Artisans Making Millions

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Artisans Making Millions

Jul 2nd, 2007 by RichFinish

At the Brooklyn headquarters of online marketplace Etsy, which bills itself as “your place to buy and sell all things handmade,” there isn’t an Aeron chair in sight. Instead, in keeping with the site’s artisanal ethos, nearly everything in the space was made or scavenged by a staff member. Computers were assembled from spare parts, the halfpipe (for skateboarding) and stage (for bands) built from salvaged wood. And except for the odd Ikea item, most of the furniture was found on the street.

To observers, Etsy fits the checklist for the second-wave dot-com success story almost perfectly. Cool offices? Check. Trio of twentysomething founders? Check. User-generated content? Check. Snowballing word-of-mouth? Check. Venture capital funding? Check.

Perhaps less typical of a Web startup—Etsy is actually making money. Just a few days shy of its second anniversary, the site has grown to a community of more than 250,000 registered members and 50,000 sellers, and is expanding daily. By the fall, the team expects Etsy to be completely in the black. Like other young entrepreneurs who recently sold their companies to one of the “Big Five”—Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, eBay, and Amazon. 27-year-old Rob Kalin and his two co-founders seem tantalizingly close to becoming paper millionaires. But Kalin isn’t interested in becoming a paper millionaire.

Kalin is the first to admit that he’s never really been able to look more than two to six months into the future. Back when Kalin first came up with the idea for Etsy, Kalin’s grandfather—an experienced businessman who had worked for IBM and GE —peppered him with questions about target audiences and market share. But against his grandfather’s advice, Kalin decided to skip past the formal business plan.

“There’s so much you can’t plan for—so instead of trying to fudge the numbers,” he says, the approach was, “We’ll just launch it and see.”

source BusinessWeek