Startup and Entrepreneur News

I talked with several publishers making so much from their blog that they left their day jobs. One such blogger – Rhett Butler, founder of Mongabay.com – makes $15,000 to $18,000 a month on his site about rainforest conservation. Such success usually comes from experimenting with ad-revenue models, advertised products and ad positions. It can take several months to find the best model for a particular site.

Of course, drawing big ad money depends more on having a blog with lots of interesting and unique content that draws lots of readers, showing up high in search-engine results for your topic and having ads that pique your readers’ interest. The vast majority of blogs make dimes, not dollars, a day, according to ProBlogger.net.

While the programs are expanding, some bloggers are coming up with their own ways to make money. For instance, Roger Fredericks, a golf pro who sells DVDs teaching golfers flexibility exercises, used to spend $10,000 to $25,000 a pop airing infomercials on the Golf Channel. When the network raised its rates last year, he decided to focus on making money on his Web site.

http://blogs.wsj.com/independentstreet/2008/01/15/bloggers-get-creative-to-make-dough/

For anyone inclined to daydream about a Web business that would all but run itself, two other details may be of interest: Mr. Frind operates the business out of his apartment in Vancouver, British Columbia, and he says he has net profits of about $10 million a year. Given his site’s profitable advertising mix and independently verified traffic volume, the figure sounds about right.

There’s much to be admired in Mr. Frind’s entrepreneurial success. But his site, now almost five years old, has some unfinished patches and irritating quirks and seems to come from the Anti-Perfectionist School of Design.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/business/13digi.html?em&ex=1200459600&en=b9c0cb998ca49b2a&ei=5087%0A

Michael Stajer bet big on his idea to start an eBay-style (EBAY)Web site for buying and selling wines in 1999. The Bay Area attorney sold his personal wine collection for $25,000 to finance the site, called WineCommune. At the time, he hoped to get venture or angel funding early on. “My original plan was, ‘Hey, I’ll get this product up and then I’ll shop it around and see if I can get some money, hire some people, and then take it to the next level,’” Stajer says.

That didn’t happen. The dot-com collapse came a year after he started WineCommune, and investors were wary of the regulated market of alcohol sales. Stajer kept his day job and gradually developed the site. He amassed more than $40,000 in credit-card debt to finance the business. But despite the time he spent wondering how he would ever pay the bills, Stajer says he’s glad he never got funded. The company expanded by launching online retailer J.J. Buckley and WineZap, a price comparison site with a social network. He expects WineCommune to have $17 million in revenues this year from a mix of advertising, paid referrals, and retail wine sales across the three sites. “Now, of course, [the credit-card debt is] paid off, and I got my wine collection back,” he says.

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Storeatmyhouse.com is a site for people who have extra space, simply enter the address, put in a brief description of the size, location and price, and post the information.

Users searching for storage space simply enter their zip code and browse through the available listings. Available storage spaces include extra rooms, attics, basements, and pre-paid storage facilities.

Now US-based NapAd has picked up on the same theme but played it in bars and nightclubs instead. NapAd, which just launched this fall, uses what it calls high-definition napkins to bring marketers’ messages directly into the hands of urban consumers when they’re relaxed and uninterrupted by other media. The photorealistic, 5-by-5-inch cocktail napkins are distributed free to NapAd’s network of bars, nightclubs and lounges; in exchange, the venues serve them with drinks to their patrons, who can then be exposed to the messages printed on them for hours at a time.Targeting is customizable within NapAd’s network, so that if an advertiser wants to reach males aged 18 to 34 in Garden City, Kansas, for example, NapAd might tap into a network of sports bars in the area. The company is currently focusing its program on Manhattan, but it’s planning to add five more markets in 2008 and can serve areas requested by clients as well. A typical New York City campaign with 1 million NapAds starts at about USD 27,500.

