An article came across my desk today about www.smugmug.com – a premium ad-free photo- and video-sharing site. Here’s the article: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/2008-02-19-smugmug_N.htm
These guys are a father and son operation with various other family members involved (and now 30 employees). They have a simple revenue model and 100,000 subscribers. Not bad. They’re now about a $12 million dollar a year operation which is impressive given they started with only a very small initial 200k investment from the father.
I say they bootstrapped though because 200k doesn’t stretch very far on wages, servers and other expenses. It looks like they simply did the hard work and grew! Good on them – it’s well deserved.
Anybody who’s bootstrapped a business to revenue or profit knows that it’s a tough road. Doable, but not easy, but when you make it you end up owning more of the original business and have a deeper understanding of exactly what makes your business tick.
Technorati Tags: Startup,Success Story,Bootstrap,Photo Sharing,Video Sharing,SaaS,Software
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About the author:
Julian Stone, CEO – Project management specialist for: ProActiveSoftware.com, ProWorkflow.com & Julian101.com
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Tags: Bootstrap, Photo Sharing, SaaS, Software, Startup, Success Story, Video Sharing
About The Author:
Julian Stone begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting is the CEO of ProActive Software, developers and creators of the leading web based project management software http://www.proworkflow.com.
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