Email Marketing a Top Priority

Those companies that are seeing the current downturn as a chance to expand and that are planning to spend more on their online efforts this year, say that they will focus their investments on search (80%), email (65%), and social marketing (60%). According to this report, these businesses see email as one of the most important means to communicate with their customers and most plan to use it to inform customers of new product launches, promotions, and to get customer feedback. 90% of all respondents listed a focus on email marketing as a top priority.

Companies Won't Scale Back Social Media Campaigns

Interestingly, the study also found that those companies that are growing faster than expected during this downturn are also more likely to embrace social media. Even those companies that are planning to scale back their online operations this year still plan to experiment with social media campaigns.

Imaged used courtesy of Flickr user jakerome.

Our site ReadWriteHire covers new hires in tech and new media. Today we're publishing our aggregate numbers for the first 3 months of 2009. Who's hiring? Software and IT companies, social media and social networking companies and marketing and advertising firms.

We've reported on a total of 420 hires since the first of January. The top 10 sector categories have been:

1. Software/IT (24%)
2. Social Media/Social Networking (15%)
3. Marketing/Advertising (11%)
4. Publishing/New Media (7%)
5. Hardware (6%)
6. Mobile (4%)
7. Gaming/Entertainment (3%)
8. Search (3%)
9. Government (2%)
10. Security (2%)

News of those positions getting filled came from press releases and personal tips, but also from mentions of new jobs on Twitter and blog posts. We scour the web daily for cool news about people getting cool new jobs.

There are far more hires going on in total than we can currently report on, but we're working on expanding our capacity and we believe that this is a valuable data point as a semi-representative snapshot at least. We hope that the particular hires reported on ReadWriteHire will also be of interest to companies in each of these sectors. Knowing who your competitors have hired is valuable information.

If you've made a new hire or gotten a new job recently, drop us a line to let us know! You can reach us by email at jobwire@readwriteweb.com.

Congratulations to everyone who secured these increasingly difficult positions to land. Join us over at ReadWriteHire for more stories of exciting new hires every day of the week.

John Donahoe made the very reasonable point that online e-commerce will look like offline commerce: fragmented. Consumers will buy from eBay, Amazon, Walmart.com, Zappos, whatever gets their attention and has the right product at the right price. That rings of common sense.

To illustrate this fragmentation, he told us that the mighty Walmart has only 4% of the market.

For a more extensive discussion of the problems facing eBay's core service, read this very well-reasoned (but long) post on SeekingAlpha.

When queried on these issues, Donahoe simply indicated that the problems did not originate on his watch, that he was aware of them, and that they were complex to solve. That does not seem enough. The bits of insight above may be great, but eBay needs to fix its core service to regain its stature as a leader and give investors a good return. You don't transform a company without fixing the core, and investors clearly feel that eBay needs transforming; that is the message behind a stock price that in the last 12 months trails the NASDAQ and peers like Google and Amazon. eBay is actually in the rather miserable club with Yahoo, as perceived by investors.

PayPal: Jewel in the Crown?

Donahoe contrasted the fragmented e-commerce business with the highly consolidated payments business. Clearly, the latter has greater appeal. One can see why. The payments business is global and dominated by a few players: Visa, MasterCard, and Amex. As the low-cost player best suited to the web, PayPal has enormous potential.

I'm pretty sure I even heard Donahoe say, "PayPal should be bigger than eBay." As he spoke about the global payments system, one could see why.

He described the national banking regulatory challenges, a major barrier to entry. Taking money online is the easy bit, he said. Moving that money in and out of the traditional banking system is hard, because the banking system has to adhere to a maze of local regulations. Donahoe told us that eBay works on penetrating something like 5 to 15 new countries each year. Some, like Japan, remain a challenge.

This is clearly a huge opportunity, but these local regulations are a big barrier to entry. Anyone who has done a lot of international business can attest to how archaic some of the processes are. Wiring money is bad enough, but the processes around letters of credit seem positively arcane, almost 19th-century.

