Konamoxt, Inc.

I spent most of today at the Small and Special event hosted by Jackson Fish Market, and I have to say it far exceeded my high expectations. The venue was amazing. The presenters were each amazing and inspiring in their own right! Even more amazing was the synergy between the presenters. Hillel and crew orchestrated a perfect program with an amazing flow of very diverse yet all equally compelling entrepreneurs who were all building amazing businesses out of things they loved.

But maybe most amazing part of the event was the energy from the crowd!

The audience did a great job of creating a live tweet stream, and from the tweets and retweets you could tell that some of the best lines from the speakers struck a common chord with the audience.

Some of my favorite presentors included…

Eric LeVine of CellarTracker.com talked about how he originally started CellarTracker as a project to simply keep himself busy after leaving Microsoft after 13 years… to have a reason to get out of his PJs in the morning. His passion for wine, and a vision of building a “spreadsheet in the clouds” has turned into the worlds largest wine database with over 80,000 collectors tracking over 13.3 million bottles of wine with soon to be more the 1 million reviews.

With over 15,000 customers voluntarily paying on average $40 per year, he’ll gross over $500,000 this year. Not bad for a guy in his pajamas!

Steve Bristol from LessAccounting.com has an interesting perspective on why smaller companies have an advantage over larger companies.

“Two people are smarter than one, but four people are definitely not, and then you have companies with thousands and then they are idiots!”

Jon Rimmerman of Garagiste had a lot of inspiring things to say about following your passion and focusing on your customers. He doesn’t have an online store, and he spends $0 on marketing, but he does have 100,000 people on an email list, who read his “wine poetry” and if they want to buy some wine from him, then great… but that’s not his focus. Well, something is working because he vaguely described his business as generating “less than $30million a year in revenue, but only a little less than that”. But my favorite line from him was his answer for why people buy wine from him.

“Because I have smelled the wine maker’s breath!”

Rachel Venning, co-founder of Babeland, recounted who she and her co-founder were motivated by their interests in activism, feminism, gay and lesbian issues, and the realization that they simply wouldn’t fit in at IBM, to start an adult toy shop that focused on celebrating sexuality without the sleazy unfriendly atmosphere at traditional establishments.

Their business has grown from and $18,000 initial investment to over $12 million in revenue, from four locations and an online store.

There were several other great presentations, and as I said, Hillel, Jenny, and Walter did a great job in organizing an amazing event. You can’t help but walk away from an event like that being inspired by these amazing entrepreneurs and inspired to go out and redouble your own efforts to build a great business.

Filed by Brad Hefta-Gaub at 9:17 pm under Bootstrapping, Entrepreneurship
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