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This family turned a childhood game into a multi-million dollar business.

Jera, 34, and Brad Deal, 39

Sticks And Stones, Peoria, Illinois
Projected 2008 sales: $10.5 million
Description: Custom keepsakes made using framed photos

Stick and Stones

Picture perfect: When Jera Deal took her oldest daughter “letter hunting,” it was merely a way for the 15-month-old to learn the alphabet by finding letters in nature and architecture. Four years and two kids later, however, that game had evolved into a full-time business. When they needed a unique and memorable gift for a wedding, Jera and husband Brad framed photos of the letters that spelled the newlyweds’ last name. The keepsake was a hit, and the Deals quickly realized they were on to something.

Show biz: Following the 2005 launch of their website, the Deals got into their first catalog and set out to get their product into as many hands as possible. There was one person, however, who they especially wanted to reach: Oprah Winfrey. After a couple of trips to her show and “a little bit of luck and persistence,” says Brad, they finally managed to reach the icon. “I stood up in front of 300 audience members and [gave] her a keepsake,” he explains. “She opened it and loved it”–so much so that she commissioned one on the spot for Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. Says Brad, “We were already self-sustaining at that point, but having [Oprah's approval] helped a lot.”

Word bank: Today, Jera and Brad continue to build their letter inventory, brand, reach and sales. They’re inking deals with a third catalog and are working on relationships with Disney and Hallmark. But staying true to their original vision remains a priority. “We don’t ever want to come across as commercialized,” says Jera. “This is a family business [that started] as a hobby with our daughters. We want to maintain that integrity.”

Follow their lead: Even a successful business can benefit from a high-profile endorsement.

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What is your secret to success?
Brad and Jera: The gut answer is faith. We can’t tell you how many things got answered in our business because we prayed and prayed. But from a business standpoint: building the brand. When you think MP3 player, you think iPod. In our small industry, we are like that. We are the iPod of our specific market.

What advice would you give other entrepreneurs?
Brad and Jera: Seek out people who have done it before or who can help. Don’t be afraid to humble yourself and ask. And don’t be afraid to go straight to the top. Ask for the producer’s name; ask for the editor’s name.

When did you know you’d “made it”?
Brad and Jera: Getting on Oprah’s show as an audience member and giving her a keepsake. When she said, “I have to have [one] for Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes,” the audience collectively gasped because they all knew what that was going to do for business. She’s the most recognizable face in the world. We would have been a nameless catalog company without her.

What was the first toy or reward you bought for yourself when you became successful?
Brad and Jera: Honestly, we have not bought a thing for ourselves. We just donate it. We’re house hunting and we’ll get a new car at some point, but we already have nice cars and live in a beautiful home. We already have a blessed life, so it’s a privilege to give back to the community. In January, we bought new desks for our daughters’ classrooms at their private school. The desks have been around since 1972; they were falling apart.

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Thomas Gorny, 30
iPower
Phoenix
Projected 2006 Sales: More than $40 million
Description: Web hosting and services

Across Countries: Thomas Gorny spent the first 14 years of his life in Poland. A move to Germany found him attending a prestigious business college and running his own PC hardware business. Then, two months before graduation, he dropped out and sold his business for very little money to seize an opportunity to immigrate to America. The risk paid off not once, but twice.

iPower.com

First Time Around: Gorny joined one of the very first web hosting companies in 1996 and earned 20 percent ownership. The company was sold in 1998, and when Gorny left in 1999, he was in the money. “I never thought I’d go back to web hosting,” he says. So he jumped into marketing and real estate, but when the bubble burst in 2001, his stocks dropped and his real estate projects suffered. “I just got involved with the wrong people in business,” says Gorny, who lost everything.

Second Time Around: “Being on an investor visa, I couldn’t even go to work for somebody because I didn’t have a work permit,” Gorny says. After re-examining the hosting market, he realized there was room for a company offering web hosting and site building for nontechnical users. Armed with his American Express card, Gorny willed iPower into existence in late 2001. “I said to myself, ‘If we can acquire 10 customers a day, I’m going to be in heaven.’” The company garnered 60,000 customers in its first year. Now with more than 500,000, iPower recently moved its headquarters from Santa Monica, California, to Phoenix.

