Carbonmade provides creative people with the ability to showcase and manage their work. It uses a modern, lightweight user interface and works across all browsers. Carbonmade was built as a side project by Jason Nelson and Dave Gorum. The idea came about when Dave, frustrated by manually updating his portfolio, proposed building a simple tool to handle the drudgery. The app was so handy that friends and colleagues began asking to use it. Answering their call, Jason and Dave built the app into a standalone product, and in a year’s time Carbonmade was a thriving business.
The Opportunity
The design agency Nterface was founded by Jason Nelson and Dave Gorum in 2004. They focused on web design and development for customers including Scribd, MerchNOW and Epitaph Records. Soon, the combination of spending long hours on consulting work and managing an ever-growing Carbonmade on the side began to take its toll. Faced with the prospect of never sleeping again, the duo made the decision to drop their consulting business and to focus entirely on Carbonmade. This decision became a reality when Spencer Fry joined the team. With his marketing and business experience Carbonmade had a real chance of making a go of it.
Spencer Fry, CEO of Carbonmade said, "Within a very short period of time after dedicating ourselves to Carbonmade, we changed our little side project into a thriving business. Shortly after putting our heads down, we became profitable enough to focus all our efforts on Carbonmade."
An updated version of Carbonmade is expected to go online in the fourth quarter of 2009 featuring new functionality and an overhauled user-interface. The three-person team of Spencer, Dave and Jason have been working on this update since stopping client work in 2007.
The Technology
Taking the economic climate into consideration Carbonmade chooses to keep their pricing as low as possible. They offer a free hosting plan that allows customers to host up to 5 projects and up to 35 images for life. Should customers feel the need to expand their portfolio, they can upgrade for $12 per month, which offers them more storage and additional features.
To achieve the dual goals of keeping prices low, and keeping the service reliable, Carbonmade turned to the Microsoft Web Platform. As the site is design focused, they needed a clean, reliable, standards-based interface, which they built using ASP.NET and the ASP.NET MVC Library using C#.
They took advantage of the Microsoft BizSpark offering for small companies to save a lot of money in Operating System and Database licenses, where they pay $15 per month per server for the licenses to run their site.
“We use 5 servers, so our total bill is $75 per month to use the Microsoft stack. This is less than what we used to charge for 1 hour of consulting. While there are lower cost alternatives, the marginal costs of Microsoft technologies have been easily justified by the time saved by everything working so well together. Things just work. - Jason Nelson, Carbonmade.”
As Carbonmade is an ongoing business, they need continued support, and they are confident in the choices they’ve made. “With Microsoft’s commitment against breaking changes, it’s great to know that things we deploy will continue to work in production as long as needed,” Jason added.
Summary
Through the Microsoft BizSpark Program, Carbonmade has been able to build a legitimate, sustainable business, incurring a license cost of only $75 per month in order to do so. This small, but growing business is a shining example of how a small company can build and thrive on a world class web and software platform.
