What they do:
Created a service to manage email marketing.
Inspiration:
In 2002, Ryan Allis and Aaron Houghton were students at the University of North Carolina. Allis specialized in web-marketing consulting, while Houghton did web design and software development. Aaron had just created a software tool for managing email-marketing lists. Ryan tried it and thought it had a lot of potential in his world of web marketing. They decided to combine their talents and make something totally new. The result was iContact.
About the business:
iContact is an online service that helps businesses manage their email marketing. Within one year, iContact turned a profit, drumming up 300,000 dollars in revenue. Recent annual revenue reached over $26 million dollars. They keep the good karma going by donating much of their time, money, and services to numerous causes, charities and nonprofits.
In this episode of the Why Didn’t I Think of That? Podcast, the Why Guys are joined by blogger Benjamin Christopher for a wide-ranging discussion on Pandora Radio and the current state of Social Music.
For a while, it looked like Skype, the popular video chat program, could go either way. But Skype is hardly on its way to the tech start-up junkyard. Or if it is, Microsoft just made an $8.5 billion mistake.
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Blogs are great. Especially this one. But they remain an enigma to some people. Do you ever wonder, “How do those people make money off of that?” And, maybe even more importantly, “What is a blog, really?