No Exit: “One thing I said at the beginning is that I do not have an exit strategy, and I’m holding to [that]. That is a powerful thing,” says Gorny. His business is now the world’s fourth-largest website hosting company, thanks in part to Gorny’s vision of offering feature-rich but also easy-to-use hosting packages. Phoenix may be a long way from Poland, but Gorny has definitely found a place to call his own.

Follow His Lead: Turn adversity into opportunity by revisiting your business strengths and taking cues from your past successes.

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Greg Selkoe, 33

Karmaloop, Boston, Massachusetts
Projected 2008 sales: $40 million
Description: Streetwear retailer and online community

Wear it’s at: With brand names like Artful Dodger, Married to the Mob and Naughty Monkey on its roster, Karmaloop is a far cry from your local mall’s cookie-cutter clothing stores. “One of the things that makes Karmaloop unique is that we’re much more than an e-commerce site,” says founder Greg Selkoe. “We’re a community of style.” With his recent video venture KarmaloopTV and upcoming social network Junglelife.com, Selkoe has come a long way since bootstrapping the clothing retailer from his parents’ basement in 1999. “We had to learn on a very tight budget and be very careful about every penny we spent.”

karmaloop.com

Fashion forward: Karmaloop now has a passionate global customer base of more than 2.5 million unique web visitors per month. “We’ve framed it as a movement to help save people from the evil forces of McFashion,” says Selkoe, whose Street Team consists of customers who go out and promote the store. The Kazbah section of the site features a handpicked set of up-and-coming underground designers who help keep Karmaloop on the cutting edge of urban fashion.

Harvard man: Streetwear may seem like an unusual market for someone with an urban planning background and a public policy degree from Harvard, but it’s all led to a deeper cultural understanding that’s helped Selkoe develop his business the same way a city grows from a small town. “Karmaloop is a lifestyle. It’s not just selling clothes,” he says. “Clothing and music and culture are completely linked. It’s all symbiotic.”

Follow his lead: Recruit passionate customers who can help you generate ideas and market your business.

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What is your secret to success?
Selkoe: Staying positive. A number of things have come up that would make a lot
of people think this company would never succeed. The most important thing is believing in myself, the people I’m working with and the concept.

What advice would you give other entrepreneurs?
Selkoe: Don’t give up. If you have a good idea and you think you can do it, it
takes longer than you think. There were many years when we didn’t make money. If you have a good concept, eventually, it’s going to work out.

When did you know you had “made it”?
Selkoe: You never know that 100 percent. There was never one exact moment when I knew I made it. The thing that kept me going was the tremendous response
from our customers, even when it wasn’t going well in terms of money.

What was the first toy or reward you bought for yourself when you became successful?
Selkoe: Staying in nice hotels is the main thing I started doing, and sometimes flying in first class. For so long, I was taking the bus and staying in flop houses. I would stay in hotels that should have been condemned. Now I’m starting to stay in nicer hotels.

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John Vechey, 28; Brian Fiete, 29; and Jason Kapalka, 37
PopCap Games, Seattle
Projected 2007 Sales: More than $20 million
Description: Creator and provider of downloadable games

Level One: When game designer Jason Kapalka first met John Vechey and Brian Fiete in 1997, the two 19-year-olds had just been wooed from Indiana to work at Kapalka’s former employer, a gaming company. “We hit it off really well,” says Kapalka, who was impressed by an online game the two teens had created. “We kept in touch, and around 2000, we were all a little unhappy with our jobs. We thought, ‘Hey, we could start our own company.’”

Beyond the Bust: As it turned out, the years 2000 and 2001 weren’t kind to internet companies. “We didn’t have the best timing, but we survived because we didn’t have many expenses,” says Kapalka. The business’s first low-overhead stomping grounds were in the co-founders’ respective apartments. PopCap adapted to uncertain times by experimenting with direct game downloads from its website. The gamble paid off, and within a couple of years, the company moved to a real office in Seattle. It has since added offices in Chicago; San Francisco; Vancouver, British Columbia; and Dublin, Ireland.

popcap.com

High Score: “We’re just trying to keep a very simple business model: Make games. If people like them, they’ll buy them,” says Kapalka, adding that top sellers include Bejeweled, Bookworm, Chuzzle and Peggle–all games that are easy to learn but hard to master. People certainly love PopCap’s games: Their content generated around $75 million in sales of their content across all platforms and partners in 2006. A lot of that is because the games have more in common with Pac-Man and Tetris than with World of Warcraft. PopCap is helping to engineer a shift from complicated, hard-core gaming to casual gaming for general audiences. Says Kapalka, “We’re moving toward the democratization of video games.” And that’s a winning formula.

