This young woman from Perth believes that the secret to her success was NOT having any experience. Melanie Perkins was a 19-year-old university student when she started her first company.
She grew her yearbook design software company Fusion Yearbooks from the couch in her mother’s living room, and it was so successful she ended up dropping out of university and never going back.
Now 28, Ms Perkins has since founded another multi-million dollar graphic design company that employs 70 people whom she feeds a chef-prepared lunch every day.
Ms Perkins, wasn’t even studying graphic design at university but she fell in love with it during a first-year subject in digital media.
She learned quickly, and worked so hard in class assessments, that she was invited to teach graphic design workshops to students in other faculties.
The software she was teaching was a bit awkward she found most people struggled to pick it up.
But instead of getting frustrated, she got a business idea. “It was really complex and difficult, and it would take the entire semester to just learn where the buttons were on the software,” Ms Perkins told Daily Mail Australia.
At the same time Facebook was taking off, and it was so easy to use and everyone was on it.
The company now employs 70 people in Sydney and the Philippines, and their jobs come with a range of perks
“When we got our first $100 cheque, it was the most exciting moment ever, knowing people were prepared to pay for what we had built,” Ms Perkins told Daily Mail.
“We never took on external financing but we kept putting every cent back into the business.” They sold to 15 schools in their first year, 30 in their second and 80 in their third.
One year later, Ms Perkins and her boyfriend Cliff Obrecht went to the Innovator of the Year awards in Perth to present Fusion Yearbooks. There she had a short but fateful conversation with MaiTai founder and San Francisco investor Bill Tai.
“He was the first investor I’d met who had insights into the whole world of technology and venture capital. It was a window to another world,” she said. (Daily Mail Australia)