5 Most Successful Startups of 2016

Some of the most successful startups of 2016 have become so well ingrained in our society that it seems bizarre to think that they weren’t always around.

Startups are all the rage these days. Big cities like San Francisco and New York, for example, are full of young tech startups and people who think they’ve come up with the next great app that’s going to change the world. It’s harder than you think to create something successful, but some have made it look so easy that one may wonder why they aren’t the CEO of their own company. It’s like there’s an app for everything these days and it’s thanks to the hardworking people who found a niche and stuck themselves in it so they could be part of your lives every day.

Creating a startup is hard enough, but getting exposure is the tricky part. I know I often see ads on the subway for new apps or companies with coupon codes to encourage people to get started. A lot of the time I hear about new things through word of mouth, which admittedly isn’t the fastest or best way to get a lot of users all at once, but it at least ensures that the company is reputable. I don’t think I started using Lyft or Gett because I saw an ad — I had a friend tell me to download it because they gave me their word that they were great. It’d be interesting to see if any of the startups listed are among the Most Profitable Small Businesses to Start in 2015.

That being said, looking for the best startups is pretty easy. Despite the fact that they’re new, they’ve made a lot of headway and grown in popularity, so people are talking about them quite a bit. For the most accurate results, we got our data from three places: Investopedia, Business Insider, and Forbes. We took the average of the rankings of the startups mentioned in their respective articles and created our rankings from there. Not only are the startups listed here successful, they’re also socially relevant and helpful, which is likely why they’ve done so well.

Take notes, entrepreneurs, because these are the 5 most successful startups of 2016. I wonder how they’ll fare in 2017.

5. Cheddar

Founder: Jon Steinberg, former president of Buzzfeed

Cheddar is like CNBC for millennials and is designed to present the news with a little bit of flair. The site shows short interview and news clips and hopes to gain more revenue through paid content. The idea behind it is to make people pay for the news they want to see. The target audience is young professionals in their early 20s.

4. FreshDesk

Founder: Girish Mathrubootham

FreshDesk, the next one in our list of most successful startups of 2016 has a recorded equity of about $95 million according to Forbes and is one of the biggest and most successful startups that launched in 2016. It has a cloud-based customer support software that can create tickets for chat requests and emails. It’s great for small businesses and its relevance to the growing industry of e-commerce has helped make it so successful.

3. Juno

Founder: Talmon Marco

Juno’s founder also founded Viber, which was sold for $900 million. It was created to counter Uber and aims to be a more driver-friendly alternative. It takes a smaller profit outtake from drivers as compared to Lyft and Uber. The company has successfully raised about $30 million so far.

2. Slack

Founder: Stewart Butterfield

The number 2 in our list of most successful startups of 2016 is the Slack that is like an AOL chatroom but for the workplace. It functions as a virtual workroom used by business teams to communicate. You can use it to chat with your coworker across the room and send funny GIFs or to communicate vital information to the rest of your team. It’s made telecommuting really easy for those who work from home or do freelance projects. More companies have switched to Slack from older platforms because of its ease and all the cool apps you can use with it. Slack has an equity of about $340 million right now.

1. Gigster Inc.

Gigster is full of specialized services for programmers and connects them to businesses who need them. It’s more than just a simple freelancing platform and what sets it apart is how it recommends registered programmers codes that they can use to complete their projects, which saves the hassle of writing new ones for each project. One of the main contributors to this company is none other than Ashton Kutcher. No, you’re not being Punk’d, he really did invest.

There’s always a fresh business idea lurking around that’s useful for people if you just take a look around. Take your cue from the most successful startups of 2016 and just get started. You never know the amount of impact and success you could have.