Interview with young entrepreneur Stacey Ferreira on starting her business mySocialCloud.
This is part two of the ten part series. Follow the Starting a Business as a Young Entrepreneur interview series and don’t miss an interview!
Interview Series Sponsored by Hiscox Small Business Insurance. Hiscox specializes in protecting IT/technology, marketing, consulting, health and beauty, photography and many other professional services businesses, tailoring coverage to the specific risks in your industry.
As Stacey Ferreira said during our interview, “It stands out when people are young and doing amazing things.” She stated that being a young entrepreneur is an advantage, and she has certainly taken advantage of every opportunity that has presented itself.
Twenty year-old Stacey Ferreira was just 18 when she and her brother Scott scraped together $2,000 each for a chance to meet face to face with Sir Richard Branson at a cocktail event for charity. They found out about the opportunity through a Twitter post, and the rest is history. Two months after the meeting, their startup mySocialCloud received approximately one million in seed funding from Richard Branson, Jerry Murdock from Insight Venture Partners, and entrepreneur Alex Welch.
This rare and extremely unlikely entrepreneurial success story would not have happened if it wasn’t for one significant mishap. Scott Ferreira managed his massive number of account passwords through a spreadsheet. From email log-ins to school related passwords, Scott lost everything due to a computer crash. Scott was left password-less, troubled, and with a need to find an easy solution for this annoying problem. The idea for mySocialCloud was born.
The brother and sister moved out to Los Angeles to work closely with co-founder Shiv Prakash, who was attending USC at the time.
MySocialCloud wasn’t the first company of its kind in the marketplace, but their focus and strategy set them apart from the competition. Unlike competitors, they offered a free model, and focused their product on serving a market they knew very well – college students. Not only was the price right for their target market (free) – there are few demographics that have to manage as many passwords as a college student. Stacey credits their growth and success to college campuses and word of mouth.
MySocialCloud was recently acquired by Reputation.com.
Stacey has already accomplished a great deal in her career at the age of 20, but this won’t be the last time you hear about her in the business world. Stacey studied music business for one year at New York University and remains extremely passionate about that industry. “I haven’t had a chance to do anything in the music industry in my career. That’s definitely one area that I want to explore, and hopefully start a company in that space.”
Q: Is starting a business at a young age an advantage or disadvantage?
A: “For the most part I would air on the side of it’s an advantage to start a business when you’re young. You haven’t had all of the experience that other people have – you’re not as jaded as some other people might be when you’re starting out. You’re hungry to try anything and everything no matter what people say.”
Want more? Listen to the full interview audio with Stacey Ferreira below!
Interview Highlights
– How the company has successfully grown, which led to being recently acquired by Reputation.com.
– Why the company stayed away from a social bookmarking feature despite being requested by many of their users.
– Biggest challenge: Focus
– “There are lots of ways with social media that your business can be attacked by people online …one of the best thing that you can do is to keep on top of your customer service and make sure that your customers are getting a good experience, no matter what your business is.”
– “There are a lot of people that are scared to take an opportunity. Go out and do. Treat everything as an opportunity.”
Listen to the full interview here:
[powerpress]
