photo credit: nanpalmero

LinkedIn is a social networking website for professionals – and definitely one of its kinds. It has over 60 million members stemming from 200 countries and 150 industries and is still on the path of growing rapidly. The professional networking website connects you to your trusted contacts and also helps you exchange ideas, knowledge and opportunities with a broader network of professionals around the world.

It has a three dimensional revenue model:

1.Upgraded Accounts: Business, Business Plus and Pro accounts provide extra features including lists of who has searched for you and your company.

2.Hiring Services

3.Advertising on LinkedIn – (the largest source of revenue)

LinkedIn was founded in late 2002 by Reid Hoffman, headquartered in Mountain View, California. Last year it recorded the most successful quarter as well. In just six years, the company has become one of the most successful one’s in Silicon Valley and a brand recognized throughout the corporate world. It started recording profits since 2006, and the company’s present value is more than $1 billion.

Impressive, isn’t it? And what is more impressive is the successful startup story behind it;

Reid Hoffman, a Stanford graduate, realized the importance of forming networks and leveraging them when it comes business or work. The entrepreneur is an active investor, funding over 60 startups in Silicon Valley, including Facebook. Hoffman took the decision of leaving his academic life at Oxford behind and returning to Silicon Valley in the 1990’s to pursue his dream of starting a software company, a decision he wouldn’t ever regret.

He landed a Job at Apple (which was his first job) and moved on to working with Fujitsu. After this he jumped into the online and social networking market by opening his first company – Socialnet. The company wasn’t successful and Hoffman accepts that many mistakes were committed and the most devastating one was not having a proper product distribution strategy – how will you get users to come to your website.

Hoffman decided to leave Socialnet and started working with Pay Pal. It was during his work at Pay Pal he learned that the work culture was changing – you can’t do everything on your own, it’s practically impossible and that is when you need specialists and that is how you learn. After leaving his job at Pay Pal, he decided to start LinkedIn and he was really interested in the professional space and how professionals connect with one another. The initial financing was from savings of his previous job at Pay Pal.

He followed a simple policy of first getting users engaged into your product/service and then forming a business model. The company now has three successful revenue models (mentioned above) and is also a Fortunes 500 company.

To get more insight to the story we suggest you visit cnnmoney.com

Willing to take risks, learning from every experience, dedication and never quitting is what made LinkedIn what it is now. Every startup starts business on a small scale but a good entrepreneur will always have a vision to make it grow through successful business models.

Even though we had cash in the bank, we decided to have more cash in the bank. One of the things we need to do is find really cool products. We're building some but we'd also like to broaden out our offering and buy a cool product with a good development team and add it into the service. That's why we went through the process of raising money last year.