We’re Hiring at iContact

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We’re hiring at iContact. We currently have 11 open positions and 14 open jobs at iContact. If you are interested in any of these positions please email jobs[at]icontact.com with a resume and cover letter. If you know someone who might be interested, please ask them to email jobs[at]icontact.com.

About iContact

iContact is a four-year old venture-backed company based in Durham, NC, that provides email marketing and online communications software. iContact is only 4 years old and is doing extremely well. It has over 70 employees and has strong recurring stream of revenues. The company already has an effective lead generation system, a robust sales pipeline, over 16,000 customers, and many blue chip companies as reference-able clients. iContact has positioned itself as the #2 player in the industry and consistently takes clients away from the big vendors. Now, we need to continue to add world-class individuals to the team as we focus on becoming the world leader in email marketing and online communications software.

Positions will be headquartered in the Durham/Research Triangle Park area of North Carolina. Relocation is available for the right candidates. This is an excellent opportunity to get in early at a successful company that is positioned for a very big and profitable exit. The iContact product is the leading email marketing and online communications platform used by over 16,000 companies worldwide ranging from small businesses to blue chip clients like International Paper, Ford, Bank of America, Super 8 Motel, Symantec, Re/Max, United Colors of Benetton, Nissan, and LG Electronics. iContact 4.0, designed for the SMB market and iContact Enterprise, designed for mid-sized to large organizations, are both available at www.icontact.com. iContact was named one of the Best Places to Work in the Triangle by the Triangle Business Journal in 2007.

Product Manager

Seeking a Product Manager to plan, analyze, and execute new releases of iContact email marketing and communication software. The ideal candidate will take vision and input from The Board of Directors, team members, and customers and synthesize them to build our product, project, and iteration plans. Excellent verbal and written communication skills and a bachelor’s degree and 3-5 years experience are required. Candidates with previous project management skills and experience with Scrum will be strongly preferred. Requirements include: experience developing and launching consumer technology products, intuitive sense for product usability and design—ability to think through every aspect of the user experience and general understanding of web technologies (e.g. AJAX, CSS, MySQL), how they’re implemented/served, and how they fit together.

Graphic Designer

Seeking an experienced Graphic Designer who has expert skills with tools such as Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. The ideal candidate will have experience in creating mock-ups and storyboards, a history of designing user interfaces for web applications with multiple features and a constantly-evolving feature set, experience designing with grids, excellent verbal and written communication skills, and a bachelor’s degree or five years of related experience. In addition, they must possess a design portfolio demonstrating related and relevant work, including links to at least 2 designs that are live, with a description of what role you played in the development and design of the web application and/or web site. Additional desired skills and experience: advanced HTML & CSS skills, with an extremely solid understanding of semantically valid markup; formal education in Graphic Design with a thorough understanding of color, layout, composition, typography, and iconography; experience with print design; a passion for web standards; proven skill at creating both vector-based and pixel-based user interface elements (controls, dialogs, icons, text, etc.); excellent prioritization and analytical skills; self-starter/highly motivated; passion for designing interfaces that are simple, usable, accessible, intuitive, consistent and beautiful; experience creating, maintaining and following GUI standards and design standards; technical writing skills; familiarity with Smarty; JavaScript and AJAX experience.

Account Managers

Seeking several Account Managers to work as part of the Sales Department, selling iContact Enterprise to organizations that desire a world-class E-marketing program. The individual will begin work in an intensive training program and be initially assigned to the Lead Generation team. After completing training successfully and generating leads at an acceptable rate, the individual will be eligible to move onto the Inside Sales team. The ideal candidate will possess a 4-year technical degree and 1-2 years technical, quota-based sales experience, achieving above quota.

Web Application Developer

Experience with web based application development, object-oriented design and programming, design patterns, finding and fixing bugs, test-driven development, and working in teams. Computer Science or related degree. Additional desired skills: PHP, MySQL, Linux, database indexing and optimization, and familiarity with agile development methods.

Customer Support Representatives

Experience responding to support issues, answering questions via phone, providing support via live chat, and assisting customers with use of web based software products. Proficiency with computers, experience with troubleshooting, providing technical support, and knowledge of HTML are all required. Experience with email newsletter, phone queue system, support ticketing systems or live chat systems a plus.

HelpDesk Support Specialists

One to three years experience in IT support, LAN, network printing, Windows XP Professional on the desktop and laptop is needed. Experience in Linux desktop is a plus. Some college or a 4 year degree in a technical field is preferred. Desired skills: Windows XP, networking protocols-TCP/IP or DHCP, networking hardware-patching a cube, working with switching, network printers, laptops, desktops, help desk tickets, Microsoft Office, Open Office, and Firefox.

