Juliet Brindak's website for girls, MissOandFriends.com, gets more traffic than Barbie, Hello Kitty and Girl Scouts. (Photo Credit: CC BY/Salahudeen Olawale /Pro Entrepreneur Diary)
The spirit of entrepreneurship is alive and well in America, thanks to motivated young women like Juliette Brindak. According to CollegeNews.com, Brindak’s online network for girls called Miss O and Friends is currently valued at $15 million. What began as a series of drawings of young female characters when Juliette Brindak was 10 years old is now an online and print media empire.
Juliette Brindak got her family involved
Once people began to tell young Juliette Brindak that they liked her drawings, she got her family in on the act. The characters soon began to take on a life of their own. Young entrepreneur Brindak’s idea to start MissOandFriends.com came when she saw what her older sister faced at 13:
“Girls can be mean. Boys come into the picture, and school starts to get important. It’s just really stressful. I thought, ‘We should really start doing something for these girls’.”
MissOandFriends.com launched in 2005
On MissOandFriends.com, young girls can interact with their peers, seek advice and play games. Essentially, it’s a social network for girls. Behind the scenes, Juliette Brindak employs more than 30 people, including interns, a webmaster, a lawyer, psychologist and even her parents, reports CollegeNews.com. This tight network of employees helps provide a safe, secure and inviting place where teen girls can build their self-esteem. Popularity and fitting in matter less than the quality time users can spend together conversing about their worries and dreams.
A dream the competition is chasing
Little did Juliette Brindak know that her dream would draw an investment from Procter & Gamble in 2008 and that her site would be valued at $15 million. Miss O and Friends is now so popular that it developed into a book deal. Currently, 120,000 copies have sold, according to Juliette Brindak’s estimates. MissOandFriends.com is doing so well that Alexa traffic data indicates that the website has more visitors than websites for Barbie, Hello Kitty and the Girl Scouts, writes Pro Entrepreneur Diary. MissOandFriends.com also appears on more than 7,000 classroom websites across the U.S., and its “Kids Counsel” column is syndicated worldwide by McClatchy-Tribune.
Sources
Juliette Brindak interviewed at 14 on NBC Channel 4 in NYC
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