Our Startup Story

Hi, everyone.  I’m Jeffry Houser and I’m a technical entrepreneur.  In high school, I mowed lawns for a neighbor.  At the time, I had no idea that could be construed as an Entrepreneurship beginning.

In college, I started selling live import CDs (AKA Bootlegs) on the Internet.  This was before the web was the e-commerce haven it is today.  At the time, selling stuff on the Internet meant posting to Usenet and having people snail mail us a check.   I didn’t think this was a business either; I was just looking for a way to make some extra cash.  Myself and a friend pooled our money together and placed a bulk order with a supplier in Germany then we sold stuff over the Internet.  My friend was the financier and I was the labor.  We split profits 50/50.  It was nice to have some extra spending cash for a poor college student and I still have some of the unsold merchandise in my collection today.

Then I graduated from college with a computer science degree and got a “real” job for a few years.  I worked as the “IT Guy” in a business to business consulting firm.  My boss would sell clients on these incredibly insane things and it was my job to figure out how to implement them.  I was in heaven.  I wasn’t even old enough to drink, yet I had already accomplished more than I ever dreamed I could.  This is more depressing than it sounds.  Then the hours started to grate on me and I drifted towards burn out. After a particularly good pizza one afternoon, I gave my two weeks notice.

This led to the founding of DotComIt, the IT consulting firm which has been my bread and butter for more than 9 years.  If I have one piece of advice, it is do not ever start a business this way.  I had no plan, nominal savings, and no idea what I wanted to do with my life.  I just got lucky.  The company I left hired me a week later.  I went to a local User Group meeting and got a client.  A different user group got me a different client.  Then I got another client, and another.

All of a sudden, I was writing books paper weights for Osborne McGraw-Hill.  Then I was speaking at User Groups and Conferences all over the US.  Without doing anything business-like on my part; word of mouth kept me busy.  It wasn’t all fun and games though.  I had one client go out of business owing me a big chunk of change.  I had many issues collecting payments; and a lot of clients would renegotiate invoices when it came time to pay.  It seemed with every project, I would modify my contract terms and/or internal procedures.  These days I am known for being especially meticulous on doing “due diligence’ as a business owner.

Along the way I was in 2 serious bands; a band is a business too.  I also started a company named “Web Pages for Bands” (guess what that company did?).  I had this crazy idea to create a way for independent musicians to easily sell mp3s on their web site.  The idea was fantastic (see iTunes, Amazon MP3, CDBaby, and plenty of others), but the business crashed and burned.  I was making too much money consulting and didn’t devote enough time to getting it off the ground.  If I was smarter about building that business, I’d be writing this from my own private island right now.  Clearly I had the right idea at the right time.  But it doesn’t matter how good your fudge is if you keep making cookies.

A couple of years ago I stopped being in bands and decided to devote my full attention to DotComIt.  At some point I decided I absolutely hate consulting.  It wasn’t always so, but I have been doing it for a real long time.  I needed to decide what I really wanted to do with my life.  I loved writing and helping other developers.  Can someone create a business based solely on that?  I think so!

I started The Flex Show, a podcast for Flex Developers.  When you do have a moniker like “Producer of The Flex Show” next to your name, no one questions your ability to work with the technology, so it was a bit easier to bring on consulting jobs.  But, I didn’t want to bring on consulting jobs; I wanted to convince people to pay me to produce these episodes that I’m already producing for free.  Where else can you go to get a message in front of 2700 (and counting) Flex Developers?  Adobe Max, probably, but  I am pretty sure a sponsorship of the podcast would be cheaper and give you more direct exposure.

I was always intrigued by the challenges of product development and it seems like a nice change from consulting.   I’ve started working on Flextras, a line of Easy to Use Interface Design Components for Flex Developers.  This is in the uber start up stage and my launch is currently about four months late.  I’m juggling graphic designers, lawyers, a web developer, and a business coach consultant trying to pull everything together.  Building a product was the easy part.

So, at the moment I have two ‘brands’ in start up mode; and a mature consulting business that I want to shoot and bury.  I know John and Tom love business transparency.  I want to bring The Flex Show revenues up to 150K a year.  Consistent sponsorships would do that easy if we could succesfully bring sponsors on.  We’re still figuring out what works best in our format.  With Flextras, I want to generate 600K a year and have a staff of five employees.  To do that, we need to sell 160 components a month.  To keep that pace up, we’ll have to keep a steady stream of new products coming out–ideally 1 a month.

I hear having a vision is the first step in actually achieving one.