With the Seattle 2.0 awards less than 48 hours away, I wanted to take a closer look at one of the more interesting categories in the show, Best Boot-Strapped Startup. After the initial round of voting, four very strong nominees emerged:
Appature
,
BigOven
,
Picnik
, and
UrbanSpoon
.
While all of these companies are loaded with talented, hard-working entrepreneurs, it's hard to find a more inspiring story than that of 26-year-old Appature founder Kabir Shahani. Along with Chris Hahn (who is also a finalist in the "Best Startup Technologist" catagory), Kabir launched the profitable health-care marketing system Appature back in January 2007 with just $4,000. By working directly with enterprise customers to fully understand the needs of their clients within the enterprise space, the company quickly reached profitability and has assembled one of the more talented teams in Seattle. Kabir was recently named one of Business Week's
best tech entrepreneurs under 30
, and has helped position Appature as one of Seattle's top companies to watch in 2009.
Next on the list is BigOven, a recipe sharing and networking site that has the honorable distinction of being the only startup in the entire list of nominees that is run by a single individual, Steve Murch. Steve's love for cooking brought him to start BigOven back in 2004 for around $25,000, and it has grown dramatically over the past years to become one of the most frequently-visited internet properties in Seattle (over 4 million monthly uniques as of March 2009). Along with the website, BigOven has a popular iPhone application that cracked Apple's top 100 list for 2008. It's a pretty amazing accomplishment for a single entrepreneur.
The third company nominated is Picnik, the awesome online photo-editing service that is probably best known for being the default photo editor for Flickr. The company was founded by three massively talented entrepreneurs, Jonathan Sposato, Darrin Massena, and Mike Harrington. The company is looking to take home their second award of the season after CTO Darrin Massena won the Technology Innovator of the Year award for the WTIA. Jonathan is also up for "Best Startup CEO", and for good reason – the self-funding startup recently hit the #4 spot on the
Seattle Startup Index
with a 10x explosion in growth over the past year bringing them to profitability a little over two years after launch. It doesn't hurt having Mike Harrington on the team. Mike is one of the cofounders of Valve Software and was director of development for Half-Life 2, which if you don't know, is quite simply one of the best videos games ever made.
Last but not least is UrbanSpoon, the drop-dead simple restaurant search and discovery engine that was one of the first startups
profiled here on the Seattle 2.0 blog
. Oh yeah, and did I mentioned that
they have an iPhone app
? Along with being featured on a prime-time Apple TV spot, the app was one of the top 10 most downloaded iTunes apps of 2008 and brought instant acclaim to the 3-year-old company boot-strapped by friends and former Jobster co-workers Ethan Lowry, Adam Doppelt, Patrick O'Donnell. And just last week, the dream of any self-funded company came true as IAC approached the company with "an offer we couldn't refuse". The team is staying here in Seattle and will continue working on Urbanspoon from their Eastlake office. It's a fairy-tale ending that couldn't have happened to a nicer group of guys.
Who do you think will take home prize in this very competitive category? If you can't make the event in person, you can tune in to the live stream here on the Seattle 2.0 site on Thursday night starting around 6pm PST.