NapAds is part of Maryland-based guerilla marketing firm JI Worldwide, which was founded by 28-year-old Jay Jaber, a finalist in the 2007 Wall Street Journal’s Creative Leaders Challenge. The company (which also sells its napkins under the name HDN—High Definition Napkin) is now seeking distribution partnerships with major airlines, cruise ships, bars and lounges, and is also interested in hearing about other collaborative opportunities, Jaber says. It’s a big world out there—so many bars, so many patrons, so little time…

Website: www.napads.com

 Kaboodle

Founders: Chetan Pungaliya, Manish Chandra, and Keiron McCammon
Acquisition Price: $30 million to $40 million, according to TechCrunch
Buyer: Hearst
Funding: $1.5 million from Garage Technology Ventures, Shea Ventures, Kanwal Rekhi, Jeff Clavier, Ron Conway, Georges Harik, Rajeev Motwani, Iggy Fanlo; $3.5 million from Shea Ventures

The Runup:
During its two-year incubation, social shopping site Kaboodle faced many hurdles, including an electrical accident that took the left arm of founder McCammon. But by summer 2007 the site had formed a partnership with eBay (EBAY) and was luring more than 2 million unique monthly visitors. With the board help of veteran Silicon Valley investors including Ron Conway and Jeff Clavier, Kaboodle began forging ties with potential buyers. In its third digital media play of 2007, magazine giant Hearst in August paid an undisclosed amount of cash.

The Payoff:
“It’s an unbelievable sense of relief,” says Chandra, who says he agonized for months over whether to sell. Chandra and his partners received “a nice chunk” of their payout on closing day, he says. The rest will be paid over time, in addition to the earnout incentives stipulated by multiyear contracts. Hearst says Kaboodle will become an independent subsidiary, though it plans to integrate the site with content from other properties.

• http://images.businessweek.com/ss/07/10/1011_luckyducks/source/1.htm

 Business planning literally pays off for entrepreneurs Bryan Howe and Brent Butler.

The most successful business plan that Bryan Howe and Brent Butler ever created could someday prove to be their own.

The two entrepreneurs started their company, MasterPlans Inc., four years ago. This year, Howe and Butler expect revenue to be $5.5 million, with another $750,000 to $1 million for their newly launched sister company, marketing firm Sente Creative. That’s up from $2.5 million in revenue last year.

The entrepreneurs expect their company to grow to nearly $12 million next year, with MasterPlans growing to $10 million and Sente Creative to as much as $2 million.

Butler’s and Howe’s business plan calls for much more ambitious growth than that. They’re planning for revenue of $100 million in 15 years. They expect to achieve that by expanding the two divisions they have now, and phasing in new ones.

See http://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/business_resources/starting_your_business/stories/2007/11/01/smallb1.html?page=1

The Next Big Ideas: Cool Products from America’s Coolest Young Entrepreneurs « Previous Slide | Start Over | Pause | Next Slide »
Insomnia Cookies’ jumbo deluxe cookies, which come in triple chocolate or peanut butter chocolate, are even more decadent than the six regular varieties the company offers. College students have really embraced Insomnia’s late-night delivery model — founder Seth Berkowitz says some stores receive hundreds of orders per night.

See All  Products http://www.inc.com/multimedia/slideshows/content/30under2007prod.html

Jdate.com

Jdate, a Jewish singles site launched more than a decade ago, was one of the first online businesses to tap into religion’s ability to draw people together. The site’s 72,000 subscribers each pay around $40 a month. That lucrative model has inspired the site’s owners, Spark Networks, to launch a series of religious niche dating sites for Baptists, Catholics, Mormons and Seventh-Day Adventists.

http://www.forbes.com/2007/10/05/website-religion-online-tech-cx_ag_1005godweb_slide_5.html?thisSpeed=15000

Rishi Shah, 25   Flying Cart Media  Madison, Wis.

Rishi Shah doesn’t like clothes shopping. So when he was studying electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, he decided to start a business that would allow users to get recommendations on what to buy based on past purchases. He envisioned national brands like the Gap (GPS) offering the service to their customers. Executives liked the idea, too, but in meetings told Shah that they could offer such a service themselves.

