How Limos.Com Grew From A Modest Startup To A Multimillion Dollar Business

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http://www.limos.com/

In the fall of 2007, T.J. Clark sat down with three former colleagues from Hotwire.com to assess business opportunities in the travel industry. One jumped out at him. "Those last few miles of the trip were way behind the times," he says. "We couldn't figure out why nobody had modernized the experience in the town-car category."

Deep into the internet era, town-car and limo services still worked pretty much the same way they had in the age of Donkey Kong. If you were a regular business customer, you probably had a service to go to the airport and back, and you knew the driver like you did your barber or dentist. But establishing a relationship beyond your home base was an ad hoc process. It involved scoring leads from friends or colleagues, dealing with scraps of paper with phone numbers and scrawled first names, then getting a suspicious voice at the other end of your cold call. It felt more like finding a bookie than planning business logistics.

There were no national or even regional brands in the category--even today, no company has captured as much as 1 percent of the town-car industry, estimated at $1.3 billion in revenue in 2012, according to research firm IBISWorld--and virtually no online booking. Prices tended to be high compared to taxi service. And the quality of the rides fluctuated from surprisingly luxurious to unendurable.

A former intercollegiate swimmer at Notre Dame and then a Chicago trial lawyer, Clark moved to San Francisco to join the Hotwire team led by college friend Karl Peterson, then stayed on when IAC bought the company in 2003. Four years into his corporate career, he was ready for another ride on the startup roller coaster.

In early 2008, he and his team bought the Limos.com URL. They set out to build a network of providers who would agree to the company's strict standards in return for inclusion on its website. They traveled extensively, attending conventions, visiting with proprietors and taking hundreds of rides to validate the quality of car companies.

Their technology team created software that would instantly aggregate prices from every provider in their database who was willing to make the trip requested by a consumer. A feedback feature ensured that unacceptable performance had instant ramifications. Since launching in early 2008, Limos.com has grown from four employees to 55; revenue rose to more than $6 million in the first two years of business.

There are now more than 2.5 million registered users. Many are booking leisure trips--anything from wine tours to prom night--and the average fare in that category is about $500, making it a sizeable chunk of income. Meanwhile, half of the Fortune 500 companies have at least 50 registered users.

"We're making three big bets," Clark says. "We're betting on accessing both leisure travel and business travel in the existing town-car market, and we're betting on moving people from taxis to town cars. All we need to have is one of them pay off. So far, they all are."

That doesn't even include a larger potential market of business travelers who are using Limos.com to replace rental cars. In most cities, the cost of booking Limos.com cars ends up comparable to renting one--without having to pay for parking and gas. "There's also something nice about showing up at a meeting in a town car, as opposed to figuring out where to park," Clark says. "Less stress."

The number of potential customers who will be exposed to Limos.com will grow exponentially this month, when more airlines and hotel chains add a link to the site from their booking confirmation pages. "We think 2012 will be the year of the private car," Clark says. "It'll be the fastest-growing segment of the travel industry. And we'll be the brand that reaps the benefits."

[Via - Webiot.com]

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http://yuhuhu.com/

Nowadays, photo editing is an “in” thing. A lot of people enjoy cropping, enhancing and applying all sorts of techniques to enhance their photos, inasmuch as every photo has a story to tell. Best of all, these can be done through a selection of photo editing software, free or otherwise, that’s available to just about anyone on the web.

The name may not say much and the tagline – the only place for social pins – a little obscure, Yuhuhu.com is a cross between an online photo editing freeware and a social media platform like Pinterest. Notwithstanding the outright confusion (as there is no About page), what’s remarkable about this site is the simplicity of the interface and the relative ease of navigation. Here are some the basic steps:

1. Choose the thumbnail of the image you want to include in your photo. That can either be a bear with a plush heart, an outstretched hand with a bouquet of flowers, grapes, a cat sleeping in a box, and a few others.
2. Select the position/variation of the photo effect, either lower left-hand side or lower right-hand side.
3. Upload your photo.
4. Do some editing, if needed.
5. Finally, once you’re done, click go and your edited photo should be available for download.

At step #4 above, however, everything started to get really tricky. As there aren’t any instruction manuals, figuring out how to go about the horizontal and vertical layouts was quite a challenge. And for a photo editing software (if indeed it is), Yuhuhu.com doesn’t have much photo effects. The choices are very limited, all contained in a single page and a little too girly to begin with.

On the upper right-hand side of the page are three tabs – Home, Register and Login. Since I was already at the Home page and I didn’t have any login credentials yet, the next logical course of action was to register. I was asked to provide a username, a password and my e-mail address. After hitting register, boom, I came up with a PHP error that left me wondering what in the world just happened.

