Did you know that Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, the founders of Reddit, became multimillionaires in just a year?

Here’s their amazing story:

1. In 2001, Steve and Alexis became friends at the University of Virginia, living together in the same room for 4 years.

2. In 2005, they decided to launch a business MyMobileMenu (mobile food ordering). With this business, they pitched Paul Graham (founder of Y Combinator).

3. Paul Graham said, “I’m sorry, we’re not accepting you.”

4. The next morning, they got a call from Paul saying, “I’m sorry, we made a mistake. We don’t like your idea, but we like you guys. You guys need to build the front page of the Internet.” (= The idea of Reddit was offered by Paul).

5. Steve and Alexis agreed, got $100K from Y Combinator and built Reddit in 3 weeks. It was as simple as just Web links and headlines submitted by users, with Interesting or Uninteresting buttons that you could click on underneath.

6. In order to overcome the chicken and egg problem of having no content and no users, they created 10,000 fake users and submitted content for the first 3 months that they would have been interested in seeing. Now the service looked interesting and seemed popular.

7. Paul Graham published a blog post about Reddit. That created the real initial audience. Then it just naturally expanded through word of mouth.

8. On October 26, 2006, Condé Nast Publications (owner of Wired) acquired Reddit for around $20 million.

Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian became 23-year-old multimillionaires.