Gain Expertise in Your Areas of Interest to Fuel Success

For many Founders and Entrepreneurs, their success came from Deep-rooted expertise in their areas of Interest. Their expertise had them create side hustles that turned into full blow Billion $ businesses.

Gmail, for example, started as an email search engine, and it worked better than others. Rest, as they say, is History.

How many people do you know that don’t have a Gmail account? And come to think of it, I find it easier to search emails in Gmail than Hotmail or any other provider. So there’s something to be said about expertise.

When you build a functional product that’s exceptional at its core offering, you’re brewing a recipe for potential greatness.

Speaking of Email providers, let's look at Hotmail Outlook, shall we?

The developer, Jack Smith and Sabeer Bhatia, were Apple employees and wanted to discuss potential business ideas while still @ work; however, they did not want to use their work emails for obvious reasons.

Also, their private email access was barred too. So, what do you think they did?

Well, being experts in their fields, they started coding an email service provider that can be accessed from anywhere in the world without having to be linked to an internet service provider. And that was the birth of Hotmail.

Here’s a secret, you don’t have to be that experienced to be an expert.

The VR behemoth that it is today. VR headsets existed much before Oculus came in and took over the market by storm.

Many attempts were made to commercialize them in the ’80s and ’90s, too; however, little to no success was achieved.

Palmer Luckey was passionate about VR headsets and an avid collector of headsets from his teenage years. Collecting them and obsessing over them in his parent's garage.

Luckey was frustrated with the inadequacy of existing head-mounted displays in the market, which suffered from low contrast, high latency, low field-of-view, high cost, and extreme bulk and weight.

In response, he started experimenting with his designs in 2009. He completed his prototype, PR1, at age 17 in his parent's garage in 2010, featuring a 90-degree field of view, low latency, and built-in haptic feedback.

Luckey developed a series of prototypes exploring features like 3D stereoscopy, wireless, and extreme 270-degree field-of-view, while also decreasing the size and weight of his systems.

He shared regular updates on his progress on MTBS3D, a forum frequented by many virtual reality enthusiasts.

His 6th-generation unit was named the "Rift" intended to be sold to fellow enthusiasts as a do-it-yourself kit on Kickstarter crowdfunding Web site.

He launched Oculus VR in April 2012 to facilitate the official launch of the Kickstarter campaign.

The Kickstarter campaign raised US$2.4 million, 974% of its original target. After raising more than one million dollars, Brendan Iribe was hired by Luckey in August 2012 to be CEO of Oculus.

Oculus VR was acquired by Facebook in March 2014 for US$3 billion. Although Luckey's share was not made public, Forbes magazine estimated the founder's net worth to be $700 million in 2015.

As Bill Gates puts it: "Be nice to nerds; chances are you’ll end up working for one."

So, you don't necessarily need experience; creative curiosity and a bit of obsession goes a long way too.

If you want to learn more about how to launch a startup, please check out my online course here.