Financial Assistant

BA in Accounting or equivalent. Two to six years of experience with payables and receivables, general ledger, payroll support and wire transfers supporting company’s finance team. High level of proficiency using MS Office programs, especially Excel. Knowledge of Quick Books or Sage Accounting software is an added advantage.

Vice President of Customer Service

Manages a 27 person department that may scale to 55 persons in 2008 and 90 or more in 2009. Proven ability to reduce phone call abandonment rate from 8% to 2% and reduce ticket response time. Ensures quality and consistency of support representative training programs. Establish a customer satisfaction score system and manage all product documentation including user guide, KB, and tutorial videos. Requires a BS or BA degree and 10-15 years of business experience. A Masters in Business is preferred or equivalent experience. Ability to build training and support materials for resellers.

Online Advertising Manager

Seeking an experienced A-Level player to manage and scale our lead generation and customer acquisition efforts through online advertising. Person will be extremely experienced with driving customer acquisition through online media buying. Experience utilizing an ad serving engine like Atlas, DoubleClick, Zedo, or a similar tool is required. Responsibility for coordinating all non-CPC online advertising and scaling customer acquisition from 1600 to 10000 customers per month. Main responsibilities include managing creation of ads, testing creative and landing pages, CPM media buys, negotiating and executing deals, campaign execution and optimization, determining competitors ad locations, and utilizing an ad serving engine. Requires degree and 2 to 5 years of successful experience managing and scaling online media buys in a fast-growth environment. Person reports directly to the Vice President of Marketing.

Affiliate Advertising Manager

Seeking an experienced A-Level player to manage and scale our lead generation and customer acquisition effort through CPA and affiliate advertising. Person will be extremely experienced with driving customer acquisition through affiliate networks, large affiliate recruiting, and established CPA-based deals. BA with 2 to 5 years of successful experience managing and scaling successful CPA advertising buys. The person will report directly to the Vice President of Marketing. Will have the responsibility for coordinating all of the affiliate and CPA customer acquisition and helping scale our customer acquisition from 1500 to 10000 customers per month. Experience with managing creation and testing of effective ads, affiliate recruiting, contract negotiation, business development, deal negotiation, campaign execution, customer acquisition cost and lifetime value calculation, return evaluation, and campaign scaling is essential. We are seeking an individual that has managed an affiliate program on a major network that had monthly commission payout of at least $100,000 and recruited at least 2000 affiliates.

Usability Engineer

Three to five years of experience working on web-based applications and managing the usability aspects of development projects. Strong interpersonal and negotiating skills and user interface design skills. Proficiency in statistics, data analysis,and survey design. Ability to make strategic and tactical design recommendations based on results from usability tests and customer surveys. An advanced degree in Human Factors, Cognitive Science or a related discipline is preferred. Additional desired skills include (X)HTML, knowledge of Agile development techniques, exposure to design and prototyping tools such as Photoshop, love for mentoring others in usability best practices, and familiarity with Section 508 accessibility requirements.

Senior Front-End Engineer

BS or MS in Computer Science (or related degree). Skilled engineer and architect that loves working on the controller and presentation layers. Ideal candidate will possess the following: at least 5 years prior experience working on web-based applications, in-depth knowledge of design patterns (including web presentational, object-relational, domain logic and session state patterns), strong team and individual work skills, and experience finding and fixing bugs. Additional desired skills include PHP, MySQL, XML, (X)HTML, JavaScript, CSS, AJAX, unit testing, functional testing, test-drive development, Linux development platform/environment, and Subversion.

For More Information

If you are interested and/or would like more information, please send resume with cover letter to jobs[at]icontact.com. If we determine you to be a qualified candidate we may send a questionnaire or contact you to schedule either an in-person interview or teleconference interview. Additional information on the company and software can be found at www.icontact.com.

The Superficial Luxurious Degeneration of America?

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I’m in Las Vegas for the second time about to get on the plane home. I was here for a web marketing conference called PubCon. I’ve enjoyed my time here. I saw the Blue Man Group and the Wayne Brady Show. I also did the all-American thing and lost $100 at the blackjack tables after a poorly executed Martingale strategy on the $5 tables at the Sahara. I leave, however, feeling the same way I felt last time–a bit dirty, a bit uncomfortable.

I’m disappointed with the excess and waste of the Westernized luxury culture. Wealthy men with fake-as-can-be paid escorts on each arm at the $5000 per hand blackjack tables, faux-venetian canal boats, Rolex, Prada, Burberry, and Louis Vuitton stores galore, Ferrari and Maybach dealerships, swinger clubs with $65 entrance fees, men on the streets passing out cards with naked women available for between $35 and $150.

