

Who needs funding when you have creativity? - oliviakuhn
http://blog.mixergy.com/my-financials/
Awesome and inspiring look at how Andrew Warner bookstrapped his first company, Bradford and Reed into a multi billion dollar engine. Andrew is candid, creative and sharp!
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patio11
Nitpick: the title should be "Who needs funding when you actually charge
customers?"

My mother pays something like $50 a year for online greeting cards. Do the
quick extrapolation on how many mothers there are in America, how many of them
use the Internet, and how many you can reasonably convert. Yeah, $40 million
for a market leader doesn't seem that unreasonable now does it.

You will not get invited to give conferences at The Future Of Web 3.0 2012 if
you make greeting cards. Nobody will ask you for your insights on scaling,
principally because at your scale it will be a boring engineering problem with
well-understood solutions. You'll just put smiles on a few mothers' faces and,
oh, well, there might be a little bit of money involved.

I think I've mentioned this a few times, but to say it one more time: _grown
women have money, too, and nobody in tech wants it_. Instead of building stuff
they want and charging money for it ( _money they have and spend_ ), we want
to push CPM levels to about a quarter (trending towards dimes!) while making
social networks for the same people who are already members of six.

~~~
AndrewWarner
They really were an under-served and unappreciated market. Everyone we got
funding went after the cool kids. Meanwhile we were in the business of
creating the cutest smiley-face pages. Not as cool, but more profitable.

~~~
aristus
"Were"? Are things different now?

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donniefitz2
I've watched a few of this guys videos and I'm really liking them. It's cool
to see someone make it with a startup but do it "quietly". Who ever heard of
his company? I guess it really doesn't matter because his clients sure did.

~~~
AndrewWarner
Thanks. I was very conflicted about our obscurity. On the one hand I saw it as
a way of keeping competitors away. On the other hand, I felt like the Rodney
Dangerfield of the dotcom space. All the cool kids were on magazine covers and
I couldn't even get into their parties.

~~~
volida
I suppose you can host the parties now!

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DanielBMarkham
Nice introduction, Andrew. You established credibility and got right into
WIIFM (What's in it for me)

There sure are a lot of folks helping startups. I've got a stack of books on
startups, e-commerce, and innovation. Hopefully you can distinguish yourself
from the rest of the pack. Best of luck. Look forward to hearing more from
you.