Oh, and a $500 million High-Growth Skype Business

Skype is the eBay business I am most familiar with as a user. We use it all the time here at ReadWriteWeb. It is a core tool for running a small business in which colleagues, clients, audience, partners, and everybody else in the community are all over the world. For entirely selfish reasons, I evangelize Skype to everybody. Now, I want Skype on my cell phone to cut my mobile bills; it is definitely ready for prime-time.

And yes, Skype is a real business. Donahoe told us that Skype generated $500 million in revenue last year, with "high-teen margins" and growth rates of 30% to 40%. Saying "That's not a bad business" got a wry laugh from the audience (all of whom would consider it a totally amazing business). In any other market, that would be a red-hot IPO.

Skype is perfectly positioned for a long recession, too. That already shows in the numbers. In the last quarter, Donahoe told us that Skype-to-Skype grew 73% and Skype Out grew 63%. I can personally attest to seeing many smart people, who had not used Skype previously, see it and say, "OMG, it's amazing."

$500 million was only 6% of eBay's total $8.5 billion revenue in 2008. But with Skype growing at 30% to 40% and eBay's core service hurt by a slow-down in consumer spending, this percentage could change significantly in 2009.

How much could eBay get for Skype, a business that already has scale, good revenue growth, decent margins, and a model and technology that are disrupting the massive telecom market globally? It is not entirely outrageous to think that Skype could become the biggest telecom company in the world at some not-too-distant point in the future. At some point, the IPO market will come back. All of eBay (including PayPal and Skype) is currently valued by the market at $15 billion. How much would the market value of Skype as an independent entity be? More than 6% of $15 billion? I think so.

eBay spinning off Skype was one of the three web-tech market events that I wished for (not predicted) for 2009. It looks possible. Methinks it is simply a matter of timing and market conditions.

The VC Portfolio

As well as being a collection of great but unrelated businesses, a kind of online conglomerate, eBay also looks like a VC with a strange but interesting mix of minority stakes. The most interesting and oft-discussed is its 28% stake in Craigslist. It is clearly not a happy relationship. But that 28% must be worth something.

The Economic Question

The underlying question for everybody at the Accel Symposium was, "What about the effect of the economy on your business?" Donahoe pointed out that they saw the downturn in their PayPal and eBay lines as early as May. Signals from millions of small buyers and sellers are far more reliable than any GDP numbers. So they were able to take corrective action early.

eBay's biggest action was to offer coupons to buyers, to help sellers. As he pointed out, small sellers have weak balance sheets, so a downturn can make them vanish quickly. eBay moved quickly to support its sellers.

Asked if eBay was recession-proof, Donahoe pointed to Skype as being perfectly positioned, but he noted that if consumer spending slows, then even e-commerce is affected. And e-commerce is down.

Time to Fix E-Commerce While it's Down

eBay needs to have a compelling core proposition for e-commerce that unites auction, fixed price, and classified ads. Donahoe pointed out that search is the obvious unifier. But it is not clear how eBay can use this to its advantage.

E-commerce still makes up only 7% of retail. Given the amount of time we spend online and the obvious opportunities, this could grow to 15% to 20%. A big prize awaits here when the economy turns around. eBay has the financial strength to build through the downturn.

Donahoe also painted a vision of mobile e-commerce. It is one that others have painted before: you go into a real-world retail store; see an item you like; scan the barcode to get the price; find a better price online; then decide whether to buy it in the store or online, depending on whether you prefer convenience or lower price.

As he pointed out, this could encounter a bit of resistance. I can envision videos popping up on YouTube of irate shopkeepers throwing out barcode-swiping bargain hunters! Physical retailers will have to adapt, but online folks such as eBay will have to be sensitive to their needs. This will be interesting to watch.

1. The average deal size is increasing. The average went from $2.12 million in November to $4.11 million in December to $6.06 million in January.
2. California still rules, but global investment is happening. In the US, venture capital is still dominated by Silicon Valley, but we are seeing a few more global deals, specifically in the UK, Canada, and English-speaking India.
3. Total diversity was apparent, without any market-segment bias. This is a good sign that ventures are being evaluated on the fundamentals rather than on what's hot.

Which Ventures Received Money?