I wonder to myself–Does this city in many ways represent a key part of what is wrong with our culture or a key part of the freedom that causes it to thrive? I am as pro-competitive market economy as the next guy, but I have to wonder what role do super-luxury goods play in a just society. I’m not talking about the $200 purses or $40,000 cars–the splurges that perhaps are bad within the realm of defensible-reason in moderation for quality or happiness-inducing reasons. I’m talking about the $10,000 purses and $500,000 cars.

I was taught in my economics education that societies should work to maximize utility. But whose utility does it maximize to spend $75,000 on a diamond necklace in which the original diamond miners in the DRC were paid $10 to mine the raw materials for? The purchasers? What benefit could the male purchaser of a diamond necklace of this cost gain other than the ephemeral loyalty of an ever-expecting superficial person? It is not my place to judge or question their morality, but I must wonder.

Are there not so so so many better things to invest money into other than temporarily attractive fake parasitic members of the opposite gender? And trust me, I’m not talking about women in general, just a very specific type of women that happen to be all over Las Vegas and Beverly Hills. And some wealthy women are just as guilty as the wealthy men. If the advertising and celebrity indoctrinated culture of spend-and-trash materialism didn’t create false desires to ‘be better’ and ‘have more’ could we perhaps focus our investments on something that actually matters to our society?

Could we focus our efforts and funds instead on education, healthcare, and nourishment for the 26 million children who die every day on our highly-optimized six-sigma logistically perfected world from preventable disease and starvation? I’m not talking about giving questionable ideology-inspired bilateral or multilateral aid to dictatorial governments that don’t represent their populace. I’m talking about giving directly to proven projects in our community, country, and world run by local entrepreneurs through groups like GlobalGiving, Kiva, UNICEF, UNESCO, Doctors Without Borders, Heffer International, and Save the Children. Could awareness of the dire situation of so many of our fellow sisters and brothers reduce the demand to waste money on super-expensive non-necessary junk?

But then I came back to questioning myself. What right do I have to question the utility-maximizing choices of ultra-rich people? If they want to spend 1% of their income on a $500,000 car, shouldn’t they be able to? Isn’t the freedom to do just that an ingrained part of our American culture? Is it fascist to even suggest that we should create a society in which it would not be legal to buy a $500,000 car?

I have to agree–we should not make it illegal to buy a $500,000 car or a $10,000 purse. That wouldn’t jibe with the values of our liberty-based democratic republic and market economy regardless of how wrong or wasteful it may be. Our country was also built on the value of equality of opportunity, however. And equality of opportunity surely does not exist quite yet in America.

So perhaps instead of regulating the supply side of the equation we should work on reducing the demand side of the equation. If we can create a consciousness of the realities in our world today–and create a shared awareness of what is actually important (family, friends, health, laughter, memories, the ability to create, a sense of shared humanity, an end to genocide and warfare, environmental sustainability, an end to extreme poverty and hunger, and the prevention of preventable diseases), we may be able to create a world in which the super-luxury wastefulness of the Westernized Vegases, Macaus, and Dubais can legally exist, but end up being destinations that focus on entertainment rather than superficial luxurious waste. Is possible to have entertainment without super-luxurious waste? I think so. Is it unrealistic to attempt to reduce the demand side if we agree we should not regulate the supply side? Can a committed society actually build national human consciousness over a period of decades? I am not sure.

I sometimes wonder, is celebrity culture actually more interesting than the natural drama of the future of the world? I see lots of Entertainment Tonight shows but very few United Nations Tonight shows. Maybe the issue is how the news is presented. Perhaps we need to popularize and dramatize the storylines of the world’s future. Perhaps we need a new form of realtainment that combines The National Enquirer with The Economist. ‘Pakistani Inflation Worry’ turns into ‘Smack-Down Out East: Will Musharref Bodyslam His Central Banker?’ The Current Channel on cable has done a good job at this–but it just doesn’t reach enough people.

With all due respect to Nickelback, at the end of the day who really wants to be drugged up rockstars living in hilltop houses and driving fifteen cars with girls coming easy and the drugs coming cheap? I don’t want a brand new house on an episode of Cribs nor a bathroom I can play baseball in with a king size tub big enough for ten plus me. I think, and I may be wrong here, that the large majority of people want to be happy with friends and family around them and the knowledge that they’ve made a difference in our world.

