College Entrepreneur Alan Schaaf : ImgUr Founder

Posted on 31. Mar, 2010 by Vivek Krishnan in Internet Entrepreneurs

Many people want to become an internet entrepreneur, but here is an eye-opener on how to really become one!

This post is all about the inspirational college entrepreneur Alan Schaaf (21-years old). Alan Schaaf is a budding internet entrepreneur – he is the owner of one of the most popular image hosting sites – imgur.com. Alan Schaaf is a Ohio University who is in his senior year currently.

I am sure that you have heard of imgur.com, it is the image hosting website which has tinyPic, Imageshack, and Photobucket biting dust. Alan Schaaf decided to become an internet entrepreneur when he was left with free time after his college classes. Alan Schaaf started imgur.com while he was in the middle of his junior year and by the time he reached his senior year – imgur had grown into a brand name and most visitors would think that it is a money-making conglomerate.

Imgur – like most venture startups was born out of a need. In Alan Schaaf’s own words:

I guess I picked an image host because, in my opinion, the existing ones were really lacking in some key features and functionality and I knew that I could do a better job. It also seemed like they didn’t care about the images they hosted or their customers, taking down images randomly and putting bandwidth caps on specific high traffic sites such as reddit. I think they real kicker was when TinyPIC started redirecting everyone coming from reddit to their slow ad-ridden pages, and half the time it would just take you to their homepage. There had to be a better option, and I wanted to provide it.

Most people would think that Imgur would have required a lot of venture capital but as a fact of matter, the initial investment was only $7 for the domain name. Alan already had a cheap hosting service, however, that account was deleted as his site began to generate mammoth traffic. Imgur.com sits comfortably in the top 500 of Alexa rankings.

However, many people would be surprised at the business concept Alan uses in Imgur. Currently, his site imgur.com creates no money at all. It is in a break-even state right now. He claims that he is currently more focused on making imgur.com even better and does not want to focus on the money making aspect.

You should also know that they were no coders hired or any kind of programming from outside – the whole idea was conceived and implemented by Alan Schaaf.

Here is a peep into the stats of Imgur.com:

6,020,551 Visits

• 13,930,592 Pageviews

• 2.31 Pages/Visit

• 62.68% Bounce Rate

• 00:03:29 Avg. Time on Site

• 24.93% %New Visits

• 280,208,079 Image Views

• 222,993 Images Uploaded

• 168.34 KB Average Image Size

• 35.03 TB Data Transferred

I am sure that it is a little intimidating but that is the kind of impact an entrepreneurial genius can have on the internet world. Most big-shot image hosts have been left way back in the competition. After all, Imgur is a minimilastic, “almost” ad-free and most simplistic interface for hosting your images.

If you want to know what this under-grad has plans after his college, here is what he says:

I’m not exactly sure how right now, but I know I can do it. People ask me to join their start-ups all the time, but I just want to work on Imgur, move to California and buy a sailboat. You can totally come party on my sailboat..

You can vist his home page here.

Tags: Alan Schaaf, College Entrepreneur, Image Hosting, ImgUr, Internet Business, Internet Entrepreneur, Internet Startup