Follow Their Lead: No matter how fast your company grows, stay focused on keeping your product quality standards high.  –Amanda C. Kooser
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Jacob DeHart, 25, and Jake Nickell, 27
Threadless.com, Chicago
Projected 2007 Sales: $25 million to $30 million
Description: Online T-shirt design company

Threadless is a community-centered online apparel store run by skinnyCorp of Chicago, Illinois, since 2000. Co-founders Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart started the company with $1,000 in seed money after entering an internet t-shirt design contest^.

Members of the Threadless community submit t-shirt designs online; the designs are then put to a public vote. A small percentage of submitted designs are selected for printing and sold through an online store. Creators of the winning designs receive a prize of cash and store credit.

Operation

threadless.com

Designers upload their t-shirt designs to the website, where visitors and members of the community score them on a scale of 0 to 5. On average, around 700 designs compete in any given week. Each week, the staff selects about ten designs.Each designer selected receives $2,000 in cash, as well as an additional $500 for every reprint.

On occasion, special contests—known as “Loves Threadless”—run in association with various sponsors. These contests set a theme for designs, with a selection of additional prizes being awarded to the chosen winner; special prizes often relate to the sponsor. The success of this concept led to several spin-off projects by the same company, including ongoing design competitions for t-shirt slogans at OMG Clothing and neckties and wallpaper at Naked and Angry. The competition from OMG Clothing was later integrated into the main website with the introduction of Threadless TypeTees. Multiple other companies have adopted the community model created at Threadless. Nevertheless, in mid-2006, Threadless expanded in a more traditional direction, adding shirts designed by selected artists. These designs, known as Threadless Select designs, are not subject to the voting process.

In the open source community, a Threadless t-shirt or design is considered to be crowd sourced because the designer and the company retain all rights to the design. As the “source” of a design—i.e., its vector graphics file—is not available for download, it cannot be considered “open source”.

Threadless shirts are run in limited batches. When shirts are sold out, customers can request a reprint. However, reprinting occurs only when there is enough demand, and the decision to reprint is ultimately up to company. New shirts are released on Mondays

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Steve Chen born in August of 1978 in Taiwan. Chad Hurley born c. 1977; married; children: two. Education: Chen: Studied computer science at the University of Illinois—Urbana-Champaign, c. 1995–99. Hurley: Earned degree in fine arts from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, c. 1999.

Addresses: Office—c/o Google, Inc., 1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy., Mountain View, CA 94043.

Career

youtube.com

Chen worked for PayPal, Inc., as a programmer and later with its China operations, c. 1999–2005; Hurley was hired as PayPal’s first graphic designer in 1999, and left in 2002 to become a freelance design consultant; the pair established the company that would become YouTube.com with Chen as chief technology officer and Hurley as chief executive officer, February, 2005; YouTube.com acquired by Google, Inc. October, 2006.

Sidelights

Like so many technology pioneers before them, Steve Chen and Chad Hurley had little idea that the video-sharing Web site they created in 2005, YouTube, would turn out to be such a revolutionary force and community-creating phenomenon. The two Californians and former co-workers became overnight millionaires a year later when YouTube was acquired by the search-engine Google for an astounding $1.65 billion. The deal made headlines around the world in October of 2006, and new-technology analysts heralded it as a synergistic union of two of the Web’s biggest successes stories in recent years. “We started this to solve a personal problem,” Hurley told BusinessWeek’s Heather Green. “Now we’re creating a new way to reach audiences in an era where the traditional TV time slot doesn’t exist anymore.”

Watch the video of Chad and Steve after google acquired Youtube:

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Meebo.com Networth: $3.5 Million
Founders: Seth Sternberg, Sandy Jen, and Elaine Wherry
Age: 30,29 and 27

“When we put it out we did not know if anyone would like it; we just knew that it solved our problem,” explains Seth Sternberg, 28, chief executive and co-founder of Meebo.com.