The government, businesses, and the media tells us to ‘be American’ and buy, buy, buy. The goods end up quickly in landfills. Until the full cost of producing products is internalized instead of externalized in the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles we will be incented by misaligned priorities. Hurricane Katrina was a terrible disaster that had an immense human and environmental effect–and yet it increased our GDP due to the cost of rebuilding. That wasn’t economic growth–that was economic recovery. We’re adding revenue to our asset column without first subtracting the associated expenses from the liabilities. We’re off-balance sheet financing our future.

As a final thought, perhaps we shouldn’t focus on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) but rather Net Domestic Product (NDP), the GDP minus the costs to replace the non-renewable environmental resources that are used up in producing the input goods and final goods. If we invested in companies on the NASDAQ and NYSE based on their EAARC (earnings after all real costs) instead of their EBITDA we would be a lot closer to having a market that valued companies appropriately based on their contribution to their customers and society.

I’ll end this essay with a quote from the comedian George Carlin. While I enjoy living in the fast paced globalized technology-driven business world as much as anyone—I agree with his core message…

The paradox of our time in history is that we have taller buildings but shorter tempers, wider freeways but narrower viewpoints. We spend more, but have less, we buy more, but enjoy less. We have bigger houses and smaller families, more conveniences, but less time. We have more degrees but less sense, more knowledge, but less judgment, more experts, yet more problems, more medicine, but less wellness. We drink too much, smoke too much, spend too recklessly, laugh too little, drive too fast, get too angry, stay up too late, get up too tired, read too little, watch TV too much, and pray too seldom. We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values.

We talk too much, love too seldom, and hate too often. We’ve learned how to make a living, but not a life. We’ve added years to life not life to years. We’ve been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet a new neighbor. We conquered outer space but not inner space. We’ve done larger things, but not better things. We’ve cleaned up the air, but polluted the soul. We’ve conquered the atom, but not our prejudice. We write more, but learn less. We plan more, but accomplish less. We’ve learned to rush, but not to wait. We build more computers to hold more information, to produce more copies than ever, but we communicate less and less.

These are the times of fast foods and slow digestion, big men and small character, steep profits and shallow relationships. These are the days of two incomes but more divorce, fancier houses, but broken homes. These are days of quick trips, disposable diapers, throwaway morality, one night stands, overweight bodies, and pills that do everything from cheer, to quiet, to kill. It is a time when there is much in the showroom window and nothing in the stockroom. Give time to love, give time to speak! And give time to share the precious thoughts in your mind.

13 Lessons I Learned in 2006

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1. Yes And Life
   One of the key lessons of improv is to say yes to the scene that your acting partner is creating. If your partner suggests you’re kissing cousins in a ski lodge, then you are kissing cousins in a ski lodge AND something else. By saying yes, and in response to people instead of no, but you often create better outcomes and build a much stronger relationship with the person you’re interacting with.

2. Judging People is Necessary
   As a child you learn never to judge people. Judging people perhaps even has a bad connotation. But in business, you must judge and you must judge often. You must judge based on intelligence, effort, and more importantly results. If you don’t judge, you end up with unexamined, unmeasured mediocrity. All humans have equal inherent value, but not all humans’ productive efforts are equal.

3. The People You Surround Yourself With Matters
   Venture Capitalist Steve Nelson shared some advice with me this year that has stuck with me: Stay involved with only the best. Ask yourself – are these outstanding people? To know, you only need to ask yourself: do they possess great intelligence, keen business insight, outstanding people skills, and unquestioned integrity?”

4. Life Reveals The Rules Only After You Start Playing
   Life is a game; and a game that doesn’t exactly reveal most the rules until it’s been played a few times. There are two ways to figure out the rules– a) talk to smart people who have already done what you’re trying to accomplish or b) trial and error. Either way, start playing early.

5. If Somebody Sues You, Go Talk to Them in Person
   I spent about $35,000 unnecessarily this year by listening to my lawyer and not communicating with a former client that was bringing Virante into arbitration. If I just would have flown out there and spoken with him in person initially instead of 4 months later at the mediation hearing I likely would have saved that $35,000 and a lot of personal stress. The lawyer’s advice was correct and proper legally, but the ‘legal’ solution often costs a lot of money to get to.

6. Build Consensus with the Core Before You Present Widely
   Build pre-emptive support and communicate your vision individually to your Executive or Director team or in small groups to get feedback and adjust before presenting to everyone. This can be a lot of work, but it’s how it is done in companies larger than 20 people.

7. Life is Too Short to Not Be Passionate About What You Do
   Stand out, make an impact, be compassionate, and help others. Too much injustice occurs in this world to not want to make a positive change at whatever level you can. Torture, human slavery, murder, genocide, starvation. Too many people don’t have the opportunities we have, and too many people die needlessly from preventable diseases and starvation to make you not want to do the absolute best you can in your life. Have fun. Enjoy life. Help others. Reduce suffering. That is the credo.