When I tried registering again, thinking I just bumped into some kind of a glitch, it turned out I was already registered. What was even more disappointing was discovering that the features available to me as a registered and unregistered user were basically one and the same, leaving me to conclude I just wasted my time registering.

To compete with other established photo editing freeware and/or social media platform, Yuhuhu.com still has much to work on.

[Via - Webiot.com]

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http://kidneydiet.com/

Two years ago, Lynne Sanditen was waiting in line, deciding whether to order a meal of green beans or mashed potatoes for her father who had kidney disease. She thought, something had to be done to solve this problem. That very moment, the KidneyDiet idea was born.

In order not to have to undergo dialysis, which, in the absence of a kidney transplant, is a lifetime procedure, many kidney disease sufferers have to track and change their eating habits.

A technology marketing expert by profession, Sanditen launched Boulder-based Pain Free Living and worked with software code experts, independent contractors and nutritionists to create the KidneyDiet mobile app to help end users monitor their intake of potassium, protein, phosphorus and other nutrients. With KidneyDiet, users either scroll through a list of food items or type in the items to determine their nutritional value. The app conveniently allows them to analyze and track what they eat to ensure they are following their doctors’ recommendations.

The app is being sold for $5 in the Apple Store and is also available for Android devices.

[Via - NicheGeek.com]

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http://borro.com

Artwork by Andy Warhol, military medals, helicopters, and a Babe Ruth baseball bat aren't the typical pawnshop fare. But all of these valuables have been used to secure loans through a personal asset company called Borro.

At a time when small business bank loans can be hard to get, more entrepreneurs are looking for alternative ways to finance their businesses. Borro is trying to tap into that niche, offering short-term loans between $1,000 and $1 million to small businesses and other clients who provide collateral such as fine art, watches, jewelry and even private jets and yachts.

Paul Aitken, founder and CEO of Borro, came up with the idea for the firm after Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008.

"I felt there was an opportunity to provide a business that bridges the gap between the very high end types of lending that private banks do and the very high end of retail pawnbroking," he said.

Borro doesn't have a retail presence, though, and it offers much bigger loans than a traditional pawnbroker, so "we don't actually call ourselves a pawn shop," said Aitken.

Indeed, loans average about $17,000 at Borro vs. $150 at a traditional pawnshop, according to data from the company and the National Pawnbrokers Association. Depending on the item, a customer can borrow between 50% and 70% of its resale value at an interest rate ranging from 2.49% to 3.99% per month.

Originally launched in the UK, Borro made its way stateside in January. Clients include small business owners who need cash to invest in new technology or finance a growing business, as well as private individuals garnered through referrals from private banks and financial advisors.

[Via - CNNMoney.Com]

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Making Money In Your Sleep. Almost - SleepTracker.Com Story

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http://www.sleeptracker.com/

Late one night about 15 years ago, Lee Loree noticed his wife holding a perfectly lucid conversation in her sleep. That observation started the then-stock analyst on wondering about sleep patterns, talking to engineers, and then soliciting money from angel investors to build a device to improve how we sleep.

The result is the SleepTracker, a watch-like monitor and alarm that users wear on their wrists to record their sleep patterns and awaken them at an optimal time within the window they have chosen. The alarm goes off when the lightest sleep stage is reached during that window, reducing early morning grogginess. The monitor also records sleep stages throughout the night, converting it into data that can be analyzed over time with tracking software.

Loree, 39, has sold more than 250,000 units in 35 countries but still runs his $3 million Innovative Sleep Solutions as a one-person business from his Atlanta home. I spoke to him recently about the startup process and why he deliberately keeps his company small; edited excerpts of our conversation follow.

You were working in finance in 1998, with no background as an inventor or a sleep scientist, when you came up with SleepTracker. How did you do it?

I started checking books out at the public library. I spent 20 or 30 nights sitting in a closet, watching my wife sleep, which is pretty creepy when you think about it. I had access to a lot of smart people through my networks, so I met with them and eventually found a micro-electrical engineer and a software programmer to write the code. We built a couple generations of prototypes, which I financed by withdrawing money from my retirement accounts. When we had north of $100,000 invested, people told me I was a fool—and rightly so.

I was still working at a bank at the time, and I ran out of funds. So I wrote a business plan and did a mini-roadshow, meeting with angel investors. I went with an angel who had business experience and could help me navigate the startup. He turned into a pretty good shepherd. He’s still involved with the company; we talk quarterly.

You got the product to market in 2005. What was the reaction?