The “it” in question is Meebo, a web-based instant messaging (IM) system which lets users send and receive messages from a number of different IM services, such as AOL, MSN, Yahoo and Jabber.

meebo.com

It is an elegant solution to the problem of having multiple accounts – many of which are not interoperable – and requiring different software downloads.

Community built

Mr Sternberg is not concerned that Meebo could be rendered obsolete if the big IM firms decided to work together and end interoperability issues.

“Yahoo and Microsoft have already made their IM network interoperable – we saw no impact.

“Meebo is a service but it has a community built around it. It is available in 59 different languages and our users did all that translating. The users felt so passionately about the product.”

While he jokes about one day setting up a Meebo airline, Mr Sternberg says the priority remains to roll out essential features and to take advantage of the growing power and flexibility of the web to deliver new services.

“There are very, very few limitations to the types of software that can be run as web applications.

“Microsoft and Adobe are working on technology that will completely blur the line between whether an application comes over the web or is on the desktop.”

But does he ever wish he was sitting in a cubicle at IBM, worrying about other people’s budgets?

“Definitely not. When it’s your own project, you are passionate about it all the time.”

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Ashley Quall’s Whateverlife.com generates 70,ooo dollars a month

70 thousand dollars a month is a very nice monthly income. Whateverlife.com, owned and created by 17 year old Ashley Qualls, is a site aimed at teenage girls and provides free myspace layouts….The site generates about 70 thousand dollars a month mainly from advertisements on her site.  Today we will look at whateverlife.com from a business point of view, so that you can apply a similar business model for your success. Whateverlife’s owner may be 17 years old, however she handles her business in a very business savvy wad.

whateverlife.com

Whateverlife may offer completely different services and/or product than your company, but the way you should sell your product/services should be the same. Whateverlife knows its audience very well. It caters specifically to teenage girls and knows what they want. How can you sell anything if you do not know what your potential customer wants? Put your self in your customers’ shoes and ask what it is you want. Adjust your marketing to reflect who you are trying to bring in as a customer. Know your audience like whateverlife and your customer base will increase.

Whateverlife offers FREE Myspace layouts. Keyword is free, obviously. We all love free products. Free is nearly impossible to turn down. Especially if you are looking for something specific, you find exactly what you want, and you get it for free! This is exactly what Ashley Qualls’ “customers” get. They are looking for the hottest Myspace layouts, find them on whateverlife.com, and are available for free. Whateverlife makes money from the advertisers on the website. The advertisers love the amount of traffic her site gets, and they know the audience they have to cater their ads to. If Whateverlife charged for every myspace layout, users would rather go to other sites who offer them for free. So by providing a great product for free, Whateverlife creates customers without the customer knowing it. Offer something to your customers to bring them in and then make your new relationship profitable for you. Give something to get something in return.

Ashley Quall

Whateverlife’s users can identify with the look and design of the website. They feel at home when they visit the website. Creating an identity that your customers can feel comfortable with or even a identity that they would like to have is necessary for a successful business. Look at Apple,  Who almost went bankrupt in 1997, they designed the Ipod. The Ipod didn’t necessarily do anything different from other portable mp3 players, but what it did do, it did it with style and function blended together. Everyone wants to look good. Two different products with the same features, the one that looks the best and is easier to use will be the one you buy. Create a look that your customers can identify with, throw in easy and simple functionality and your customers will pick your product/service over the competition.

Apply these tips to you and your company and you will only benefit. Whateverlife is a perfect example of a successful company with a successful business model. Quick summary:

• Know your audience and cater to them.
• Give something for ‘free’ to your potential customers.
• Create a look that your customers want and can identify with, and keep it simple.

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Markus Frind is a Canadian entrepreneur who owns PlentyofFish.com, the world’s largest online dating website. According to reports in 2006, he earned around $10,000 a day through Adsense’s contextual advertising program.

plentyoffish.com

According to a recent article , Plenty of Fish now receives 45 million visitors along with 1.1 billion pageviews every month.

His annual income from PlentyofFish.com alone is currently $5 to $10 million a year.

What is fascinating is that Markus Frind is a one-man show. He virtually ran Plenty of Fish by himself, along with help from his girlfriend and other voluntary moderators.

This is however, set to change as Markus has plans to gradually develop a team of 20 to 30 employees over the next few months.

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