8. There Are Four Must-Attend Conferences for Future Leaders
   This year I sat next to John McCain and talked about soccer and energy policy as we watched the semi-final of the world cup for 15 minutes. I had a conversation with Madeleine Albright about security and aid policy in Africa. I talked about digital camera technology riding on a bus next to Steve Jurvetson on the way to Michael Eisner’s ranch. I sat next to Glenn Close, Sandra Day O’Conner and Stelois Ioannou in a roundtable discussion on climate change. How’d I get there? Five years of consistent hard work and getting invited to attend a conference called Fortune Brainstorm. By getting invited to and attending a few key conferences you can have access to pretty much anybody in the world. In my experience so far, those key conferences are Fortune Brainstorm, The World Economic Forum, TED, and the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting.

9. There’s A Good Deal of Corruption in the World–It Can Affect Policy–And Competition Can Reduce It
   In 1995, the telcos had the technology to launch DSL. But they held off for nearly five years. Why? Because the cable companies didn’t yet have the technology ready to launch cable modems and the telephone monopolies saw hundreds of millions of dollars of second-line dial-up revenue from their subscriber base. Instead of providing DSL to Americans and allowing economic-enhancing broadband access, they (somewhat understandably perhaps) held back the technology to make more money, in the mean time using their huge lobbying base to ensure governmental policy wasn’t enacted that would benefit all other businesses, all consumers, and the entire economy. Finally, in 1999 the the technology for cable modems became ready and marketable and amazingly, DSL launched. The lesson perhaps is that while business in general and consumers in general should have the right to lobby and influence, a single industry should never have the power to lobby at the expense of the wider good.
   
   
   
10. Compounding Experience & Compounding Resources Allow For Greatness Over Time
    The big wooden flywheel from Good to Great has held true in my business experience. It takes a long time to get the flywheel moving at all. It takes a lot of really hard pushes to get it going. Each individual push doesn’t move it very much. But if you keep pushing, eventually the wheel starts moving and inertia and momentum start to take hold, causing each subsequent push of equal strength to have a greater and greater impact. In 2003, Broadwick did $12,000 in sales. In 2004, $296,000. In 2005, $1.3 million. And in 2006, $2.7 million. We worked from October 2002 until December 2003 to generate $12,000 in sales (and $20,000 in expenses!). We worked equally as hard in 2006 as we did in 2003, but instead of $12,000 we generated $2.7 million with the same effort. Intelligent consistent effort compounds as experience, knowledge, and access expands. Sometimes it is difficult to fathom how people like Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Morgan acquired their fortunes and made the impact they did in one lifetime. They started by working their butt off to make $12,000 and forty years later they were working with hundreds of millions. Same way Buffet did it, same way Gates did it. Play life like a long-term game. And always be improving.

11. Networking Isn’t About Handing Out Business Cards
    In every personal development conference you go to you hear that networking is key to business success. And that is in fact true. But most teachers leave out the most important rule of networking. It’s not about shaking hands, having a little small talk, and swapping business cards. It’s about building real, trusting, mutually giving relationships with quality people.

12. The World Has a Lot of Problems, But They Are Fixable
    One of the reasons I want to be a U.S. Senator one day is to be able to influence foreign policy, especially the policy that deals with how our country interacts with other countries from an economic and environmental standpoint. This year, I’ve been made so consciously aware of the extreme inequities in the world today. 49,000 people die per day from preventable disease and starvation, 2.7 billion people live on under $2 per day, most people don’t have the opportunity to be creative through entrepreneurship due to class-divisions and bureaucratic restriction, the developed nations produce an uneccessarily large amount of greenhouse gas causing agricultural famine in non-developed nations, billions of dollars go to farm subsidies in the U.S. and E.U. creating silos upon silos of wasted grain while millions die of starvation due to lack of access to markets in developing nations, tens of thousands of humans remain in sexual or work slavery. I have been deeply affected by these issues in 2006 and hope to be able to dedicate much of my life the best way I know how doing my best to improve these situations on a global scale through politics, business, and social entrepreneurship.
13. Community Matters
    And yet, for every thought I have about Malawi, Benin, or Burundi, I think about North Carolina. For every issue in Malawi, Benin, and Burundi, I can see a parallel issue (though at a different scale) here in North Carolina. A lack of equality of opportunity in Malawi can be paralleled to a lack of educational equity here at home. Most North Carolinians know that our K-12 educational quality has not been on par with that of other States’ in the past, especially east of I-95. I applaud Governor Easley’s efforts to improve the situation as well as the measurement and tracking work the North Carolina Progress Board is doing and am hopeful for continued improvement. I was thrilled to meet with members from the Institute for Rural Entrepreneurship in November and to become a donor to the Council for Entrepreneurial Development this year and am hopeful to be able to work within the communities of North Carolina for decades to come. The Lesson: While you should always educate yourself about the world, what happens in it, and how you can make a global difference, you can most often make the largest difference right at home–and there are always plenty of issues (read: opportunities to improve) right here in our own community.

