How Entering A Twitter Contest Led To A $1 Million Investment

Most entrepreneurs don’t spend their free-time entering Twitter contests, but maybe they should. When Stacey, 20, and Scott Ferreira, 18, responded to Sir Richard Branson’s Twitter contest, the two entrepreneurs never could have guessed how their 140-character entry would change their life and their startup‘s course forever. Branson’s contest called for users to donate to charity and tweet about it for a chance to meet him in Miami for the 25th Anniversary of Virgin Atlantic. On a whim, the brother-sister team entered and, just like something-out of every founder’s dream, they won. The next thing they knew they were being flown to Miami to spend time with easily one the most influential entrepernurs of our lifetime. “I responded to the Tweet and my brother and I were able to spend two days in Miami at two parties with Sir Richard Branson. We were able to talk over the course of the two days and soak up all his knowledge,” said Stacey. Returning to their home in Los Angeles, the Ferreiras kept in contact with their new-found media-mogul pal, updating him on the progress of MySocialCloud, a startup they had been working on with friend and fellow co-founder, Shiv Prakash. MySocialCloud is a service that combines digital bookmarking and password management in hopes of being a centralized hub of a user’s online activity. Branson was impressed with the the ambitious duo and introduced them to friend and Flipboard Investor, Jerry Murdock. Together Branson and Murdock decided to invest just under $1M together in August of 2011. “Shiv, Scott, and I all went out to dinner with Jerry Murdock in California. I remember us sitting in the car after the dinner ecstatic. The whole story seemed almost surreal since it all was really about preparation meets extremely great timing.” Murdock also introduced the team to Alex Welch of Photobucket who also decided to invest and act as a mentor for the young team. With Welch as a mentor, the team has expanded to nine people and continued to build their product. While still in beta, MySocialCloud has 35,000 bookmarks saved by users, 5,000 autologins per week, and hundreds of shares happening everyday. Stacey says there are several new features in the pipeline and as for the future, she sees MySocialCloud becoming the central hub of a user’s online information. Image via: The Telegraph