I was a software engineer at Cisco Systems before returning to grad school for an arts degree. You have to understand I was a Computer Systems engineering major, and the last paper I wrote was in my high school days. So when my professor said I had to format my papers in "Turabian", I bought the book (it was the 6th edition at the time) and then tried to throw it away as irrelevant. It had instructions on how to adjust a typewriter to get the proper spacing for headings and other arcane formatting rules of which I didn't see the point. After 4 hours of just formatting footnotes, I gave up and handed in my paper. I barely passed the paper, because of silly things like a missing comma in a reference.
The next paper I had to write was a group project. I was the editor of a team of four, which wrote a combined paper with 99 footnotes in it. After 4 hours of fixing footnotes (again!), I gave each section back to the authors and told them to fix it according to Turabian. Some team members did (incorrectly unfortunately), and others argued with me as "it was a pointless exercise," so we handed in an inconsistently formatted paper and paid for it in lost grades.
So I said this was crazy and wrote a computer program to format my paper for me, and EazyPaper was born. Classmates looked over my shoulder and asked "What is that?" and I told them. They offered to buy it from me and I said "Sure!" So in my naivety (I was single at the time), I started a company, developed a website, and launched EazyPaper Inc. with $10 000 from my school savings.
We have since then expanded EazyPaper to support APA and MLA, and then AMA. We've added a bunch of add-ons to help me (and others) do better research and improve our writing. EazyPaper Inc. even eventually became famous enough to form a partnership with a professor who taught at my grad school to edit papers.
EazyPaper has come a long way since then, and is used by thousands of students around the world to achieve their academic goals. The unsolicited testimonials page is what I'm most proud about with EazyPaper. What started as an "accident" has become the best $10 000 I ever invested.
So let me know how EazyPaper's helped you or this story inspired you to reach your dreams.
“Write the paper, not the footnotes,”