When I Was 21

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Tomorrow I turn 22. While the difference between today and tomorrow is negligible, I find meaning and opportunity in the new denotation. These past twelve months have been extraordinary—full of learning, happiness, and challenge. There were moments of sublime contentment, overwhelming joy, and maddening disappointment. Thank you so very much to the countless people who have helped me over the past few years get to the point I am today.

Below is a review of my goals for the past year and my goals for the upcoming year.

My Goals for the Past Year

Here were my goals for age 21 and how I did:

	Get IntelliContact Pro to 5,000 clients (currently 2539) We ended up with 5,265 clients, and changed the name of the product to just IntelliContact, dropping the Pro. It’s amazing to think we’ve more than doubled in size in 12 months.
	Get net new clients above 250 for IntelliContact Pro (currently 172) We ended July with 266 net new clients during the month. With the 4.0 launch on Friday and the expanded marketing campaign, we are on track for August, however, to get 550 new clients with net new around 425!
	Build IntelliContact Sales Force We now have three salespersons—Rick, Jonathan, and Rob and expect to expand our sales team significantly in the next year.
	Launch AntiPovertyCampaign.org Last September I launched antipovertycampaign.org as a blog covering all things related to economic, health, and opportunity poverty. So far there have been 73 posts from myself and team members Jen Monroe, Joel Thomas, Moffat Thomas, and Joan Maina reporting from the United States, Argentina, Mali, Uganda, Botswana, and Kenya. We’ve also posted a mission and our 13 beliefs.
	Get to #1 in Google for Entrepreneurship (currently 3rd) My web site on entrepreneurship, www.zeromillion.com, is now #1 in Google when you search for entrepreneurship, allowing it to grow to have 160,000 unique visitors per month, 6,254 members, and 3,315 individual articles on business, entrepreneurship, and marketing. Let’s hope it stays there!
	Raise $1.5 million of VC for Broadwick Broadwick ended up raising $500,000 in convertible debt from the Durham VC firm NC IDEA in May—which is all we needed at the time. We may choose to raise additional funds in the future, but have no need to presently.
	Pay off house by December 31, 2005 I decided to not pay off the house, after learning of the advantages of continuing a mortgage payment (if you can make more than your interest rate in your own investments then it often makes more sense to not pay off the mortgage). I probably still will when able just for an added layer of security, or perhaps instead purchase another property in D.C., England, or Boston.
	Build UNCstudent.com to 6,000 users (current 1173) This was a project that I began back in 2002 when starting as a Freshman at UNC-Chapel Hill that was essentially a web discussion forum for UNC students. In September 2002, the site took off and immediately got a few thousand users. Unfortunately, I did not have access to the technical experience at the time to be able to scale the site with the number of users we had. I also lacked vision in naming the site uncstudent.com instead of unc.student.com. Had I taken a bit of risk and purchased Student.com and figured out a scalable model, it might just have become what Facebook has instead become. In August 2005 my friend Kyle Powers and I decided to relaunch the site with the hope it could still reach its original vision, but the project ended up dead in the water as I quickly realized I had much more important business ventures to focus on and Kyle found out just how much time being a Chemistry major at UNC took.
	Build Virante to $55,000 per month (was $28,000) Virante lost its largest client in December which significantly hurt the company for a few months. We were able to maintain all of our staff and have since added many new clients. We’ve grown from 5 employees to 11 employees and have recently added Bob Misita, Jeff Buechler, and Chris Doran to the team as Virante positions itself to reach its mission of becoming the largest search engine optimization and web marketing firm in the world over the coming years. It looks like we’ll be very close to reaching our $55k sales goal this month.
	Build GHC to $330,000 in monthly sales GHC unfortunately ended up bringing Virante into arbitration. A settlement was reached in March.

My Goals for Age 22

1. Grow IntelliContact
   Get IntelliContact to at least 10,560 clients (Currently 5,265). Double our current client count. This will require 438 net new clients per month.

