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Seth Godin, who was born in Mount Vernon, turns 54 on Thursday.
Godin, an author, entrepreneur, marketer, and public speaker, was born July 10, 1960. In 1995, Godin launched Yoyodyne, which used contests, online games, and scavenger hunts to market companies to participating users. In August, 1996, venture-capital firm Flatiron Partners invested $4 million in Yoyodyne in return for a 20-percent stake. The site gained significant traction with over one million viewers and companies like America Online, American Express, H&R Block, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, Sony Music, Sprint, and Volvo have used its services.
At Yoyodyne, Godin authored "Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers." In 1998, Godin sold Yoyodyne to Yahoo for about $30 million and became the search engine's vice president of direct marketing, a position he held until 2000.
In March 2006, Godin launched Squidoo, a community website allowing users to create pages, called "lenses," for subjects of interest. The site donates 5 percent of the profits to charity, and 50 percent to the lensmasters.
Godin and Squidoo have been profiled on CNN and in the Washington Post. The site was given top prize in SXSW's community/wiki category. In July 2008, Squidoo was one of the 500 most visited sites in the world.
As of April 27, 2014, Godin is the author of 17 books. "Tribes" and "Linchpin" are his two best-selling books, while "Free Prize Inside" was a Forbes Business Book of the Year in 2004. Additionally, during its first two years of release, "Purple Cow" sold more than 150,000 copies in more than 23 print runs.
"The Dip" was a Business Week and New York Times bestseller. In the early 1990s, he created a 10-book series for children titled "Worlds of Power," which had multiple authors. Each of the book's plots is based on a video game and are written in a novelized form.
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