Name: Emeka Anen
Profession: Founder of InstaSneaks
Age: 26
One Word That Describes You: Perceptive
Emeka Anen is changing the way sneakerheads think about their shoes by transforming shoe collections into a digitized locker, curated collection, and secondary source of income. Motivated by the opportunity to leverage his insights and strengths by providing value to a passionate, rapidly growing community, Anen became a tech entrepreneur and created InstaSneaks.
Equipped with confidence and the ability to perform and figure things out, Anen is building his reputation by letting his results speak for themselves. “I’ve always been a huge advocate of telling people what I’ve done; not what I am going to do,” he tells BE Modern Man.
Anen is always learning, consuming data, and studying industry trends, which has enabled him to build and grow InstaSneaks. His platform centralizes the sneaker and street-wear community, and makes it safe and easy for members to interact, buy, and sell from each other. “We’re an extremely fast-growing company, providing value to well over 250,000 people in under a year’s time,” says Anen.
One of the most popular sports related apps in the app store, InstaSneaks has ranked as high as #40 out of hundreds of thousands sports apps. With all the competition out there it’s extremely difficult to break through all the noise in the app world. Anen is doing just that, by providing value. “I tend to caution people against doing things just for the sake of being able to say you’re doing them,” says Anen. “I think that’s ineffective and tiresome. Instead, I think that by asking yourself ‘why am I doing this?’ or ‘what value am I seeking to provide?’ You’ll find your efforts to be much more effective.”
Deciding to leave a very successful consulting job, and turning down a scholarship to several top 10 MBA programs to start a business, was a challenging for Anen. “A lot of people looked at me crazy, or thought I was making a very strange decision, because I was choosing to invest in something that was just an idea at the time, had a high probability of failure, and wasn’t generating income yet.”
Anen’s decision proved to be the right one. He’s found success and is continuing to impact communities. “I want to be a part of a shift in our community’s mindset and mode of thought,” he tells BE Modern Man. “As my platform and reach grows, I’d like to impact our community at large by making it ‘cool’ to achieve and be extraordinary as an entrepreneur; especially within tech.”
Willing to take chances, Anen is a role-model and leader in his community. “To me, a BE Modern Man is someone who’s focused on living outside-the-box while providing value to others,” he says.
The BE Modern Man team congratulates Emeka Anen on the early success of his industry-changing platform.
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