Most times, the path to success can be very long and tiring, which can make some people want to give up. The ability to persevere regardless of every challenge that comes your way is essential in your life as an entrepreneur. However, this ability can be very difficult to develop. This is why listening and reading other peoples’ stories is good; because they inspire you to go on. We understand this; hence, we will share with you a few entrepreneur stories to inspire you.
Before we get on with the storytelling, let’s quickly see who entrepreneurs are.
Who are Entrepreneurs? – Entrepreneurs Stories to Inspire You
Entrepreneurs are people who initiate new things.
They are people who create and organize a business
Entrepreneurs are leaders who are responsible for a business’s growth or failure.
In every business venture, entrepreneurs are the ones with the most significant stake.
They are the brains and directors of a business.
Being an entrepreneur takes a lot.
Entrepreneurs face different challenges and difficulties in their entrepreneurial journey.
This is why they need to develop several skills to help them overcome these challenges and difficulties.
For you to be a great entrepreneur, you will need to be a problem solver, an opportunist, a risk-taker, a self-starter, and an innovative individual.
Furthermore, as an entrepreneur, the weight of your responsibilities might be overwhelming sometimes.
However, you should remember that most good things come from hard work and perseverance, as you’ll soon see in these entrepreneurs we’ll share with you.
19 Success Stories of Different Entrepreneurs – Entrepreneur Stories to Inspire You
The following entrepreneur did not find it easy on their entrepreneurial journey.
They had to sacrifice one thing or the other at one point to achieve their goals.
Most of them made tough decisions.
They did this because they knew what they wanted and pursued it with all they had.
Reading their stories will inspire you and make you believe that you too can achieve success as an entrepreneur.
Here are some entrepreneur stories to inspire you:
Harriet Mills
Harriet Mills took a bold step as a mother with two young children to quit her thriving sales job.
She usually enjoyed going out with friends and doing group painting.
On one of such occasions/fun trips, she discovered the idea for; Wine and Designs.
She wanted a life where she could do what she loved and make money while doing so.
Hence, she launched her business with the brand name Wine and Designs.
It wasn’t an easy journey.
However, she persevered, and Wine and Design now have franchise locations of almost 80 across America that offer various events from corporate get-together to children’s parties.
Andy Puddicombe – Entrepreneur Stories to Inspire You
Andy Puddicombe was in a sports science school when he realized he wanted to do something different.
This realization moved him to live in the Himalayas, where he studied meditation.
Puddicombe became a monk shortly after.
When he returned home, he had an idea to create an app for relaxation and meditation accessible to an extensive range of people.
He created an app called Headspace.
This app helps people to develop a state of mindfulness and also how they practice meditation.
Marybeth Hyland
Marybeth Hyland was abused as a child and passed through several situations that challenged her confidence and self-worth.
Hyland did not allow that to define her and neither did she let it overcome her.
This woman started a company called Spark Vision.
This company aims to assist businesses in building and maintaining thriving office culture.
Her company also offers workshops to enable businesses to grow great connections and collaboration among their workers.
According to her, what she has passed through has helped her in making her company more successful.
Instead of allowing what she went through in the past to put her down, she uses it to create connections with people around her and grow her business.
Eric Yuan – Entrepreneur Stories to Inspire You
Eric Yuan migrated from China to America during the ‘90s.
His purpose was to engage and invest in communication and the internet, which was booming in America.
It took him nine tries before his visa was finally approved.
However, the process took two years before it was finalized.
Yuan worked in Silicon Valley for some years.
Then, in the year 2012, he founded Zoom, a communication platform.
Yuan got the inspiration to create Zoom from his daydream to solve the issue of distances relationships.
Seven hundred fifty thousand businesses now use Zoom to connect their teams through audio and video conferencing, chat, workspace, and others.
Zoom allows several employees to work from home or various office locations and connect /communicate with their colleagues and superiors.
Eric Yuan achieved this because he had a vision and persevered regardless of the challenges he faced.
Howard Panes
Panes happen to be the first person to engage in electronic cigarettes.
He started a company he named Logic.
This company introduced electronic cigarettes to Americans.
He later sold out this company.
After doing that, he launched an Ab product called Steady Body Fitness with Ab Roller inventor Dan Brown.
This generated over one billion sales.
Steady Body Fitness turns your workout into a game on an app.