Still convinced he could create a successful e-commerce business, Shah spoke to independent retailers running shops along State Street near campus and discovered that most wanted a simple way to sell online. He held onto the idea. After working for Accenture (ACN) for two years, learning “how to take an idea and turn it into something,” he created three-employee Flying Cart to give small-business owners a way to sell their products online. He offers a bare-bones version for free and sells subscriptions to two versions with more options for $15 and $30 a month.

Shah says about 30 new shops are created on his site each day. He estimates the business, which now has more than 1,000 shops, will be profitable by the spring of 2008.

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Unlike most recent college grads, Joe Aigboboh does not have a Facebook account. But Aigboboh, 22, and his business partner, Jesse Tevelow, 24, are now among the world’s reigning experts on the Facebook platform—thanks to the popularity of one Facebook application, called Sticky Notes, that took Aigboboh less than a week to write.

They set up shop here, in the freshly painted basement of a dilapidated West Philly row house, a few weeks ago. Almost daily they get calls from Facebook-frenzied companies scrambling to stake their claim on the platform, offering them paid consulting gigs, development projects, full-time jobs. But now that their four-month-old company, J-Squared Media, is pulling in $45,000 a month in advertising revenues from Facebook, they’ve decided to focus on building their own applications instead.

http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/oct2007/sb2007108_307252.htm

A few years ago, Mr. Levchin, one of the young princes of Silicon Valley, bought his first home, a 12-room Edwardian high atop a hill here, for $3.4 million. But Mr. Levchin, who made a fortune at age 27 selling PayPal, the online payment service he helped start in 1998, never moved in. He sold it two years later without having slept there for even one night.

Since then, Mr. Levchin has moved into his second home, a more expensive one found for him by Nellie Minkova, his girlfriend of eight years who has become his fiancée. But so consumed is he by work on his second company, an Internet start-up focused on sharing photos and videos, that the cartons that contain what Mr. Levchin described as “85 percent of my worldly possessions” are still stacked in his living room, five months after moving day.

Mr. Levchin, who is now 32, is typical of a new generation of junior titans in Silicon Valley who might be called the prematurely rich — techies worth tens of millions of dollars, sometimes more, at an age when many others are just starting to figure out what to do with their lives.

see http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/business/28invent.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5087&em&en=a37ec3773b496f0e&ex=1193803200

In case you haven’t noticed, the stereotypical image of a silver-haired 50-something chief executive wearing a perfectly dimpled necktie is fading.The top dog at the company no longer has to fit that mold to gain the trust of his or her peers and shareholders. Authority and competence are no longer found just in a look — and age and experience don’t always dictate performance.

Take the youthful Michael Chasen, the 36-year-old CEO and co-founder of Blackboard, a developer and marketer of educational software. He started the venture with his college roommate, Matthew Pittinsky, in 1997, and has since helped it grow into a $183 million company that services students around the globe.

Despite being as high as one can go in the world of corporate job titles, Chasen is not one to rest on his — or his company’s — laurels.

“Forever seems like a little bit of a long time,” Chasen said. “To me, all we’ve really done is make sure we have a spot at starting line of the race.”

And he definitely wants to take Blackboard the distance.

Chasen said age, to a point, does matter in the tech business, since it’s typically the younger generation that has kept its finger on the industry’s pulse. So, naturally, he was an early adopter of the iPhone, and has a Facebook profile. Even as a millionaire, a CEO can still afford to be a kid from time to time.

http://www.forbes.com/2007/10/10/young-boss-ceos-lead-manage-cx_mk_1010thirties_slide_2.html?partner=yahoo

http://finance.yahoo.com/career-work/article/103730/The-Thirty-Somethings-Running-Your-Company?mod=oneclick

THE INSIDE SCOOP
But few of the 4,000 independent college counselors now scattered around the country can match Hernandez’ influence or earning power. Early on, she began offering college-admissions counseling for students in eighth grade—yes, eighth grade—an approach that is becoming more common. Since 2005, she has run application boot camps in Manhattan and Santa Monica, Calif., which this summer cost $9,500 and are sure to attract imitators. Hernandez says she earned almost $1 million last year. She drives a BMW convertible. And she just moved near Middlebury, Vt., where she and her husband own 117 acres on Snake Mountain.

