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
Digg! this story.
1 Comment

I can’t help but shake my head a little when I read that 52.9% of VCs think that their own approach is broken. Why are VC’s so concerned, you ask? Well, we’ve been talking about this issue a lot lately, but it all boils down to finding the next buyer who’s willing to pay more for the business than they did… and those hopes are vanishing:

Fifty three percent of VC’s say that they are “very worried” about when the IPO and M&A markets will return.

So what can you do about this as an entrepreneur? How about focus on your business? How about making money the old fashioned way? Earn it!

Personally, I’m really looking forward to tomorrow’s Small and Special conference, where some of the brightest minds in the Seattle entrepreneurial scene will be getting together to exchange ideas, best practices, and inspiring stories about how they’re building businesses by focusing on what’s important: great products that matter to real customers.

I hope to see you there!

Filed by Brad Hefta-Gaub at 10:57 am under Bootstrapping, Entrepreneurship, Investing, Venture Capital
Digg! this story.
No Comments

As I’ve mentioned in my last couple posts, there’s been a lot of talk about bootstrapping, VC investments, and lifestyle businesses in the Seattle entrepreneur scene lately. I was recently sent a link to an interview with James Hong of HOTorNOT.com. He has an interesting, I’ll say fresh, perspective how they chose to build and manage their business.

What I found particularly interesting about this interview is that James is pretty direct about the fact that he and his co-founder will milking this business for the cash. They made business choices that would never have been accepted by their investors had they taking outside funding.

Sure, there was a lot of luck involved in their success, and they were very much there at the right time and the right place. And today, HOTorNOT has faded, and is far from the cash generating juggernaut it once was. But their business was generating as much as $5 million a year in PROFIT, split between two owners. Not a bad way to create “FU Money” as James calls it.

The interview is a little long, but it actually covers a lot of different topics, and is certainly worth a view. Thanks to Ram for sending this to me.

Filed by Brad Hefta-Gaub at 10:42 am under Bootstrapping, Entrepreneurship, Social Media, Venture Capital
Digg! this story.
No Comments