost 1.4 billion members across the world.
Ratuken engages in the business of internet services.
Its 70+ business services include internet services, FinTech, and mobile services.
Ratuken came on Forbes top 100 Digital companies in 2019 and Forbes top regarded companies in 2019.
It also was recognized on LinkedIn’s Best Companies to Work for in Japan in 2020, as well as Forbes World’s most innovative companies in 2017.
3. Salesforce
Salesforce incorporated is an American cloud-based software company with its headquarters in San Francisco, California.
The company provides customer relationship management services and also sells applications focused on customer service, marketing automation, analytics, and application development.
The company attributes its success to its customer’s success.
They are dedicated to building the right technology and making the needed innovations easier and more accessible to help create a future with greater opportunity and equality for everyone.
Their theme word is “Ohana,” a Hawaiian word for “Intentional Family,” and this guides and drives their core values which in turn serve as the foundation for the company’s decisions, actions, and communication.
In 2018, the company made it to Forbes Most Innovative Companies in the World list and was on the list of the World’s Most Admired Companies from Fortune from 2013-2019.
Salesforce has also been the number one CRM software provider worldwide by revenue for 7 consecutive years and is among the fastest-growing top enterprise software company with $17.1 billion in revenue in the year 2020.
4. SPI
SPI is an acronym for Smart Passive Income which is runs on a blog and as a podcast.
It was founded by Pat Flynn to help other people create passive-income driven online businesses.
SPI is a company that exists to provide a trusted learning and development ecosystem for online entrepreneurs.
The company has a mission to elevate entrepreneurs to reach their dreams.
SPI empowers its community members to take action towards achieving their goals by providing best-in-class educational content and training experiences.
The company is also into Affiliate marketing, Business Development, Digital Marketing, Online courses, personal development, and so much more.
5. Marie TV
MarieTV is an award-winning weekly show supplying businesses and entrepreneurs with witty and actionable ideas to create the business and life they love.
The show is anchored and run by Marie Forleo who has been dubbed by Oprah as a next-generation Thought Leader.
MarieTV works and caters to people looking to build passionate businesses and lives.
The show also offers a variety of educational materials and her blog offers a variety of courses dedicated to starting an online business you love.
The show has an audience of all ages in 195 countries in the world.
6. Foundr
Foundr is the go-to magazine for inspirational resources if anyone is looking to hear the stories of today’s successful entrepreneurs and learn what they need to be successful.
Foundr is an independently published global media and education company that works with great entrepreneurs of our time and harnesses their stories as an inspiration for their worldwide audience via magazines, blogs, podcasts, and courses.
Foundr has a mission to build a household name entrepreneurial brand that impacts 10’s of millions of entrepreneurs every single week with content as well as bringing true entrepreneurial education to the masses.
The community has at least 250,000+ subscribers in 173 countries around the world, over 1,000,000+ people listening to its podcast, and about 243 entrepreneurs interviewed by Foundr all over the world.
7. Nexon
Nexon is a pioneer when it comes to the world of interactive entertainment software.
The company is an industry leader in Massively Multiple Online Role-playing Game (MMORPG) with more than 80 live games operated across more than 190 countries.
Nexon is headquartered in El Segundo, California, and has been widely credited with unmatched global expertise in sophisticated live game operations, nurturing player communities, and sustaining global titles in the entertainment industry.
The company is responsible for the development of longstanding IP Franchise hits like, Sudden Attack, MapleStory, Dungeon&Fighter, and KArtRider.
Each of their games is tailored to the unique geography in which they are played, which is a big reason their games continue to be played by millions of people around the globe.
8. PokerStars
PokerStars is a community of online poker with the best tournaments and games, using secure deposits, fast withdrawals, and award-winning software.
PokerStars is an online poker cardroom owned by The Stars Group and it is the largest real-money online poker site in the world, controlling over two-thirds of the total online poker market.
According to analysts, the company’s estimated market value was approximately $2billion in 2006.
On December 27, 2007, PokerStars set the world record for the biggest online tournament with an entry fee of $1, and entrants numbering up to 149,196.
The record was broken on December 4, 2011, when 200,000 players played in a $1 buy-in tournament with a first prize of $50,000.
As of the first quarter of 2019, PokerStars was generating about $1,273,144.44 in pure profit per day.