2. Grow Virante
   Get Virante to $150,000 in monthly sales (Currently $50,000). Utilize the new momentum we have with our new growth strategy to triple the size of the company over the next 12 months.
3. Get Zero to One Million Published.
   Get the new version of my book Zero to One Million: How to Build a Company to $1 Million in Sales published by a top tier business book publisher. I’ve been able to get an agent and we’re in the middle stages of working on a deal to get a “real” publisher to get the book out there and into mainstream bookstores.
4. Continue Education
   Do 2-3 independent studies at UNC to get additional credits toward graduating. I currently have 81 credits. I intend to go back to UNC in 3-4 years after I’m done with what I’m working on currently in order to get my B.A. in Economics. Getting additional credits to knock out some econ requirements will help.
5. Create More Jobs
   Create 43 new jobs (total of 43 so far). I’ve found that one of the most fulfilling aspects of being a business owner is being able to create jobs. Broadwick currently has 32 employees and Virante has 11. I’d like to be able to double the number of jobs the companies have created by this time next year. We currently support 21 babies between the two companies!
6. Travel Outside the Country
   Travel outside the U.S. at least twice. I didn’t get a chance to get out of the country this past year. I’d like to make my first trip to Asia when I go to Japan in March for an Young Entrepreneurs’ Organization conference event. I’d like to also make it to Dubai, China, Nigeria, or Kenya.
7. Build Strong Relationships
   Have fun and build quality relationships with many different people. In the past I’ve sometimes focused on business too much (and computer screens) rather than people. I’ve made efforts to grow as a person over the past year and interact as a more full and present human being. I hope to be able to continue to build strong relationships over the next 12 months and make many deposits into the relationship bank accounts I have with the most important people in my business and personal lives.
8. Figure Out What’s Next
   Continue to research what’s next for me after Broadwick and UNC. While I have quite a few more years left doing what I’m doing now, which may turn into many more years depending on how things go, I would like to return to UNC one day to finish the one year left I have to earn my undergrad degree. After UNC, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the possibility of joining the Navy as an Intelligence Officer for 4-5 years. I’ve also considered working for the State Department or doing Americorps or the Peace Corps. I’m currently evaluating what I can do best that will maximize the learning, experience and connections that I can gain while serving the country in some way for a few years during my 20s. After the Navy, I would very much like to do a MPP/MBA joint degree at Harvard’s Business School and Kennedy School of Government for 3 years, and then get back into business for 15 years or so and take my shot at creating a billion dollar company and taking it public. Eventually, around age 45 I’d like to get into politics and perhaps make a run for U.S. Senate.

Thank you very much to the people who have helped me learn and grow over the past 12 months including but not limited to…

Andrew Allis, Sr., Pauline Middleton Allis, Andrew Allis, Jr., Erin Mulfinger, Bonnie Mulfinger, Carl Mulfinger, Mark Mulfinger, Marti Kiely, Steve Kiely, Aaron Houghton, David Roth, David Rasch, Tim Oakley, Brandon Milford, Malcolm Young, Bob Misita, Russ Jones, Jeff Staub, Amber Neill, Robert Plumley, Chuck Hester, Merrette Moore, Jinan Glasgow, Bill Laughlin, Peter Nyberg, Scott Korbin, Sriya Chari, Brett Watkins, Anne-Marie Comeau, Sindhura Citineni, Alex Hardy, Kyle Powers, Phil Gennett, Jen Monroe, Jen Coneski, Nichole Hillstrom, Tiana Lawrence, Jud Bowman, Buck Goldstein, Ted Zoller, David Jones, Jason Caplain, John Glushnik, Scott Heiferman, Merrill Mason, and Robin Merritt.

I’ve been alive 273 months now! Here’s to the next 819.

NC IDEA Funding

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Broadwick closed on $500,000 in an initial round of funding today with local investment firm NC IDEA. We’re quite excited about the financing. Additional coverage can be found at the LocalTechWire, Triangle Business Journal, Carolina News Wire, and Tech Journal South.

The 20 Most Important Business Lessons I Learned in 2005

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Near the end of each year, I always create a Year Review document in which I list memories from the year, new people I’ve met, the progress I’ve made on my goals, business results, and the most important business lessons I’ve learned. Per my 2005 Year Review, here are the twenty most important business lessons I learned in 2005.

