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How did you start your own business?

Thread title: How did you start your own business?
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05-06-2005, 10:46 PM
#1
Anthony is offline Anthony
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  Old  How did you start your own business?

Some of us own businesses here on TalkFreelance.

How did you start yours?

Mine started after I made a little bit of money in a graphics contest at another forum. Basically I was using a friends old version of Photoshop 5. He sold it to me for £15 because he couldn't use it to save his life. I bought it because I got tired of Paint Shop Pro and its limitations. The first business I ran was called EvalueDesigns.com , god that brings back memories.

From here I re-branded and re-styled my work into Microvisuals.com. I now own licenses for :

Adobe Photoshop 7
Macromedia DreamweaverMX 2004
Macromedia Flash MX 2004

And other small pieces of software. It was started with £15 capital, and all marketing is via word of mouth only.

How did you start yours

05-07-2005, 03:11 AM
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xdoomx is offline xdoomx
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My first ever business would be SleekSkins, it was a project that we started discussing in October 2004, we wanted to bring something new to the forum skinning scene, beeing tired of seeing EP sell their low quality skins for $30 and people actually buying them. When we first started, we wanted to basically be a store where you can buy pre-made skins for $20-25, for some reason a few months lates, in December/January we kinda decided to forget about the project and it never came to life. In March, we decided to start this for real, we gathered the original team that was supposed to be working on it and on April 3rd we launched, this time as a custom forum skins company. It was a huge success ever since we launched, with a constant work load that nearly is too much for our small staff. As of right now we have worked with over 10 clients in one month and we keep receiving a decent amount of requests. After only two weeks we had to hire a new coder to keep up with the work load that was getting too big. Since we started, our prices have more than doubled considering the high demand, forcing us to decline some offers. Hopefully thing will keep getting better and better for us and we're looking forward to expanding both our staff and services, we've got many projects in head, one beeing the SleekSkins store which should be launched sometime this summer.

Yup, that's how I went from a 16 years old kid with too much free time to an extremely busy business man, it's amazing how much it all changed my life.

05-07-2005, 06:30 AM
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Julian is offline Julian
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I began designing originally as a hobby, it lead to people raving about my work and referring me to friends etc. This all in turn led to me having too much free work so I had to start charging for my time.

Eventually I designed an online portfolio website but it didn't have the right domain name so I scrapped it. I bought www.nzgraphicdesign.com over a year ago and ran it as a hobby business. I bought www.circle.co.nz 3 months ago with the intention it would take over as my online design business.

So far everything is going really well, I have done a few small projects and I currently have 3 very big projects in the late negotiation stages. One is for a NZ and Pacific business council.

I work full time and this is a great hobby to be involved in. I have a 5 year goal of having 40 maintenance paying clients which will enable me to quit my bread and butter job. So far I have two.

05-07-2005, 12:20 PM
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Adam is offline Adam
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freind of mine had about 5 of his own business. and also runs his own record label. he had all his signings that watned websites. but knowhere to host them! so got some reseller space and began to resell it to his signings and host his own sites.

the deal was that i would get free hosting if i helped out with the support. it made no difference for me because i was supporting them anyway (being the nice guy i am :P) so i got something and he got something

the business wasnt becoming massive but it was doing well enough to pay for the reseller space and then have some left over at the end of the month.

the business began to expand and he didnt have the time to put alot of effort into it anymore so it began to go downhill. this is where i came in.

we run the business together now. i moved everyone over to our own dedicated server , im rebuilding the website, we have plans for advertising and design services. and we are going at it in a proffesional way and are really putting alot of effort into it.

the business has survived 3 years this month with the only advertising through word of mouth!

i have alot planned on how we can take the company from strength to strength. we are just currently waiting on the business bank account to be sorted so i can sort the payment gateway and begin taking new customers.

05-07-2005, 01:34 PM
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  Old

Wow, interesting stories. Everybody has a different tale to tell

I've been running a 'business' since the tender age of 15

05-07-2005, 07:29 PM
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Chris Gwynne is offline Chris Gwynne
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Been in the freelance section for over 3 years now. It's provided me with a lot of work and a lot of money has been generated from it. Most of my work is working with forums; vBulletin etc. But I do a wide range of work these days.

It'd be nice to set up a business presence for myself, make things a lot easier in many respects but currently I have no free time.

05-08-2005, 12:06 AM
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Birdo is offline Birdo
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My cousin and i started a game server buisiness last summer. At first we rented dedicated servers from dirt cheap providers and sold for dirt cheap prices. We gave great friendly support and our buisiness grew exponentially over a month. In 2 months time we had over 20 clients but we started to realize that people didn't really care about prices, they cared about quality. So we upped our services investing into colocation and thats when our buisiness really started to get successful. By December last year a company offered us an ammount of money to high to refuse and we ended up selling our 6 month company for quite a bit of money.

05-08-2005, 12:20 AM
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Nice to hear of a success story Birdo, thanks for sharing

05-08-2005, 01:04 AM
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DateinaDash is offline DateinaDash
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Not sure how long i've been doing business online, probably 2 or 3 years now.

It started with some template and banner designs on yaxay and wht. I realised there was a huge market for a decent banner designer so decided to create banners2go, this was fairly succesful and geneated me enough money to open up visitors2go (it's sister site) and then I ended up selling them both last year for $6,000.

About a month after I sold them I decided to purchased talkfreelance from Anthony and this skin from Tarun and here we are. I'm looking to get a few more properties up over the coming months as well

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