Over the past several years I’ve come to realize that being a young business owner is not a common thing. It elicits a slew of different responses from people. Any student or young professional interested in starting their own business always asks me “how did you get started?” And with good reason – it’s a daunting task. Starting a successful business takes a combination of work ethic, insane optimism, and luck, among other things.
Here’s a time line of the path I took. It wasn’t all planned, it wasn’t anywhere near the shortest path to success, but the result has been an absolutely amazing ride that I wouldn’t trade for anything in the world. I am eternally grateful for being able to make a living doing something I enjoy so much. Hopefully you’ll be able to draw from it in your quest for entrepreneurial success.
- 1/2003 – As a 20 year old engineering intern, a fellow student and I developed an innovative new quality testing device.
- 7/2004- I spent my summer learning to program, culminating in the launch of a sports collectibles marketplace SportsLizard.com (check out the current about page for a screenshot of the original site).
- 12/2004 – Upon graduating Magna Cum Laude from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with a degree in Industrial Engineering, I decided to move from NY to CT to take a job with that same company I interned with. I figured I’d run SportsLizard in my free time.
- 10/2005 – SportsLizard won Honorable Mention in the Microsoft Start Something Amazing Awards and I was subsequently interviewed for a feature in the February 2006 issue of Tuff Stuff Magazine.
- 11/2005 – I started the SportsLizard Entrepreneur Blog, which eventually became this blog.
- 1/2006 – Unsatisfied with my corporate job, anxious to keep up SportsLizard’s momentum, and scared of becoming miserable like many of my co-workers, I quit my job and moved back to NY.
- 6/2006 -half a year into running SportsLizard full time, it failed to grow (due to some really poor decisions). I decided to switch directions and launched a web to-do list software called iPrioritize.
- 10/2006 – iPrioritize got a ton of publicity and a lot of user registrations, but alas didn’t make much money due to a poorly set up premium service and the general perception that “web 2.0″ services should be free. Capitalizing on that publicity and needing money to avoid going broke and returning to work, I began doing web consulting work.
- 11/2006 – My sites were growing, as was my consulting business. I was finally profiting enough to support myself.
- 12/2006 – My consulting work led me to my current partners, whom I knew from high school. George and Greg ran Detailed Image, while Mike ran Chinese Food America. In December, Mike, George and I purchased a now-defunct website together and decided to incorporate our business. Pure Adapt Inc was born. We had a crazy night out to celebrate.
- 2/2007 – Greg and DetailedImage officially became part of Pure Adapt. Splitting our focus between my consulting work and running our sites – primarily Detailed Image – we were profitable in our first month.
- 4/2007 – SportsLizard’s Price Guide Tool made it’s debut. While it didn’t set the collecting world on fire as we had hoped, it provided (and still does) a steady revenue stream of premium subscribers.
- 8/2007 – We began looking for a warehouse for Detailed Image. We thought we had a deal, but it thanfkully fell through at the last minute.
- 9/2007 -Recognizing that DetailedImage needed a total overhaul to grow, we completed months of development on a custom shopping cart platform. Immediately we saw the results we had hoped for. Mistakes were down, efficiency was up, and revenue was way up.
- 9/2007 – Music-Alerts is born and subsequently makes it’s way through the blogsphere, featured on popular tech sites like Lifehacker and FoxNews.com. My little “side project” became much more popular than I had hoped.
- 10/2007 – We mistakenly started a new web design service called Faceup-Sites. These clients turned out to be far less profitable than our web marketing and search engine optimization clients that we had previously.
- 2/2008 – We moved into a 5,300 sq-ft warehouse in Guilderland, NY
- 3/2008 – Realizing we spread ourselves too thin, we decided to fire all of our clients and focus solely on growing our e-commerce sites, which at this time consisted of just Detailed Image.
- 4/2008 – We launched Tastefully Driven using the same e-commerce platform that was successful for Detailed Image. The site was to be a “premium shopping community” with a social conscience. The community aspect failed, but the site met sales goals and turned over inventory, in large part due to listing our products for sale on Amazon.
- 5/2008 – Capping an immensely stressful few months where we stopped paying ourselves, our heat stopped working, and we fired our accountant during tax season, we had major server issues a week after I moved to a new apartment. We potentially lost tens of thousands of dollars and I almost had a nervous breakdown.
- 5/2008 – I began forcing some balance into my life, writing one of my favorite and most popular posts Productive Output: What the 9 – 5 Misses and Why I’m Done with a 40 Hour Workweek
- 6/2008 – We launched one of our coolest features – a system that automatically puts a different Detailed Image item on sale each day for 24 hours only.
- 10/2008 - I gave a presentation on entrepreneurship as a career choice to students at Skidmore College.
- 11/2008 - We made our first Commerce with Conscience donation for Tastefully Driven, donating 5% of first year profit to the Regional Foodbank of Northeastern New York. A very proud moment for me.
- 12/2008 – We had a record-setting holiday season, so much so that our competitors complained about our pricing. For the year, revenue more than doubled in 2008.
- 1/2009 – We start re-developing our e-commerce platform in an attempt to dominate the auto detailing niche and create a system that can be easily portable to other markets.
- 2/2009 – The EZ Detail Brush that we sell at Detailed Image was featured in Autoweek magazine, bringing an unanticipated wave of sales.
- 3/2009 – Despite facing increasing time constraints, we decide to fast-track our new e-commerce platform and increase our paid sponsorships in an attempt to accelerate our growth.
- 4/2009 – March was our fastest growing month ever, with revenue 33% higher than our previous highest month. As we always try to do, we went out and celebrated.
- 5/2009 – We launched our new e-commerce platform on Detailed Image. The response was overwhelmingly positive, both in terms of feedback and sales.
- 6/2009 – We completely re-organized our warehouse, putting the most popular brands on the most prominent shelving units, with the most popular products at eye-level. We then modified our invoices to print out in the order that the products were located. Result – a huge time savings and less errors.
- 7/2009 – We hired our first employee and he exceeded our expectations. After settling in, we started having him take daily inventory of a small sample random products to essentially eliminate the need for bi-monthly physical inventories.
- 8/2009 – We started promoting our Going Green Program on Detailed Image.
- 8/2009 – I launched Z.ips.ME, an open source URL shortener for PHP and MySQL. It was subsequently featured on the popular technology blog Read Write Web.
- 9/2009 – We hired our second part time employee. Again, he’s doing a great job.
- 10/2009 – I traveled to Virginia to give two guest lectures on entrepreneurship as a career choice at James Madison University.
- 11/2009 – Black Friday and Cyber Monday were even bigger than last year. We had our largest single day of sales on Cyber Monday. November was our largest month in revenue by a good 25%.
- 1/2010 – In an effort to become more efficient, more scalable, and more profitable, we decided to eliminate several functions of our business. First we closed Tastefully Driven and stopped selling on Amazon, and then we stopped shipping packages to international and APO addresses.
- 2/2010 – We added two major features to Detailed Image – a weekly free product coupon code and an Ask-a-Pro Detailer Blog. Both made a big impact immediately.
- 2/2010 – We announced our next venture, a sports news application called LockerPulse
- 5/2010 – LockerPulse was finally launched to the public! The overall response was great, but I was totally wiped out.
- 8/2010 – We hired our first full-time employee!
What does the future hold? I’m not sure, but I couldn’t be more excited!