Riley McDonnell — Founder of GlassPass
In 2017, Riley McDonnell was a sophomore enrolled at USC in California, and had a hobby and passion for collecting glass. After some time, he noticed a major flaw in the glass-selling market: Artists and collectors were buying and selling hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of glass pieces through Instagram DMs, which was vulnerable to scams, non-delivery and damaged products. With the vision of a trusted website fostering reliable sales of expensive pieces, McDonnel began by creating his own Instagram account to build a community. The Instagram page grew rapidly as he and his team reposted over a thousand stories a week for free of other people’s glass they were selling. However, the website he had created in 2019 for his own selling was doing rough and wasn’t as user friendly as the Instagram page was. Because of the loss of potential McDonnel foresaw, his team decided to scrap the website including tens of thousands of lines of code to target users who prefer mobile devices — which was 97% of them. In April of 2020, they began building the GlassPass mobile app and launched it 11 months later. The app added value to the industry by requiring sellers to strictly abide by the packaging and shipping standards set by McDonnell. Every transaction, no matter the price, has accountability. Now, GlassPass is viewed by artists, collectors, and galleries as a trusted space to buy and sell glass. It generates millions of dollars in annual revenue as well.
What makes Riley McDonnell unique is the passion he has for the high-end glass market. He saw the profit opportunity but genuinely cared about giving customers art that deserved protection. He demonstrates extreme resilience and an example of this was when he threw away two years of hard work and code to save the company. To innovate, he took the verification models used in luxury sneakers/watches and applied them to his niche. What I take away from McDonnel is that it can be crucial to establish an engaged audience to solidify a product-market fit prior to launching full scale product development.
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This is an inspiring story because the entrepreneur turned a hobby into a business. He saw a need for a new way of doing things and tackled the problem. The fact that he cares so much about this and created a business out of it is extremely inspiring.
This is very interesting Kai, you don’t often hear about glass sellers much, so I find this topic you chose to write about very interesting. I admire how Riley has a passion for what he was doing, he wasn’t solely focused on making cash, he actually cared about what he was doing and found a way not only to be successful in his work but he was intentional and very passionate in his work it seems.