Texts From Last Night

Ben Bator and Lauren Leto, creators of the newly famous website Texts From Last Night (TFLN), were just a couple of average college students two years ago. In just a few years they have created a company, hit website, a book, iPhone application, and a television deal with FOX. The idea for TFLN came about when Ben and Lauren would both forward text messages they had received from friends to their other friends. After realizing how hilarious text messages out of context can be, they decided to make an online website to list them all. They showed the website to a few close friends, and then their friends had forwarded it to others. After getting a lot of positive feedback about the website, they had paid someone $200 to redo the design for the TFLN site. Just like any young entrepreneurs, Ben and Lauren knew they had to take a chance on this website. Lauren who was originally in law school, and Ben who was planning on applying to law school, had both decided to drop out and pursue their TFLN website. Now they are young and successful entrepreneurs, and marketing TFLN to the fullest.
To be completely honest, I didn't really find their success story that interesting. When it came to representing themselves as founders of a company, in my opinion, they didn't do a very good job at being inspiring entrepreneurs. Their success mostly just came from an idea that happened just by chance, and is now continuously fueled by the general public. It just goes to show that even the most simplest things, such as a funny text message, can turn into a phenomenon. The internet has become this world that doesn't physically exist, but people can create something successful from it, another example being Facebook. TFLN and Facebook are two websites that don't actually provide anything beneficial except entertainment and/or laughter, but our generation has become obsessed with them. Ben Bator had mentioned that the best way to gain success is to take a simple yet original idea and market it in the cheapest way possible. It seems our society has become consumed with the "get rich quick" idea. This is mostly because so many people have had success with it in the past, and will try to ride out their success as long as they can. TFLN is currently in it's prime of success, and I guess we'll just have to wait and see how long it will go on for until something else comes along.