What motivates you?

What moti­vates you? Sur­pris­ingly, not many people have an answer to this ques­tion. That’s why Lars King,DMSB’17, has devel­oped Year of Moti­va­tion, a year­long sub­scrip­tion ser­vice that delivers short moti­va­tional videos to your inbox every morning.

“People pay hun­dreds of dol­lars to see moti­va­tional speakers that help them stay moti­vated for a week, and then they’re back to where they started,” said King, a dual major in entre­pre­neur­ship and mar­keting. “But what if they could get a few min­utes of moti­va­tion every single morning that gets them going and excited?”

So that’s exactly what he did. For less than a dime a day, sub­scribers can watch daily moti­va­tional, inspi­ra­tional, and infor­ma­tional videos that have been hand­picked by King. To curate these videos, he searched the web for the biggest players in this genre based on views, likes, and sub­scribers. From there he selected the best, most effec­tive videos.

And evi­dence shows that this ser­vice is in demand—Year of Moti­va­tion launched at the start of this year, but King has already made hun­dreds of dol­lars in profits. “I would encourage everyone to think about Internet mar­keting and online business—it’s where a lot of busi­ness is headed,” said King. “It’s easy, cost-​​effective, and you can gain invalu­able experience.”

Year of Moti­va­tion is King’s first offi­cial foray into starting an online busi­ness, but he’s hardly new to the entre­pre­neur­ship game. He’s started mul­tiple small busi­nesses throughout his life, and is cur­rently on co-​​op in the busi­ness devel­op­ment depart­ment of Mass­Chal­lenge, an annual global startup com­pe­ti­tion and accel­er­ator pro­gram for entre­pre­neurs. There, he is respon­sible for coor­di­nating with spon­sors to make sure that the non­profit orga­ni­za­tion has the funding nec­es­sary to operate and com­pen­sate com­pe­ti­tion winners.

The chance to work with an estab­lished accel­er­ator such as Mass­Chal­lenge has granted him the oppor­tu­nity to get reg­ular expo­sure to the dos and don’ts of launching a venture.

“I want to expose Year of Moti­va­tion to people who read moti­va­tional blogs and struggle with moti­va­tion in gen­eral,” said King. “For example, I’m cur­rently col­lab­o­rating with a friend who runs a body building web­site and a lot of his clien­tele need moti­va­tion to keep up with what they do.”

King knows exactly what he wants to do: his future plans at North­eastern include working on co-​​op inter­na­tion­ally and delving deeper into the entre­pre­neurial ecosystem.

“I’ve learned a lot from starting this com­pany, from time man­age­ment to dif­ferent web tech­nolo­gies,” said King. “But really I’ve learned that the Internet is where the money is, where the energy is, and where the focus is.”