Ah yes, EasyBib (yes, THAT EasyBib). The life-saving site that got me through what must have been thirty STEM-focused research papers in high school, a million “Works Cited” presentation slides, and an incredibly hard ancient Islam class. I recently spoke with Neal Taparia, founder and serial entrepreneur about his journey to EasyBib and beyond. Read more to hear about his career (and the new things he is working on!).
- Her Campus CU Boulder: We’d love to hear more about your background. Why entrepreneurship?
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Neal Taparia: I always like the idea of starting a business and making money. At one point in high school, the air conditioning system broke, and I tried selling handheld fans to classmates as a side hustle. I always got a thrill out of building and convincing people to use my products. I always thought that if I can solve problems, it will lead to good opportunities to make money.
Now that I’ve been an entrepreneur for a number of years now, I love being my own boss, but also the constant learning process of entrepreneurship. You forge your own path, and it’s a tremendous way to learn through experience.
- HCCU: Okay so you actually founded THE EasyBib (thank you, btw). Can you tell us more about the idea behind that?
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NT: When I was in high school in 2001, my friend and I hated doing bibliographies. We were taking computer science classes, and the lightbulb went off. Couldn’t we create software that can make the entire process of creating citations much easier?
We spent two months working after school to create the first version of EasyBib, which would help scrape data and put together bibliographies. Ultimately, we were creating a product we wanted ourselves. It turned out our fellow students and teachers found it just as valuable.
- HCCU: Wait, then you sold the company to THE Chegg? What was it like watching your inkling of an idea transition to an acquired company?
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NT: When we started EasyBib, and the umbrella company behind it, Imagine Easy Solutions, we had no idea where the journey would take us. We were just 16 years old at the time.
Having seen people use EasyBib with enthusiasm though made us realize there is a whole world of opportunity for our ideas. In particular, as students, we thought we could create products that were easy and intuitive for students, hence our corporate name Imagine Easy Solutions.
Only after college, when Easybib had grown to a few million users, did we realize we can turn the company into something much bigger. We left our corporate jobs after just two years to focus on growing the business.
When we hit our first $1M in revenue, it was a mind-blowing achievement. Soon after it was $5M, then $10M, and then $15M in revenue. Each milestone was thrilling, and gave us confidence we were doing the right thing, and should just keep doing whatever we can to grow the business.
By the time we had sold the business in 2016, we had worked on it for 15 years. It was like raising a child and seeing it off to college. It was exciting and bittersweet at the same time because it was a new transition in our career.
- HCCU: From your experience, what were some of the failures you had to overcome that made you a better entrepreneur?
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NT: We learned the hard way the importance of how a great team can super accelerate your efforts. Early on, we made some bad hires, but my business partner and I didn’t have the heart to let them go. We thought it would impact company culture, and we wanted to give people more chances.
Only later did we realize that those people were holding us and our team back, and to be a good operator, it’s important that we retain our best people, and transition out those who don’t bring their A game.
We also invested close to a million dollars building out a research product. We had collected billions of citations, and we thought it would be unique if we turned this data into a search engine. It was a major dud. It turns out, students wanted to research with Google, and we were no better. It taught us to do better customer development and research before investing into product ideas.
Lastly, when we joined Chegg, we had shuttered a business where we sold an institutional version of EasyBib to schools to focus on our direct-to-consumer offerings. By being last focused, we were able to grow that business more than we imagined. It was a major lesson into the importance of thinking big, and dedicating yourself to one thing.
- HCCU: We have to ask…what else are you working on right now?
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NT: We left Chegg about a year ago, and in our research we learned that games can be a great medium for brain training and mental health. We launched Solitaired, as a way to bridge popular and classical games like solitaire to brain training. We’ve been getting good traction, with over 100,000 games played.
- HCCU: Are you going to expand out of solitaire games?
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NT: Yes, the whole goal is to figure out how we can take popular games in general to use them to exercise higher order thinking skills. For example, we just launched FreeCell Challenge, Spider Solitaire Challenge, and Unscramble Words to plant flags in different types of games that we hope to grow over time.
- HCCU: What advice do you have for young entrepreneurs looking to get their start?
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NT: My biggest tip is to fail fast. Every entrepreneur looks through the lens of optimism and believes they can do anything. However, such strong optimism can cloud your judgement and lead to a lot of wasted, precious time. Intentionally find ways and signs to fail fast. If you do, it’s a good learning experience, and you’ll be able to move on to your next idea or iteration. If you don’t fail, then that’s great of course. It means you’re on the right path.
Now that I finally have a face to the name “EasyBib”, I can’t wait to do our next works cited with a whole new appreciation (and I’ll be hopping on to play solitaire ASAP). Thank you again to Neal for sharing your insights with the HC community!