As at 2020, PokerStars generates $2,379,433.33 in Poker, $1,098,977.78 in games, and other areas.
9. Netflix
Hello Movie Lovers!
Netflix Inc. is an American technology and media service provider and production company with its headquarters in Los Gatos, California.
As of April 2020, Netflix had over 193 million paid subscriptions worldwide including 73 million in the United States.
Netflix is the world’s leading streaming entertainment service with over 195 million paid memberships in over 190 countries enjoying TV series, documentaries, and feature films across a wide variety of genres and languages.
Today, Netflix produces and distributes content from countries all over the globe.
10. Bet365
Bet365 began in 2000 with just about 12 employees and today has become the world’s favorite online gambling company with over 53 million customers.
The business employs more than 5,000 people in its global offices.
The company was founded by Denise Coates, a British billionaire businesswoman.
The business initially borrowed 15 million Euros to start up, but as of 2016, Bet365 was one of the world’s largest online gambling companies, with $2 billion in revenues and $45 billion in yearly bets.
11. GoDaddy
GoDaddy Inc. is an American publicly traded Internet domain registrar and web hosting company with its headquarters in Scottsdale, Arizona.
GoDaddy is the world’s largest services platform for entrepreneurs around the world.
The company has a worldwide community of 20+ million customers and entrepreneurs and is committed to giving them the help and tools they need to grow online.
They have helped customers with 80 million+ domain names.
As of June 2020, GoDaddy had more than 20 million customers and over 7,000 employees worldwide.
GoDaddy offers different services to its large customer base, from GoDaddy Auctions, which is its domain marketplace where users can list their domain names for sale or bid on other domain names auctioned by other registrars, to GoValue a domain appraisal tool which shows the average value of any given domain name, to its blog, GoDaddy Garage, the company offers a variety of services to help entrepreneurs create, grow, and scale their businesses online.
12. Slack
Slack is a proprietary business communication platform developed by American software company Slack Technologies.
The business offers many IRC-style features which include Persistent chat rooms, direct messaging, private groups, and a lot more features.
Slack provides mobile apps for ios and Android in addition to their Web browser client and desktop clients for macOS users.
8,000 customers signed up for the service within 24 hours of its launch in August 2013.
In February 2015, the company reported approximately 10,000 new daily active users signing up each week, plus more than 135,000 paying customers spread across 60,000 teams.
By April, these numbers had grown to 200,000 paid subscribers and a total of 750,000 daily active users.
In late 2015, Slack passed 1,000,000 daily active users and as of May 8, 2018, it had passed more than 8,000,000 daily users, 3 million with paid accounts.
To top it off, as of April 26, 2019, Slack reported more than 10 million daily active users from more than 600,000 organizations located in more than 150 countries.
13. Stripe
Stripe is an American financial service and software as a service company with its headquarters in San Francisco, California, United States.
Stripe is a technology company that builds economic infrastructure for the internet.
The company primarily offers payment processing software and application programming interfaces for e-commerce websites and mobile applications.
Stripe combines a payment platform with applications that put revenue data at the heart of business operations.
It is also the world’s fastest advancing developer platform and gives businesses the tools and technology they need to build better.
14. Naver
Naver Corporation is a South Korean development company with its headquarters in Seongnam, South Korea, that operates the search engine Naver.
The company established itself as an early pioneer in the use of user-generated content via the creation of the online Q&A platform, – Knowledge iN.
The company also manages global mobile servicers like the mobile messenger LINE, video messenger Snow, and group communication service BAND.
15. Workday
Workday Inc., is an American on-demand cloud-based financial management and human capital management software, vendor.
The company was founded in March 2005 and offers services in the areas of software, recruiting, and human resources.
In October 2012, the company launched a successful initial public offering that valued the company at $9.5 billion.
In 2020, Fortune magazine ranked workday Inc. at number 5 on their Fortune List of the Top 100 companies to work for in 2020 based on an employee survey of satisfaction.
Francisco Business Times also ranked Workday at number 2 on their Best Places to Work in the Bay in the largest companies’ category.
Conclusion
So these were just some extremely successful businesses to give you motivation for your online business.
Now you have read this article, you know where to go when in search of inspiration.
Hope you found this helpful!
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Anita is a part of Weshare’s writing team. She has social media marketing experience for over 4 years and has been writing in-depth guides and articles about marketing, social media, and online education for the past 7 years.
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