How My Lifestyle Business Became a Startup
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Re: How My Lifestyle Business Became a Startup
#2Great post Clint, and good inspiration for "older" founders. We found the same niche ourselves, "hosting" companies are a dime a dozen, but our company in a year of operation has lost less than 10 customers. Solve an emotional problem with empathy, and the world will flock to you.
Re: How My Lifestyle Business Became a Startup
#3Great post Clint, and good inspiration for "older" founders. We found the same niche ourselves, "hosting" companies are a dime a dozen, but our company in a year of operation has lost less than 10 customers. Solve an emotional problem with empathy, and the world will flock to you.
Gracias.
Re: How My Lifestyle Business Became a Startup
#4Very inspirational .. especially from someone who is already in his 30's and running a profitable startup.
Re: How My Lifestyle Business Became a Startup
#5Very inspirational .. especially from someone who is already in his 30's and running a profitable startup.
Thanks ngsayjoe. One small point - I'm actually now in my 40's, but your point remains. The site was profitable enough to risk it and go full time when I was 35.
Re: How My Lifestyle Business Became a Startup
#6Congrats Clint - do you have any employees now helping you out?
Re: How My Lifestyle Business Became a Startup
#7Congrats Clint - do you have any employees now helping you out?
Not technically, although I do have a lot of help.
I've managed to build a good "team" by outsourcing as much as possible. I use Rackspace so I don't have to manage servers or do much sysadmin. I work with a freelance programming firm for things I need done that I can't/don't have time to do in house. I've hired freelance writers to produce content for our art blogs (usually artists. Also-I write for those art marketing blogs, drawing on my 16 years of gallery experience). I usually hire customers who know what they're doing as part time support agents - they work freelance from home via our forums and ticket system.
It's actually getting easier over time to outsource services as more and more Saas and Paas offerings come online (Do you know how much easier storing Terabytes of images is now that S3 exists?). A few Examples: I used to maintain a mail server, now that's outsourced to MailTrust, we outsource customer analytics to getclicky.com, we outsource email newsletter deliver to Cakemail.
Having said all of that, I am starting to look for an in-house developer. There are some aspects of a code-base and server configuration that are hard to outsource to another firm.
Re: How My Lifestyle Business Became a Startup
#8Great post. We have a similar experience and its nice to read about those of us who didn't start coding / building our companies until late 20s/30s.
Re: How My Lifestyle Business Became a Startup
#9Congrats Clint - do you have any employees now helping you out?
Not technically, although I do have a lot of help. I've managed to build a good "team" by outsourcing as much as possible. I use Rackspace so I don't have to manage servers or do much sysadmin. I work with a freelance programming firm for things I need done that I can't/don't have time to do in house. I've hired freelance writers to produce content for our art blogs (usually artists. Also-I write for those art market…
Nice - you got a business doing 400k+ in revenue per yr, growing nicely. I'm sure someone would be willing to put down a few to several million if you ever sold. Keep it up.
Do you market mainly via word of mouth, pay per click, etc.? Seem like word of mouth based on the growth curve.
Re: How My Lifestyle Business Became a Startup
#10Great post. We have a similar experience and its nice to read about those of us who didn't start coding / building our companies until late 20s/30s.
Wow - love your 2 sites - would be awesome if you did a similar blog post. Those pictures->canvas things are getting pretty popular at local boutiques.