Koby Conrad with his business partner and girlfriend, Emily Eveland
You should meet Koby Conrad.
If you're older than him, he'll make you more optimistic about the future.
If you're his age, he might inspire you.
Conrad is a 20-year-old college student. Unlike most 20-year-old college students, he's also a business owner.
Conrad owns an online store called Hippie Hope Shop.
There, he sells goods like hookahs, incense, and hippie clothes made out of hemp. He gets traffic to his shop by running a Facebook page called "The Hippy Bloggers."
He also runs another Facebook page called Mother Hemp, which sends traffic to a store called Mother Hemp Products.
The business seems to be going well. In an email conversation, Conrad says it pays for his entire living. He also tells us he's about to sell 50% of the shop to two investors in two $30,000 chunks. He plans to use the money to buy "likes" on Facebook. "The Hippy Bloggers" currently has 75,000 likes. Conrad wants to get that number to a million. By his math, that many likes will put his revenues past $50,000 per month — $600,000 per year.
Obviously, Conrad might be wildly overestimating his ability to scale his small online retail business. But you've got to love the ambition and the hustle.
We met Conrad via email earlier this week when he cold-emailed Business Insider.
He had something to say about a series of posts we've written about changes Facebook recently made that have negatively impacted lots of people in several industries.
Early in December, Facebook changed the algorithm that determines which stories show up in your News Feed — that column of status updates, news stories, photos, and videos that you see when you open up a Facebook app or go to Facebook.com
Facebook said the point of the change was to make it so users see more "higher quality stories" and fewer joke photos and thin viral content.
The change may have had that effect, but it also had another one with wide-spread consequences: it made it so that when Facebook brand page owners posted a story, a much smaller percentage of the people who "like" their pages see that story. Some page owners said their "reach" decreased by as much as 90%.
The change to Facebook upset a lot of people, and we wrote a bunch of stories about it…
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This Irate Cookbook Author Represents A Swelling Threat To Facebook's $6 Billion Ad Business
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Facebook Screwed Lots Of Online Retailers Just In Time For The Holidays
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Facebook Slightly Tweaked How The Site Works — And It Screwed An Entire Profession
Then Conrad emailed me.
His message, paraphrased: All the people who are complaining about Faceobok's changes are just using Facebook the wrong way.