December:

• NetShelter
• dotblu
• InnerRewards
• KZOInnovations
• smartfundit
• Appcelerator
• Wordstream

January:

• HubDub
• Sittercity
• Appnomic
• CloudSwitch
• GoInternetMedia

Which VCs Wired the Money?

December:

• Rho Canada
• GrowthWorks Canadian Fund
• JLA Ventures.
• DE Shaw, Maple Investments
• Valhalla Partners
• Baytech Venture Capital
• Storm Ventures
• Sigma Partners

January:

• Pentech Ventures
• Apex Venture Partners
• Norwest Venture Partners
• Atlas Ventures
• Matrix Partners
• Kennet Partners

Like an increasing number of private companies, Blurb is starting to report its financial results publicly, almost as if it were a public company. This presumably serves the purpose of both reassuring customers that the business is healthy and attracting potential acquirers.

Allow us to quote shamelessly from Blurb's press release (at least it prevents errors):

"Blurb, the creative publishing platform, today reported a year of record growth in 2008 with revenues approaching $30 million. The company reached profitability and achieved nearly 200% year-over-year revenue growth in 2008."

Quiz: which would you prefer: a company with $200 million in advertising revenue that is burning cash, or a business with $30 million in subscription revenue that is profitable? The first describes Facebook, the second describes Blurb. Yes, it is almost absurd to make the comparison. But the point is that old business maxim: revenue is vanity, and profit is sanity.

What Does this Tell Us About the Economy?

On the face of it, not much. Blurb's business is partly seasonal; people buy more during the holiday season. We asked Eileen Gittins, the company's CEO. She sounded almost surprised, not at all triumphant, and generally cautious. Which is a reasonable reaction of anybody doing fairly well in today's economy. Eileen confirmed that January is also looking good: 30% over projections. So this is not just a holiday buying story; it's more about what specifically Blurb offers.

What Does this Tell Us About Blurb's Market?

Eileen attributed the good results to three factors:

1. Pent-up demand to write books. Who doesn't have a book they have always wanted to write? It is now easier than ever to publish (if not write) a book.
2. The cultural shift of people becoming more active contributors to media, as writers as well as readers.
3. The forced leisure that layoffs create, and the desire to do something that one has some control over and can point to as an achievement. This may be exacerbated by the bad times: get laid off from a big job, take three months to write a book about what you know, do it well and you'll be back in demand pretty soon.

There is one simpler explanation that we see. In tough times, affordable luxuries that provide a high level of emotional satisfaction do well: think movies, roses, and booze.

What's it like at your end? Are a lot of your budgets and projects that seemed like slam-dunks a few months ago suddenly coming under scrutiny? Or are you finding there's still room to experiment and innovate, even - or, with some particularly visionary organizations, especially - in a recession?

More Noise to Signal.

Another, relatively unknown project that is being closed now, is the Mashup Editor, which was based on the Google App Engine, and never left a very limited, private beta.

Will You Miss These Services?

That Google would shut down Google Video is not exactly a surprise, given that Google's own YouTube is far more popular. Google's Catalog Search will probably only be missed by very few users. We are, however, sad to see Google Notebook (one of our favorite Firefox addons), Jaiku, and Dodgeball go. These services had a lot of potential - and a lot of it remained untapped as Jaiku and Dodgeball remained almost unchanged after they were acquired by Google.

However, the current economic climate is probably making even a highly profitable company like Google focus on its core assets. None of the services that are being closed now had a lot of users and probably brought in very little to no revenue.

Also: Changes to Engineering and Recruiting

Shutting down these services was only part of Google's announcements today. In addition, Google announced that it is winding down almost all of its contracts with external contractors and vendors providing recruiting services to Google. Google will also cut 100 internal positions.

On the engineering side, Google is shutting down its offices in Austin, Texas; Trondheim, Norway; and Lulea, Sweden. The company is asking the employees who work there to move to Mountain View.

What About GrandCentral?

One service in Google's line-up we have always wondered about is GrandCentral - another service that was acquired before it even went public. Just like some of the services that Google is closing now, GrandCentral never came out of its invite-only mode after being acquired by Google. The fact that it is not being closed now, though, leads us to believe that Google is still having plans for this service.

