- JetBlue, SparkNotes, Virgin Atlantic Airlines, and other successful businesses have had rough patches in the past.
- There have been moments when their founders and CEOs didn't know if the company would make it.
- We take a look at 11 of those moments below, along with how the companies' leadership managed to recover.
If you take a look at the history of many successful companies, you'll inevitably find moments where the founder or CEO didn't know if the organization would make it.
Maybe they'd run out of money, or maybe they'd stumbled into a PR disaster. Either way, the future looked bleak.
Below, we've listed 11 such moments — and how the company leadership managed to forge ahead.
VIPKID CEO and founder Cindy Mi couldn't handle unprecedented customer demand
VIPKID is a Chinese education startup that connects native English-speaking teachers with young Chinese students for virtual English lessons.
As Business Insider's Harrison Jacobs reported, while the company was in its pilot stage in 2014, Mi's friend tried out the service and posted about it on Weibo (China's version of Twitter).
Within a day, the company was receiving calls and messages from people who wanted to try the service for themselves. People started to get angry because the company wasn't able to respond to all their requests.
Mi's team ultimately resolved the problem by putting out a statement that read: "Give us a couple of months and, when we're ready, we'll come back to you."
Mi told Jacobs that the message conveyed to customers that the company was professional instead of sleazy and wasn't simply trying to get money out of them before the product was ready.
SparkNotes cofounder Sam Yagan wasn't churning out content fast enough
Yagan was a Harvard undergrad when he cofounded SparkNotes along with his roommate; the site went live the spring of their senior year.
As Yagan told Business Insider's Richard Feloni on an episode of the podcast "This is Success," the immediate response was that "people were pissed,"sending angry emails. Specifically, because the site didn't have the book they needed yet.
"That's the best kind of hate mail to get, is we need more product," Yagan said. That summer, they hired some editors to put up more SparkNotes, "and the rest is history."
GOAT cofounder Eddy Lu wasn't prepared for the company to explode in popularity
GOAT is now the world's largest resale marketplace for high-end sneakers.
On Black Friday 2015, GOAT blew up and couldn't keep up with customer demand; thousands of orders were left unfilled.
As Lu told Feloni on another episode of "This is Success,""We responded to every single customer-service message. I think there were about 4,500 that day. But at that point it was better to be hated than unknown."
See the rest of the story at Business Insider