Unlike most recent college grads, Joe Aigboboh does not have a Facebook account. But Aigboboh, 22, and his business partner, Jesse Tevelow, 24, are now among the world’s reigning experts on the Facebook platform—thanks to the popularity of one Facebook application, called Sticky Notes, that took Aigboboh less than a week to write.
They set up shop here, in the freshly painted basement of a dilapidated West Philly row house, a few weeks ago. Almost daily they get calls from Facebook-frenzied companies scrambling to stake their claim on the platform, offering them paid consulting gigs, development projects, full-time jobs. But now that their four-month-old company, J-Squared Media, is pulling in $45,000 a month in advertising revenues from Facebook, they’ve decided to focus on building their own applications instead.
Facebook Feeding Frenzy
Last month a privately held media company made a formal acquisition offer worth more than $3 million; following in the footsteps of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, J-Squared turned it down. One reason? As with the deal that Condé Nast made for the social-news site Reddit last year, working for the acquiring company would have been a term of the proposed agreement. And for the J-Squared founders, becoming two more anonymous product managers didn’t hold much appeal—not if they could do something bigger.
Source: BusinessWeek