BrightKite started as a "nights and weekends" project that they submitted to TechStars, a small funding initiative similar to Y Combinator. TechStars provided mentorship, a bit of seed capital and generally got them off the ground - in return for some equity. BrightKite did a working prototype, then raised an angel round of $1M last year.

I then asked the two companies about how their product plan will be affected, if at all, by the economy downturn. I noted that Zoho has a wide variety of products in their Web Office suite, so for example do they plan to fold some of those into bigger products due to the economy? Zoho replied that they make money from their business applications, rather than their collaboration apps. So they have made it a priority to integrate their collaboration apps into the business apps over the coming year(s). They will also continue to add new apps, however those will be money-making business apps.

I put the same question to BrightKite: has their product plan changed due to the economy? BrightKite replied that it hasn't changed significantly, they were always planning to ramp up the marketing and do more partnerships this year. They also plan to introduce revenue drivers - e.g. location-based advertising and analytics for businesses. Generally the economy hasn't changed their revenue-generating plans too much, although it's perhaps brought it forward by a month or so.

In terms of success factors, Zoho mentioned that "constant innovation" has allowed them to keep ahead of the pack. In the online word processing space, there were around 17 competing apps when they launched Zoho Writer - but continually improving their product helped them keep ahead. Zoho has about 250 staff, so that has helped. On the other side of the staffing coin, BrightKite is a small 10-person team. They believe that being open and iterating on user problems is key for their success.

There are many more tips in the podcast, which we invite you to listen to below. Also let us know your own thoughts on not just surviving, but thriving, in this current economic environment.

Download MP3

Cat pic: fofurasfelinas

We will post the audio from the show at the end, but we hope you join us LIVE on Calliflower or Facebook.

Here are the details of our guests in this show:

• Sridhar Vembu, CEO, Zoho
• Raju Vegesna, Evangelist, Zoho
• Martin May, co-founder, BrightKite
• Brady Becker, co-founder, BrightKite

UPDATE: the audio is available now.

Download MP3

However, we've also lowered our cut-off to $0.5 million. Tougher times lead to smaller rounds, which is not necessarily a bad thing because tough times force you to do more with less money. This got our list up to nine deals in total for November.

Below, we have linked each company's name to its entry in the Trade Vibes-powered ReadWriteWeb Company Index (or to the company site if there is no entry). You can use this as a starting point for research and comparison, referring to the venture's own site when needed.

• Machinima
• CarWhale
• Maxplore
• Open Candy
• Zuberance
• Carbon Flow
• Casual Collective

Note: a commenter pointed out that in our original A-Team post we missed Siri, which raised $8.5 million in October, although we have written about them before.

So please tell us who we missed in November. We will correct it in December.

Which VCs Are Wiring The Cash?

We identify only the lead VC in the following list (assuming that the first one listed in the PR material is the lead). We aim to make this more in-depth next month by showing all of the VCs that participated.

• Pond Venture Partners
• MK Capital
• Sierra Ventures
• Emergence Capital Partners
• Bessemer Venture Partners: check out its Anti-Portfolio.
• Clean Pacific Ventures
• Lightspeed Venture Partners: it has one of the best blogs in the venture business.

Emergence Capital Partners did two Series A deals in November (Maxplore and Zuberance). That is pretty cool.

If you want to talk to the firm, here are the basics:

Investment categories:

• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
• Consumer services
• Digital and social media
• Information services
• Business services
• Cloud computing

Investment criteria:

• Early and growth stage
• Compelling customer value proposition
• Market leadership potential
• Experienced and passionate management team
• $1 to $10 million initial investment
• US preferred

Emergence is riding the enterprise SaaS wave. Most VCs missed that wave, as we found when we surveyed gritty entrepreneurs. That sector was out of favor at the time, and most ventures simply did not get VC funding then.

Where Are Ventures Getting Funded?

It looks like California is still doing the dreaming, with six out of the eight ventures residing there. The other two are from outside the USA: one from England and the other from India.

Which Sectors Are Getting Funded?

The biggest theme was video, specifically games, but there were also two that had a green focus.

Here's hoping that December will be an even better month.