This makes workout sessions more fun.
Steady Body Fitness has changed the rules of fitness all across the world,
7 years ago, Panes’ life was very different from how it currently is.
He was financially low and was in huge debt.
He had also gone through a horrible divorce.
Things were so bad with him that he had to borrow money from his father to start Logic.
All of these things did not stop Panes from pursuing his goals.
He is now a rich man and a successful entrepreneur.
Frank Kern– Entrepreneur Stories to Inspire You
When it comes to marketing, Kern is known as a legend.
Kern has been very successful in the digital marketing world.
He is among the top best around the world.
This man is the provider of excellent successful systems such as Stomperenet and Mass Control.
At the beginning of his entrepreneurial journey, Kern’s business was disbanded by the Federal Trade Commission.
This would have made some people give up.
However, for Kern, this served as an experience that helped him improve his business method.
Kern’s ability to preserve and work hard made him a successful entrepreneur.
Jack Parsons
Jack Parsons had a very thorny childhood.
He had it worst when it came to schooling.
Parson grew up with a passion to help other young children not to pass through what he did.
He decided to use his experience to make other peoples’ lives better.
When he was 26, he started an organization called The Youth Group.
The organization aims at creating opportunities like professional networking, secure placement, employment, and apprenticeships for young people.
This organization is based in the UK, but it has helped about one million people worldwide.
Grace Beverly – Entrepreneur Stories to Inspire You
Grace Beverly was once a student of the Royal Academy for Music, where she studied Violin.
Beverly planned to become a musician.
However, that changed when her zeal for sustainability lead her to another path.
She went to Harvard Business School and studied Sustainable Business Strategy.
After receiving her certificate, she launched TALA, a sustainable fitness company,
Her company aims at providing people of different body sizes and shapes with fitness wear.
Richard Branson
Richard Branson is the founder of Virgin Group
He began his entrepreneurial journey in high school when he launched a magazine for students.
It was a side hustle that became quite popular.
The success of this venture boosted his confidence that he was forced to take on the business full-time.
Branson expanded his businesses and engaged in delivery and retail service.
He needed a warehouse space to store his product, so he used his garage and basement.
The business continued growing and expanding till it became a conglomerate.
Jan Koum – Entrepreneur Stories to Inspire You
Koum was born a Ukrainian.
The main location of his birth was in a rural community near Kyiv in Ukraine.
However, when Koum was a young boy, his family moved from Ukraine to California, seeking a better life.
He loved computers, so he spent his free time studying computers and developing great tech skills.
At age 18, Koum’s tech skills had developed impressively.
Yahoo employed him to work as an engineer.
Koum worked in the company for a decade and left when he realized he had great potentials in developing apps.
During the world economic crisis in 2008, he focused on creating an app.
In the year 2009, he launched his app that he called WhatsApp.
After five years, WhatsApp became a huge success, and Koum sold it at the rate of 19 billion dollars to Facebook.
Michael Dell
Michael Dell is the CEO and founder of Dell Technologies.
He started his tech corporation in his garage.
Dell started his business venture by upgrading the personal computers of people in his neighborhood.
He did this while he was in college.
In 1985 he left school and invested all his time in his business.
After a year, his company started yielding profit.
This led him to build his computer company which we all know now.
Jeff Bezos – Entrepreneur Stories to Inspire You
Jeff Bezos is the owner and founder of Amazon.
Bezos started Amazon as a bookstore that operated online.
He wanted to name the business Cadabra, but he later changed his mind and named it Amazon.
Amazon made its first sale a year after it was established.
His idea to start Amazon came when he realized the potentials of the internet.
In 1994, he resigned from his job at Wall Street and started his business in a garage.
After a year, he moved his business to his house.
In 1997 he launched his first test site.
He expanded his company in the year 1998 by engaging in the sales of videos and music online.
Now, Amazon is a globally recognized and successful online store.
Mike Stemple
Mike was in a near car accident that resulted in amnesia and caused unusual damage to his brain.
This damage somehow unlocked the creative aspect of his brain.
He was able to teach himself coding, which made him a success in tech startups.
Mike Stemple is now a founder of 20 thriving companies.
His recent business ventures are SkinIt and Inspirer.
To show you how successful his ventures are, SkinIt has grown in three years and is valued at the rate of 100 million dollars.
This is a story that causes great inspiration.
