Christos Pittis - Udemy Premium Educator, Entrepreneur, Business & Tech

- Tell us about your current business.

Alex Genadinik - Mobile app entrepreneur, marketer

- Sure, so my current business is problemio.com, we create tools and education material for entrepreneurs, and these are mobile apps, books, online courses, and YouTube presence, and other smaller platforms that we are present on. To date, the company has influenced over 1 million people, almost 2 million entrepreneurs that have, one way or another, come in contact with either our tools or our educational materials.

Doros Kyriakoulis - GoKey founder

- I wanted to do something with connected devices. I saw this “maker’s revolution” happening a few years ago with sites like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo. I got really intrigued by these new [developments]. I was perusing another idea before I got the one for the goKey. It didn’t really stick, I didn’t really seem to get it off the ground and get the people here – the team, the funding. One day, I had the idea of GoKey and I just [pursued it] and knew I was onto something. I just followed this one thing, and here I am.

Chase Hughes - Entrepreneur and Consultant

- It started back as soon as I was a freshman in my undergraduate. I did not have a lot of capital and I did not have a lot of contacts, so I started doing things for free for people so that I could get good experience within the business advisory sector. That’s where you can really leverage your own skills to make money and then eventually start hiring people and focus more on the marketing side. I did good work with these individuals and specialized at that time in marketing analytics to improve website performance based on user interaction on the website. Through referrals within people in their individual networks, I was able to grow the business through that method. Later I added additional functions with employees – this was over a 5 year period.

Christopher Jonet - Entrepreneur

- Archery has been a passion of mine since I was very young. I got a bow for Christmas one year when I was about 10 years old; it’s just been a natural thing for me. I started target shooting, then I got involved in the hunting industry, and [my passion has] been growing ever since. There are many people in the archery industry that have been my heroes like Fred Bear, Howard Hill, even Robin Hood. People don’t think that Robin Hood existed, but he actually did. There are direct descendants from him that live in England. It’s been a real big passion of mine.

Jerry Banfield - Entrepreneur online and Udemy Instructor

- I originally started my business on helping people with video game addiction because that’s something I personally felt I struggled with. I treated my business as an attempt to replace my existing passion with something new, and to replace it with a passion of helping people. Before I started my business, my main passion was playing video games, and often drinking while playing video games. I started my business in hopes that I could have a passion that was more helpful to other people than [video games].

I started it with video game addiction, and the more effort I put into helping people with video game addiction, I soon realized what a limited scope I had helping people with [that subject]. I kept trying to find ways to make money with my passion, my hobby, my business. Soon, I ended up figuring out that people really needed help with Facebook especially - internet marketing and online advertising more generally. I learned these things myself in my struggle to do better with promoting my video game addiction business first and then trying to sell t-shirts related to that. And then, I found that if I learned it myself, I could then get paid really well to help others. That’s how I started my business; it’s funny to see that the only thing which remains out of what I started with is my desire to help people. I finally have successfully replaced the main thing I do in my life, as in video games and drinking – I’ve finally replaced those with the work I do online.

Stylianos Lambrou - Serial Entrepreneur

- When I was 19 years old, I was still in the army; while I was there, I decide to travel less, and start my own business. It was called the village express, it was a website where I promoted the villages of Cyprus. I just took a camera and went around Cyprus and captured the villages for virtual tours. In 6 months, I managed to have 100 villages as customers. It was an amazing experience because I had to convince people who were 60 - 70 years old to buy a service to promote their villages on the internet. They didn’t even know what the internet was all about. I managed to get a hundred customers – a hundred villages – and I was promoting them online.

This was my first venture and, to be honest, had the biggest luck. I funded this project by going to my parents and asking them to give me 3,000 euro. With just 3,000 euros, I managed to create a company which generated 30 to 40 thousand euro a year. With this startup, I managed to finance my university studies in London at UCL where I studied information technology. During my second year at UCL, I decided to start my second startup.

There was a financial crisis in Cyprus, so we started Heart Cyprus. Millions of people were leaving the country due to events two years ago. My sister and I decided to start a company and sell t-shirts with our logo saying “Cyprus, where my heart belongs” to our community of 150,000. In 5 days, we managed to sell 500 t-shirts in 30 different countries, and we raised 5,000 euros which we gave to families in need. At that time, Cyprus was in a really bad situation, and there was a negative image of Cyprus. German and French newspapers were writing about how the young generation can improve Cyprus, and can move Cyprus forward. This is what entrepreneurs do.

During the crisis, we saw not only the dangers but also the opportunities, and we said “I’m going to do it” and we took the risk, we bought the t-shirts, and in 5 days we managed to sell all of them. That’s how Heart Cyprus started. Currently, we employ over 15 people. We offer 65,000 euro scholarships to people who study in Cyprus. Our logo was even tattooed twice on people. In social media we have over 2 million people that we reach with our posts.

In addition, I believe that we are not all about making money, but also about giving back to society, and that’s why we also crowdfunded. We managed to get 20,000 dollars for our Olympic medalist, where other organizations couldn’t support it. For me, the most important thing is that we are not only promoting Cyprus, improving the image of Cyprus, but at the same time, we offer back to the society. My biggest achievement has been during these hard times, to employ people, and especially young people. Our oldest person here is 29 years old, and for me that’s amazing.

My third business began when I was in the third year of university, I had to do a dissertation. While I was thinking about the topic for my dissertation, I decided to actually create that idea which was actually to connect travelers on the same airports and flights. When I decided to go to the U.S. and look for funding, everyone was thinking I was crazy and they don’t believe in me. You know entrepreneurs, they are often misunderstood, and that’s OK. The best thing is actually listen to your heart and instincts and just do it.

I decided to book a ticket to San Francisco, it was absolutely an amazing experience. We managed to meet with amazing people, and after 2 months after my visit there, I managed to raise 100,000 dollars in capital investment. This money was used to create my product and right now, we are raising more money and we are innovating the way people travel.