While systems and software used to be very "behind the scenes" and often transaction-based, that is the case no longer. Consumers and businesses alike buy differently, consume differently, and recommend differently. Trends such as social networking, video on demand, and e-commerce will continue to force businesses to adapt to keep up with their customers. They cannot rely on systems that take years to implement, and most don't have the budgets to make large investments, at least they won't for the next couple of years.

The growing focus on SaaS, cloud computing, application platforms, etc. are all responses to this growing trend in the market. There will be other solutions in the future for mobile, etc. that we haven't even imagined. They all drive businesses to use systems that they can deploy, change, and retire quickly. In my main job, I remember meeting a venture capitalist who talked about how his firm looks for opportunities in which it sees lots of "wiggling." He couldn't describe what that really meant, or how one gets paid for wiggling. I thought he was a lunatic.

In retrospect, he does make a good point. Things happen quickly on the Internet and in this changing global economy. When a business sees wiggling (or opportunities), either positive or negative, they need agile systems to respond. One-size-fits-all software and packaging are going the way of the VCR. I think this will continue to grow in importance and focus as enterprises evaluate new systems and invest in new technology. What do you think?

Wild Apricot is a young technology company out of Toronto, Canada. We provide Software-as-as-Service for associations, clubs, and non-profit organizations. This is our story of an investment round that fell through due to economic conditions.

Originally financed by our founders, the company wanted to grow faster and in December 2007 decided to seek additional financing from outside investors. Things progressed quickly, and by February 2008 we shook hands on a deal with a new investor: a very entrepreneurial investment company out of UK. Closing was planned for April 2008.

Of course, things never go as planned (and this is one of the lessons many startups learn the painful way). First, due diligence protracted much longer than expected. This was partially due to the fact that our Canadian-based company has a subsidiary office in Moscow, Russia, where the bulk of software development work takes place. The investor was keen to ensure that the intellectual property was properly protected, and it required changes to the legal setup of the Russian subsidiary, new employment contracts for all employees, and a bunch of other changes.

Then the MBAs and lawyers got their hands on the deal, and it quickly deteriorated from a relatively simple original term sheet to a thick stack of very complicated contracts.

This was to be the first Canadian deal for the investment company, and the deal stalled for a while as the investor's lawyers struggled to reconcile the terms sheet with their standard templates and the wording of UK contractual law with the Canadian legal system and its way of doing things. (That's another lesson for start-ups: making a deal outside of your home base frequently takes much more time and energy.)

The shareholder agreement, articles of association, board by-laws, and all the other fun documents multiplied in versions like rabbits.

Everybody got exhausted, and the deal almost derailed a few times and was only saved thanks to the open dialog between our company and the majority shareholder of the investment company.

Dmitry Buterin, the Chief Apricot (aka President of Wild Apricot), got the final documents on the morning of October 9th, 2008. He was visiting the Moscow office at the time and went to work having the documents signed and faxed between Moscow and Toronto.

Alas, it was not to be. At 4:00 pm, he got a call from the investor. "We are not going to close the deal after all. Our shareholders are panicking and withdrawing their money. We cannot do any new deals now." The financial crisis finally hit home.

After seven months of due diligence, many thousands of dollars spent on accountants and lawyers, and countless hours invested by the management team, Wild Apricot had to write it all off.

It was even more disappointing because our company was delivering on its promises. Back in January 2008, we provided a detailed financial projection, and at the last check-in with the investor team we were proud to show the September and year-to-date numbers were right on the projections.

As the saying goes, in every crisis there is opportunity. So, the Wild Apricot team went searching hard for those opportunities.

The story is still being written because the crisis is still unfolding, but here is what we have achieved so far:

1. We asked nicely, and the investor agreed to reimburse part of Wild Apricot's legal expenses, even though there was no legal obligation on the investor's part.
2. We contacted local media right away to capitalize on all of the hoopla about the crisis and ended up on Canada's CBC television.
3. The founders put together another round of their own money, and while they had to scale back some growth ambitions, we feel comfortable about riding out the current storm and bridging this and the next investment round. (we knew that any deal had a risk of falling through, so we had backup financing arranged in advance, and it came in very handy.)