What makes her own story so compelling is that Hernandez is an insider-turned-outcast. A former admissions officer at Dartmouth College, she dared to reveal secrets of the opaque selection process in her book, A Is for Admission: The Insider’s Guide to Getting Into the Ivy League and Other Top Colleges, and then to build a thriving business that helps people game the system. As she says to parents: “You don’t want to pay $180,000 for some piddling school when, by spending a little extra, your kid could get into Yale.” She insinuates herself so deeply into her students’ lives and is so unabashed about her money-making that she has come to be regarded either as operating at the leading edge of her profession or its cynical extreme

See Full Story http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_43/b4055063.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index_top+story

The site is a review site for nude scenes in movies ..so they have clips of 175 000 nude scenes in movies and members pay 30 bucks a month …. Yeah I know they must have A LOT of members … According to the october issue of Business 2.0 the company makes $5.3 million a year .

In a darkened back room, a team of 10 employees scans incoming movies, posting the appropriate screen stills and video clips from the pile of DVDs that dozens of major movie companies send Mr. Skin each day. The rest of the employees gather news, write blogs and generally keep the business and tech sides running.

Guests to the site can access the database and read partial reviews but not see any nude content. Members, who pay $4.95 for a three-day pass or $29.95 a month, receive full access to nude screen grabs, videos, blogs and reviews. On average, McBride says, MrSkin.com gets 300 new members a day (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text). The site has become so influential that movie studios even court Mr. Skin for blurbs on DVD covers to help drive rentals.

TableXChange is exactly what the name implies - a website that helps people secure hard to get reservations at some of the most exclusive restaurants.  Want to impress by taking a date to Il Mulino’s to sample the divine Italian food of Chefs Fernando and Gino Masci but didn’t think to book ahead?  If you’re lucky then you can buy someone’s existing reservation - the price for a secured reservation for two this Friday at 8pm is $35 bucks.  Not too outrageous when you consider that’s the cost of three jars of Pomodoro Pasta Sauce through Il Mulino’s website.

Business Model:
Sellers can list as many reservations as they wish on TableXChange.  There is a $40 cap on the amount that they can charge reservation ‘buyers’.  How does TableXChange make money? Simple, for every reservation ’sold’ TableXChange makes 12% of the agreed price.  If the reservation does not sell, no harm no foul, it was free to list and the failed ’seller’ does not owe TableXChange any cash at all. So, sell a reservation for $30, then TableXChange takes a $3.60 cut.  You get $26.40 - not bad since you didn’t actually pay anything for the reservation - just five minutes on the telephone. Even at AT&T rates - that’s still a pretty good deal

See http://www.tablexchange.com/about/press.php

Virtual world goods seller PlaySpan has received $6.5 million Series A in a round led by Easton Capital, Menlo Ventures, STIC and Novel TMT Ventures.

PlaySpan hasn’t launched yet, but is promising a product that will attempt to be an official commerce provider for multiple MMOGs. According to PlaySpan, the company has already signed up seven MMOG partners

The interesting side of PlaySpan is with the background story: PlaySpan was founded by Arjun Mehta (pictured) , a 6th grader from Silicon Valley who founded the company from money earned selling online game items won from quests he fought while attending 5th grade at Challenger School in San Jose.

1. Million Dollar Homepage

1000000 pixels, charge a dollar per pixel – that’s perhaps the dumbest idea for online business anyone could have possible come up with. Still, Alex Tew, a 21-year-old who came up with the idea, is now a millionaire.

