A true Start-up story: day two - a little history, the second year.

Posted on May 20, 2007

A true Start-up story: Day two

See, I’m now writing 2 days into one for the small business story. So, I’ve got to tell you about our first entrepreneurship year in day one, now it’s time to pass to the more challenging second year.

Strangely enough, the second year started with me changing 9-to-5 jobs again. This was challenging enough, I had to find an employer that will understand, agree and sign that I can run my business as a part time job. Once this transition period was over, my two partners, Simona and Tina got more involved into the business. Simona got us the first “bigger” customers with her direct involvement into sales (I was still learning my way into Web programing and Tina was doing the creatives) and we’ve got our first PR event (which later evolved into a new business line, in progress a pr and media agency, but I will talk about this later).

This second year was really good in testing our capabilities, finding our strengths and growing as a business. We saved any penny in the process, waiting for the right moment to expand (which happened in the third year - I will tell you later in day three).

About half year, I got my first interview with an USA journalist and blogger about my entrepreneurship experience (Shawn Hessinger from www.bootstrapme.com) which actually was the moment when I’ve decided that I really have to keep on going no matter how hard it was. Also got some exposure over my own blog - one more reason to have my pride and make it work.

As we kept our 9-to-5 jobs - we hit some critical spots when we had really a lot going on, but no matter how hard it was, we felt that the things were starting to move in the right direction. We had a lot of customers (taking into consideration that we were only working by night), all of them coming by word of mouth. We never advertised, even our own site remained unchanged (and not updated) - I will say something about it later.

Our first customer (the one I’ve got from my previous job) kept coming back with more work (we are still working for him right now). I think he was our first fan. We did some stationary and advertising materials for a conference he was organizing, and that was the first time when we got to deal with real suppliers (a printing house) and went to all that stress about delivering on time, collaborating with more companies and getting involved in serious stuff. We’ve also got involved in some non-profit activities to sustain young artists.

By the end of the year we were quite set to change a little the focus from Web Design to PR and more offline stuff, which was the second change in the business plan and a Spin-off called in progress - sorry, Romanian only. Also, the involvement in the company changed a little, I switched to a secondary role, while Simona and Tina were developing most of the things.

At the end of the second year we were already doing good, we had profit and money in the bank, steady customers and more to come soon.

Continues day three.

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