Mark Harbottle & Matt MickiewiczCompany: Sitepoint
Website: www.sitepoint.com
Mark Harbottle’s original investment in the online and publishing business Sitepoint was just $400. That was 10 years ago, and today Sitepoint is turning over around US$6 million, 95% of which is earned offshore.
Sitepoint has also been the incubator that enabled him to launch an online design service in February 2008 called 99 Designs, which is now reporting revenue of more than $1 million each month.
A second business, the website sales marketplace Flippa, was launched in May 2009 and already looks like it will turn over $1 million in its first year. Harbottle has achieved all of this without venture capital, and is looking forward to launching more businesses.
Marc LehmannCompany: Saasu
Website: www.saasu.com
Sometimes a financial crisis can be a good thing, especially for accounting software company Saasu. Many companies wary of spending money on IT hardware and software have becomes converts to the software-as-a-service model used by Saasu, where its applications are delivered over the internet, rather than being installed on a PC.
Success for founder Marc Lehman has been a long time coming since he created the company in 2000, but the bootstrapped business recently signed its 10,000th customer and is winning business from traditional software providers. Revenue is doubling, and a personal finance version is also in the works. Lehman is aiming to list the company in 2011.
Mick Liubinskas & Phil MorleCompany: Pollenizer
Website: www.pollenizer.com
Look inside many of the web businesses started in the past two years and you’ll see the work of Mick Liubinskas, Phil Morle and the team at Pollenizer. Like a dotcom factory, Pollenizer has had a hand in the development of numerous businesses, with an ‘elastic team’ that numbers 12 in Australia and another 46 in India.
Recently the company added marketing expertise to help its clients launch and grow successfully. Liubinskas says Pollenizer has the capacity to work on four to five projects simultaneously – launching some in just a matter of weeks, with finished work including www.posse.com and www.spreets.com (built in just six weeks), and project work for the BBC.
Richard MerglerCompany: MIA
Website: www.miainternational.com
Mobile is an obvious area for innovation, but making money has been a hard slog for many. Leading the charge is MIA International, a profitable business with a broad range of mobile site creation and advertising products that employs 53 people in Sydney, the US and UK, and is expecting at least 20% growth this year.
Having forged relationships with Telstra and Optus, founder and chief executive Richard Mergler is exploring opportunities offshore and is relocating to the US, where he will be set up an advertising network for its Ad Factory product, as well as looking for investors. MIA has also launched a new business unit called Device Digital, to focus on selling to media companies and advertising agencies, as well as building new mobile applications.
Company: Booking Angel
Website: www.bookingangel.com.au
In 2004 Dean McEvoy saw a need to help small businesses win business by taking bookings on the internet. In September 2009 his company, BookAngel, signed a partnership deal with the US online guide Citysearch that McEvoy estimates will earn is his business $9 million a year. Now he says he has been beating back approaches from investors, which well suits his plan to raise capital this year.
Ultimately McEvoy sees Booking Angel as being acquired by a larger business in the US, although he has not lost the dream of growing it into a multimillion dollar business on its own. In conjunction with the team at Pollenizer he has also launched Spreets, an online service to help create and sell discounted deals on products and services using social media.
Company: QMCODES
Website: www.qmcodes.com
If you’ve ever puzzled over those strange black-and-white boxes that have been appearing in magazines and on movie posters of late, Antony McGregor Dey is the guy to talk to. Since May 2008 he has been spruiking the idea of quick response codes (or QR codes), which when photographed with a mobile phone can provide a link to a website, making any printed item ‘clickable’.
His business, QMCODES, has attracted the attention of big publishers in the US for its Interactive Print platform, with paid trials at Harper Collins, Warner Music and Hachette Book Group, as well as with advertising agencies.
QMCODES will be putting codes on every entrance badge for the South By Southwest conference in Austin in March, and McGregor Dey is relocating from Melbourne to New York to follow opportunities as the company chases revenue of $1 million by the end of the year.
Sidney Minassian & Alon NovyCompany: Liaise
Website: www.liaise.com
Sidney Minassian and Alon Novy cut their teeth as entrepreneurs on the Australian company Think Software, but they chose the US as the place to launch their latest venture. Liaise is a software tool that captures and manages interaction within and between businesses.
The company burst into prominence when it won the $1 million Media Prize for the People’s Choice award in the enterprise category at the influential DEMOfall Conference in the US last year. In December it opened its beta program to the public, and was subsequently selected by Microsoft to demonstrate its interactivity with that company’s Sharepoint collaboration software, and will sponsor it to return to DEMO in March this year. Liaise has hired a US chief executive, and will soon raise a second round of venture capital.
Smart Company is the leading online publication in Australia for free news, information and resources catering to Australia’s entrepreneurs, small and medium business owners and business managers.