2. SantaMail

Ok, how’s that for a brilliant idea. Get a postal address at North Pole, Alaska, pretend you are Santa Claus and charge parents 10 bucks for every letter you send to their kids? Well, Byron Reese sent over 200000 letters since the start of the business in 2001, which makes him a couple million dollars richer. Full Story

3. Doggles

Create goggles for dogs and sell them online? Boy, this IS the dumbest idea for a business. How in the world did they manage to become millionaires and have shops all over the world with that one? Beyond me.

4. LaserMonks

LaserMonks.com is a for-profit subsidiary of the Cistercian Abbey of Our Lady of Spring Bank, an eight-monk monastery in the hills of Monroe County, 90 miles northwest of Madison. Yeah, real monks refilling your cartridges. Hallelujah! Their 2005 sales were $2.5 million! Praise the Lord. Full Story

5. AntennaBalls

You can’t sell antenna ball online. There is no way. And surely it wouldn’t make you rich. But this is exactly what Jason Wall did, and now he is now a millionaire. Full Story

6. FitDeck

Create a deck of cards featuring exercise routines, and sell it online for $18.95. Sounds like a disaster idea to me. But former Navy SEAL and fitness instructor Phil Black reported last year sales of $4.7 million. Surely beats what military pays.

7. PositivesDating.Com

How would you like to go on a date with an HIV positive person? Paul Graves and Brandon Koechlin thought that someone would, so they created a dating site for HIV positive folks last year. Projected 2006 sales are $110,000, and the two hope to have 50,000 members by their two-year mark.

8. Designer Diaper Bags

Christie Rein was tired of carrying diapers around in a freezer bag. The 34-year-old mother of three found herself constantly stuffing diapers for her infant son into freezer bags to keep them from getting scrunched up in her purse. Rein wanted something that was compact, sleek and stylish, so in November 2004, she sat down with her husband, Marcus, who helped her design a custom diaper bag that’s big enough to hold a travel pack of wipes and two to four diapers. With more than $180,000 in sales for 2005, Christie’s company, Diapees & Wipees, has bags in 22 different styles, available online and in 120 boutiques across the globe for $14.99.

9. PickyDomains

Hire another person to think of a cool domain name for you? No way people would pay for this. Actually, naming domain names for others turned out a thriving business, especially, when you make the entire process risk free. PickyDomains currently has a waiting list of people who want to PAY the service to come up with a snappy memorable domain name. PickyDomains is expected to hit six figures this year. Full Story

10. Lucky Wishbone Co.

Fake wishbones. Now, this stupid idea is just destined to flop. Who in the world needs FAKE PLASTIC wishbones? A lot of people, it turns out. Now producing 30,000 wishbones daily (they retail for 3 bucks a pop) Ken Ahroni, the company founder, expects 2006 sales to reach $1 million.

Copied from http://www.nichegeek.com/10_totally_stupid_online_business_ideas_that_made_someone_rich

http://inc.com/multimedia/slideshows/content/5000ceosunder30_pagen_1.html

Jeni Garrett is one of those entrepreneurs providing a mind and body oasis to baby boomers desperate for rejuvenation. In 2001, after enjoying the benefits of spa visits herself, Garrett, now 28, founded The Woodhouse Day Spa, a luxury spa in Victoria, Texas. A year and a half later, she set her sights on turning the brand into a household name. She first planned to open more company-owned locations, but Garrett soon turned to franchising to spread the concept. “With our business model, you really need an owner/operator present because of the staffing issues and to do the marketing initiative,” she says. “Franchising lent itself very well to that.”

To move forward, Garrett knew the foundation had to be solid. She chose a top-notch franchise lawyer and streamlined operations, even ordering the fixtures for the franchisees. With her franchise system in place, she has positioned herself perfectly to accommodate the growing clientele of baby boomers. To further meet the needs of this segment, she added a menu of services that boasts 15 holistic, all-natural treatments that focus more on wellness than pampering. She is enjoying success with a multimillion-dollar business as more boomer women–and men–make the spa experience part of their lifestyles. Says Garrett, “We’re seeing [spas] move from a level of luxury to a level of necessity for wellness.”  

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20640714/