Hello everybody and welcome to Cartfly, your place – as the tag-line goes – to sell out. If you’ve visited the site before, you’ll notice that things have been spruced up around here. The site is cleaner, the logo has been polished, and all of the pages redone. We’ve come a long way from where we started, but before we go into what’s new and what’s not – there will be plenty of time for that – we thought we’d take a few moments to let you know how the so-called Flies happened to come from point A – a team of two working on a small social network site called Ustrive – to point B — the here and now at Cartfly, the world’s first outlet for social e-commerce.
The year was 2005. One of us, Bob Schober, had been a sales guy since the mid-nineties. At his old company, Bob had mastered the art of the cold call, trained legions of young salesfolk, and had literally written the company’s book on how to close deals. When he left that company, he and some friends created an energy drink and aggressively and somewhat successfully marketed it along the West Coast. But energy drinks were not Bob’s calling, so it was fortuitous that one day, Bob was introduced to a man named Josh Manley.
Josh was a somewhat different breed than Bob. In fact, he was a different breed than most: he’d spent the first half of his college years double-majoring in business and art. Though for many young college students, this might seem like an irreconcilable contradiction of themes, for Josh it did not. Josh felt that if artists could find the right outlet, the two worlds could and should be reconciled, and though, by the end of his college years, he’d decided to focus on his passions for sculpting, drafting, and graphic design, that core belief held strong. Recognizing, however, that these passions were not going to pay the bills, Josh spent a few years after college working “real” jobs. But the entrepreneur in him did not stay dormant for long, and he ventured out on his own to create a company that would bring “smart home” automation equipment into a price range that the middle classes could afford. A bold concept that ran into too many home builders unwilling to take risks on futuristic ideas, Josh’s first venture never quite got off the ground, so the day Josh met Bob was fortuitous for Josh, as well.
The two met each other at the right place and the right time, and it just gelled. Almost immediately, they decided to give the entrepreneurs in themselves another shot. The first idea grew from their shared visions around the intersection of art and business, and they created a niche social network named Ustrive, a site artists and musicians could use to promote themselves and sell their work. The network’s name was Ustrive because, well, artists are supposed to strive, and the company stayed on the Ustrive course for almost 18 months. Throughout that time, the site’s traction wasn’t negligible, but it wasn’t explosive, either.
Now, Bob and Josh like to think of themselves as nimble operators. They were pretty attached to Ustrive, but they watched MySpace’s meteoric rise and knew their network wasn’t about to follow suit. Being nimble in a start-up means being able to walk away from something you love and act on the fly, so improvise they did. Thing is, there was this one feature that Ustrive’s users seemed to love. In fact, they’d profess their love for it all the time. This feature was a small but vital part of the site: a portable storefront and shopping cart widget that users could populate with their products, set prices, and start selling immediately. The widget storefront contained everything they needed to complete a transaction: from thumbnails of the products to the shopping cart and payment options. Best, they could grab it with a line of HTML and embed anywhere they saw fit.
Stepping back, Bob and Josh understood the opportunity here and seized it. If they could create a conduit between merchants trying to unload their goods and the people who were flocking in droves to the social networks, they might just strike gold. Thus was Cartfly born. A year and a half later, seed funding had been secured, a brilliant CEO recruited, and the team had expanded from two to twelve.
Stay tuned to this blog for more of this story, tips on using and improving your Cartfly store, and other great tidbits that are worth sharing. If you’d like to see our original blog, check it out here.
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The Flies
April 13, 2008 at 4:23 pm
Hey Cartfly,
Love the new look and feel of your blog, tons better than the blogger site. May I ask why you decided to go with the hosted WP blog on the new one, rather than adding the blog theme files to your main domain, say cartfly.com/blog or similar? You see, blogs typically gain a lot of links and are updated regularly, those links can help boost the authority, rank and appeal of your main domain, where you service is.
Before you go too far with this hosted version, you should email me to discuss the additional benefits of using your blog on a sub-folder or domain in your main domain name. If you have reasons why the two are separate that I am unaware of or not thinking about, it’s still possible to gain attention and links using a blog, just not as good of use of the tools, in my opinion.
Either way, I am excited to see the cartfly program in action and look forward to catching more posts on the new blog. I’ll probably write up a review or similar for you guys too. Appreciate the addition to your blogroll as well, I’ll be sure and give you the proper eCopt welcome for that too!