BizSugar.com › User › timjahn › Submitted

With rentals available in over 7,800 cities and over 160 countries, Airbnb sounds like an overnight success. Turns out, it was anything but. Nathan Blecharczyk and his two fellow co-founders launched Airbnb two separate times but didn’t gain much critical mass. The third time, the stars aligned a Read More

Adam Weinstein used to travel a lot and never remember to send family members cards for their birthdays and such. He thought it’d be a great idea to create a place online for people to go to write greeting cards and schedule them to be sent at a later date.

When he worked at an email marketing s Read More

Several months ago, Jill Felska and Jenn Korducki quit their jobs at a large PR agency in Chicago and started their own social media branding and management company. They decided “to enter the grad school of life” and learn the intricacies of business by simply doing it.

These two bright women a Read More

I listened to a conversation the other day that went something like this:

Person A: “I heard she retired from coaching.”
Person B: “No way. She’s not old enough to retire…”
Person A: “Yeah, I think she’s retired now.”
Person B: “She’s like 42, she’s definitely not old enough to retire!”

Th Read More

For the entire 12 years that Mike Lapchick owned his marketing company, there was one giant problem that was always getting in the way: there was no consistent way to exchange product images with the manufacturers and retailers he worked with.

He came across a few solutions to the problem from t Read More

Jonathan Pasky is an IP lawyer and one of the three guys behind Midventures, a Chicago technology consulting firm. A few months ago, they threw an event called midVentures25, which was a startup demo day.

When the response was greater than they expected, Jonathan and team decided to step it up a Read More

Dave Miller is a producer, writer, and director who, in addition to writing, producing, and directing feature length movies, owns his own production company. As Dave and I got to chatting, I realized many of his lessons from being a filmmaker could apply to creative entrepreneurs looking to start Read More

For Jason Kintzler, PitchEngine was one of those ideas that just wouldn't go away. The idea consumed him so much, he went to an agency and asked how much it would cost to build his idea. Unfortunately, the down payment for the project was a bit more than Jason could swing at the time.

How did Read More

Chris Wanstrath is the co-founder of GitHub, a website that provides a place for developers to collaborate on projects together. His company is profitable and 100% bootstrapped – no VC money at all. He didn’t set out to create GitHub from day one. He had plenty of other ideas prior to GitHub.

Read More

Kris Peterson was simultaneously training for the Chicago marathon and buying tons of Groupons. He couldn’t use all the Groupons he was buying and ended up losing the money he spent on them. He thought there had to be a secondary market to sell his unused deals. But there wasn’t. So Kris created on Read More