Making $500k - Pffff. Raising $1M in VC: Priceless. at sablog.com

Making $500k - Pffff. Raising $1M in VC: Priceless.

Written by Shanti A. Braford October 5th, 2006in Linkfest.

Update: Ted Rheingold from Dogster dropped by and wrote in the comments that they are going to break $1 million in revenue this year!

I had forgot about this, but while at the Future of Web Apps conference, Ted Rheingold of Dogster gave one of the best (if not the best) presentations.

During his presentation Ted announced that they were now doing around $500k per year (can’t remember if it was revenue or profit, but they seem to have fairly low overhead regardless).

Anyway, he announced that and the audience was silent.

Next he announced that they raised $1 million in Venture Capital funding and everyone clapped.

Maybe it was just the awkward circumstance of the situation, but it reminded me how people in the Web 2.0 world really value VC and being the “in” startup, more so than actually generating revenue / profit.

Marcus Frind of Plentyoffish.com: Google AdSense’s $300k per month man

One example of a guy who probably doesn’t get as much respect as he deserves, despite having bootstrapped a thriving business, is Marcus Frind of Plentyoffish.com. The entire operation is apparently him and 4 servers. (he did, and still does, all the coding, marketing, etc. himself)

Here’s a photo of a check from Google to Marcus for $900k (Canadian Dollars):

Marcus Frind of plentyoffish.com's check for $900k Canadian dollars

(click for the full shot)

Marcus did get some props though from several presenters at the FoWA Summit, which I was glad to see.

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6 Responses to “Making $500k - Pffff. Raising $1M in VC: Priceless.”

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1 Ted Rheingold on Oct 14th, 2006 at 9:27 pm

You know, I thought the same thing as I was saying it. One correction is that we’re going to break $1M in revenue this year (I WISH it was earnings) and even that number doesn’t seem to garner much interest. I think so many web app companies are so engineering-focused they’ve never put to much thought into the realities of the business-side and self-sustainable growth.

Thanks for the complimentary words. It was a pleasure giving the presentation. It’s funny I removed a slide about PlentyOfFish just before I went on as it didn’t really reflect the passion-centric communities I was speaking on, but it does show that there is plenty of business to had beyond what the “experts” say are reasonable markets.

Best!
2 Charles on Oct 15th, 2006 at 12:23 am

Damn I wish I coulda been at FoWA. It sounds like it was really cool.
3 Shanti A. Braford on Oct 15th, 2006 at 6:26 am

Ted - thanks for the update, and for stopping by.

Congrats on being up to $1M in revenue! That’s an incredible accomplishment.

Something 95% of Web 2.0 companies will probably never achieve.