We sat and stared at our website that first day and we had 38 visitors. We didn’t have any sales. The next day, a tech blog found us and they threw up a screenshot of our website. Our business went crazy. It was like a commercial where people are watching one sale, then another, then five, then 30, and everybody starts freaking out.

I had conservative projections in my business plan, with 1,000 sales expected in the first year and 5,000 in the second year. Well, we sold 5,800 pieces in the first nine months and 12,000 the next year. We were cash-flow-positive in the first month. We scrambled to support various browsers and add an international component to our shopping cart. The product blew away all expectations that I ever had.

Your product was an early innovation but now you have competitors. Does that concern you?

I believe competition is inevitable, so you use it to your advantage. More people advertising in this space, doing interviews, doing marketing—it should grow the pie, assuming you have a product that works and is fairly priced.

A lot of our competitors have gone out and raised significant amounts of money. They have employees; they have infrastructure. Meanwhile, we have this quiet little business, we haven’t had to get additional outside investment, we have built up a significant war chest, and we don’t even carry a line of credit. We run the business debt-free and it’s clipping along.

Do you think about growing into a larger organization?

We found a sweet spot: Our business grows 10 to 20 percent annually, which is real manageable, and we are where we want to be in terms of managing cash flow. We have all the infrastructure: a call center, fulfillment center, manufacturers, warehouses—but none of them work for me. My main goal with this company was flexibility with my lifestyle. I wanted to be a dad and a husband and be there to be a part of things with my family. If I had the ambition to have a bigger company, we could scale this business up and do 500,000 pieces a year, I don’t have any doubt about that.

But using contractors, rather than employees, works for me because when we’ve fulfilled that obligation, I can turn off that expense and turn it back on when I need it. They like it also because it gives them the flexibility to pursue other contracts. And I don’t have to deal with 401(k)s, or kids being sick and people being out of the office.

How did you set up distribution?

You can get the product online at places like Amazon and Costco and in a few very specific brick-and-mortar stores. There really is not a great channel in the U.S. for these types of devices. We’ve been in specialty catalogs but we’ve not found that to be particularly productive. Some of the big box retailers that used to dedicate a lot of space to CDs and video games have gotten crushed because people are streaming that stuff now. So they’re piloting different things in that dead space, but we struggle to think that’s a good plan for us. No one is going to Best Buy to pick up a sleep monitor.

In Europe, Mexico, and Asia, we have a much bigger footprint. There are limited resources in a small business and I’ve spent much of my time trying to grow international sales.

About half of your revenues now come from sales overseas. How do you manage those markets?

We sell to 30 independent distributors, some of whom I found in our first month of operations and [who] are still with us today. We get them the product, plus camera-ready art, and I do media interviews all over the world. Of 30 distributors, 20 of them I’ve never met face-to-face. Bidding jobs to people, regardless of where they live or what they look like, has worked for me from day one in this business and I believe in it.

You are still selling the same basic product you started with in 2005. Have you got any innovations in the works?

We’re on our fourth or fifth iteration at this point, but we’re kind of a one-trick pony. I recognize that for the long term, we want to have multiple legs so we have more stability, but I’m not sure how to make it a whole lot better. It’s really hard—when you have a business that makes money—to change your focus. We are working on some innovations; by the first of the year we should have a feel for their potential and timelines. But we’ve done this before and the ideas all peter out. Sometimes we’ve spent $10,000 to $40,000 before walking away. I have a proven product, so I try not to monkey too much with it at this point.

[Via - BusinessWeek.Com]

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If you love to read, you know that books are a treasure. And if you're somebody who loves to collect memories through photographs, you know that photo books to share with family and friends can be a source of joy and inspiration.

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Aside from designing and publishing your book online with no need for download, other perks PrintLuna offers include selling your book at no extra charge, getting your book delivered to your doorstep, turning your book into a gift friends and family will love, receiving promotions for special events and a whole lot more.

So if you want books you can truly be proud of and more, it won’t hurt to give PrintLuna a try.

[Via - NicheGeek.Com]

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A lot of people wonder (and you may be one of them), why do companies need logos? And why do these companies sometimes spend thousands of dollars for a logo? The answer is simple: Logos help in branding, in creating an identity for a company, an identity that is easily recognized by consumers. As for why companies spend thousands for a logo, they probably are not aware there is a service called LOGASTER.

LOGASTER is an online design software and logo maker that allows users - mostly SMEs (small and medium enterprises) - to create their own professional-looking logos in a matter of minutes, regardless of a user's designing or logo-making experience.

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[Via - MadConomist.com]

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