1. Listen to that little voice in the back of your head. It’s usually alerting you to something that might come back to bite you if you don’t listen to it.
2. Don’t let non-communication lead to the de-generation of a relationship.
3. Full-on bias toward action is great. But only when you have little to lose. Once you have something to lose, you must balance having a bias toward action with analysis, due diligence, and care.
4. Don’t avoid doing things just because they are hard or may cause conflict.
5. Consistently look for bottlenecks and inefficiencies in communication flows and organizational behavior.
6. Integrity is what matters at the end of the day. There will always eventually be an audit or a lawsuit that has to look into what you’re doing RIGHT NOW. So make sure at all times your actions are above board and in good faith.
7. The business world can be harsh and often times there is someone in your life that you trust that you should not who will eventually try to screw you over.
8. As CEO, if there is a layer of management between you and the person you need to speak to, speak to that person’s manager first to make sure it is okay to speak with him or her or just relay the message through that person’s manager.
9. As CEO, try to avoid assigning work to people you do not directly manage to avoid priority conflicts. Rather, in all cases except emergencies give the task to that person’s manager to assign.
10. Recognition and praise can be just as big of motivating factors for employees as salary and bonuses.
11. Finding the right people when you need them is a significant challenge and can take longer than you would think.
12. Always communicate openly, fully, and quickly with your customers during any negative events.
13. Quality assurance is a critical part of the software development process. Don’t release a new version of your product until it has been thoroughly tested by both an in-house QA team and a subset of your customer base. Bugs that make it into a released version are much more costly both in lost sales and loss of brand goodwill than spending the money needed to fix them up front.
14. Raising funding for a company usually will take longer than you expect.
15. Make the call. It’s often better to call than email if you’re trying to get a project done quickly.
16. It is better to prepare for the worst when things are going well rather than when they’re not.
17. Sometimes you just have to let go. Get the right people, train them, and then trust them.
18. Just because you have a detailed plan in your head doesn’t mean other members of your team know it. If you don’t consistently communicate your vision and plans, people may think you don’t have vision and have failed to plan.
19. Be very nice to merchant account processing limit review officers and give them the information they need to review your limit well before you hit it.
20. Building a business is truly like trying to push a big horizontal wooden wheel. It takes hundreds of small pushes to get it moving, and hundreds more to get it going quickly, but once you get it going quickly inertia starts to take over and your continued efforts have a greater and greater effect.

The 20 Most Important Business Lessons I Learned in 2005

Near the end of each year, I always create a “Year Review” document in which I list memories from the year, new people I’ve met, the progress I’ve made on my goals, business results, and the most important business lessons I’ve learned. Per my 2005 Year Review, here are the twenty most important business lessons I learned in 2005.

1. Listen to that little voice in the back of your head. It’s usually alerting you to something that might come back to bite you if you don’t listen to it.

2. Don’t let non-communication lead to the de-generation of a relationship.

3. Full-on bias toward action is great. But only when you have little to lose. Once you have something to lose, you must balance having a bias toward action with analysis, due diligence, and care.

4. Don’t avoid doing things just because they are hard or may cause conflict.

5. Consistently look for bottlenecks and inefficiencies in communication flows and organizational behavior.

6. Integrity is what matters at the end of the day. There will always eventually be an audit or a lawsuit that has to look into what you’re doing RIGHT NOW. So make sure at all times your actions are above board and in good faith.

7. The business world can be harsh and often times there is someone in your life that you trust that you should not who will eventually try to screw you over.

8. As CEO, if there is a layer of management between you and the person you need to speak to, speak to that person’s manager first to make sure it is okay to speak with him or her or just relay the message through that person’s manager.

9. As CEO, try to avoid assigning work to people you do not directly manage to avoid priority conflicts. Rather, in all cases except emergencies give the task to that person’s manager to assign.

10. Recognition and praise can be just as big of motivating factors for employees as salary and bonuses.

11. Finding the right people when you need them is a significant challenge and can take longer than you would think.

12. Always communicate openly, fully, and quickly with your customers during any negative events.

13. Quality assurance is a critical part of the software development process. Don’t release a new version of your product until it has been thoroughly tested by both an in-house QA team and a subset of your customer base. Bugs that make it into a released version are much more costly both in lost sales and loss of brand goodwill than spending the money needed to fix them up front.

14. Raising funding for a company usually will take longer than you expect.

15. Make the call. It’s often better to call than email if you’re trying to get a project done quickly.

16. It is better to prepare for the worst when things are going well rather than when they’re not.

17. Sometimes you just have to let go. Get the right people, train them, and then trust them.

18. Just because you have a detailed plan in your head doesn’t mean other members of your team know it. If you don’t consistently communicate your vision and plans, people may think you don’t have vision and have failed to plan.

19. Be very nice to merchant account processing limit review officers and give them the information they need to review your limit well before you hit it.

20. Building a business is truly like trying to push a big horizontal wooden wheel. It takes hundreds of small pushes to get it moving, and hundreds more to get it going quickly, but once you get it going quickly inertia starts to take over and your continued efforts have a greater and greater effect.

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