Mike was able to turn something sad into greatness.
Sophia Amoruso – Entrepreneur Stories to Inspire You
When Amoruso was a young child, a doctor diagnosed her with ADHD because she was not doing well in school.
Consequently, she was withdrawn from school.
She started working odd jobs at a young age.
Amoruso relocated to a different city shortly after her father and mother got divorced.
While she lived there, she was financially low.
Instead of working, Amoruso spent her time stealing and hitchhiking.
In the year 2006, she decided to put her life back in order and started working.
Amoruso started trading vintage clothes on eBay.
She named her brand Nasty Gal Vintage.
At first, the growth of the business venture was very slow, but this did not discourage her.
In the year 2008, her venture grew and started making great profits.
By 2011, the profits were estimated to be about 23 million dollars.
15. Kevin Plank
Plank was a football player in college.
He intensely disliked how the cotton shirt football uniform clung to his skin when he sweats while playing football.
He figured he had to do something about it if he wanted to enjoy playing football for his college.
So, he went ahead to take action.
What Plank did was that he worked on creating a shirt that will not absorb sweat.
He did this as a side project while he took classes and go for football practice.
In the year 1996, Plank succeeded in creating a prototype shirt with a synthetic base layer.
After his graduation, Plank realized that he had a business already.
So he started operating a company, ‘Under Amour,’ from his grandmother’s basement.
He had a breakthrough when his product ‘Under Amour ‘was requested by (NFL) National Football League players.
Sara Blakely – Entrepreneur Stories to Inspire You
Sara Blakely was a 27 years old saleswoman who went from house to house selling fax machines.
Pantyhose were one of the things she had to wear while going for sales.
As much as she appreciated how the pantyhose was tight and complimented her shape, she was not happy with how her pantyhose feet looked in her open-toe footwear.
One time she experimented on her uniform by cutting off the feet of her pantyhose.
She wore these newly experimented pantyhose under slacks.
This new fashion turned out fine.
Blakely realized she could make this new fashion an excellent business venture.
However, she knew she still had to work on it.
She started using her free time to build up this new fashion while she kept working.
Blakely was able to launch her prototype and became a full-time entrepreneur.
She called her business Spanx.
Today, Spanx is a big business that deals in various shapewear for both males and females.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo
Sheila was a young mother of two children who needed assistance in caring for her children and her aging parent.
The stress of taking care of her children and parent while working was telling on her.
She desired to start a business for people like her who need assistance caring for their loved ones.
In 2006 she started her business that she called Care.com.
The company has grown in recent times to become a popular company in the Caretaking industry.
Care.com now has a large database of qualified caregivers who help take care of clients and their loved ones while they go about their business.
Jack Dorsey – – Entrepreneur Stories to Inspire You
Jack is the founder and creator of Twitter.
He had the idea to create Twitter while a web designer at Ode, a podcasting company.
Dorsey put in a lot of energy and time in developing Twitter while he continued working in Ode.
At first, he saw Twitter only as a means to communicate and chat with loved ones and friends on a computer desktop.
In 2006, he realized that it could be more than that, so he expanded and made the first
variation of Twitter as a social media platform.
Oprah Winfrey
The story of this woman is very inspiring.
Her mother had her when she was a teenager and was not able to provide for her financially.
Winfrey was abused as a young child and repeatedly raped.
She ran away from home when she was still young to put an end to the abuse.
Things did not get better after running away from home because, at age 14, she got pregnant.
Her baby boy died as an infant.
Things were still hard for her until she was able to secure a job in a radio station.
At age 19, she got a gig to anchor evening news at a local station.
From there, she started a talk show which became known nationwide.
Oprah Winfrey succeeded in building a media empire for herself.
She worked to become great despite all she went through.
Conclusion on Entrepreneur Stories to Inspire You
No matter where you are in your entrepreneurial journey, you have to believe that you, too, can make it.
The entrepreneurs who became successful did not become successful overnight.
They pushed and moved on regardless of the different challenges they encountered.
These entrepreneurs overcame challenges because they had a clear vision and a solid desire to actualize it.
Do not let what you passed through in the past or what is said about you define you.
You also can be a winner like Marybeth Hyland, Eric Yuan, Harriet Mills, and the rest.
Let these entrepreneur stories inspire you.
Chin up and work hard to actualize your goals.