Wal-Mart has been reporting record growth as of late and McDonalds is stealing market share from Starbucks. So we think Wild Apricot might do even better in these tough times. Non-profits are hurting and have to trim their budgets (just search Google News).

To tell you more about our software: the basic premise is that for a simple, flat monthly fee of $25 to $200, Wild Apricot replaces up to seven separate pieces of software: the content management system for your website, a members database, a secure private website for members and the board, an event registration system, online payments processing, software to send bulk emails and newsletters, and online community facilities, such as blogs and discussion forums. Technical support and updates are free.

For a small association or club, this set-up saves thousands of dollars in software, countless hours of volunteer time usually wasted on copying and pasting and reconciling the data between a dozen Excel files, and paying through the nose for IT services.

Wild Apricot delivers a custom-built website project that would cost the equivalent of $20,000 or more (not to mention hefty ongoing maintenance and support fees).

October 2008 has been our best month in terms of absolute financial growth (meaning our monthly revenue has increased by the biggest amount ever). Percentage-wise, our revenue grew by 11.3% in a single month! And November so far is shaping up to be an even better month for us.

We we are very confident in our ability to keep growing by staying agile on our feet!

And here is the silver lining:

The US dollar is shooting up against most other currencies. Wild Apricot software is priced in US dollars, while its expenditures are largely in Canadian dollars and Russian rubles. This adds a healthy boost to its bottom line.

What are your war stories? How are you navigating these waters, and what new opportunities are opening up for other technology startups?

If you're curious to know more about this 'gritty startup', please click through to Wild Apricot's website and support a RWW sponsor!

You can tune into the show, and interact with us via the chat, by clicking here. You can also use the Calliflower Facebook app to tune in and participate.

• Aaron Patzer, Founder and CEO of Mint, a popular online money management service. (RWW coverage of Mint)
• Gabe Griego, Vice President of Marketing at Wesabe, a "part money management tool, part community" service. (Wesabe was profiled in our recent round-up post Banking 2.0: Money Management Moves to The Cloud)
• Mu Saleem, Community Director of Tip'd, a new online community "for financial news, ideas, and tips".

RWW Live is hosted as always by Sean Ammirati, with Richard MacManus and Marshall Kirkpatrick from ReadWriteWeb on the call.

Before the show starts, we're interested in what questions you have for the panelists. Please leave a comment on this post and one of the RWW crew on the call (Sean, Marshall, Steve and myself) will do our best to ask your question.

We will post the audio from the show at the end, but we hope you join us LIVE on Calliflower or Facebook.

UPDATE: the show is now finished, here is the audio:

Download MP3

We don't think the sky is falling, but there may be an earthquake on the horizon as the tech industry begins to feel the economic turbulence. Best known in some circles for hiring Robert Scoble for the Fast Company TV online site, Mansueto Ventures is laying off 20 of their employees in their online and marketing department.

Other cuts the company will make include:

• Shelving Upstart, a planned magazine devoted to new businesses
• Closing the Atlanta office except for sales
• Cutting IT help desk coverage
• Curtailing perks like tuition reimbursement and free snacks

As to why the such measures are being taken, it is being reported:"

"CEO John Koten said in a staff memo that despite Fast Company's growth, expenses were rising faster than revenue as the publishing industry business has softened."

Seesmic Lays Off 7

On a smaller scale, video-commenting startup Seesmic will also layoff several of its employees. In order to prepare for "what most are anticipating to be a bleak economic outlook for the considerable time going forward," Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur will cut 7, or 1/3, of Seesmic's employees. Allen Stern noted that this will be in addition to 3 employees that were let go last month.

What's Next?

While these companies will still move forward with their products and services, we can't help but wonder if more layoffs will be seen in the future and from who. We certainly hope the tech industry doesn't see too much news like this future, but there's no denying these situations as fair warnings that the tech industry is not as invincible as it seems.

In a word - profit. We are looking for companies that have some Web 2.0 characteristics. But we can be loose in that criteria. We are not looking for a "pure" Web 2.0 characteristics. Whatever works, works. But something that is using online technology to disrupt an existing market, maybe using SaaS, user generated content, social media, whatever works in the Web 2.0 bag of tricks.

But we do want to write about companies that have crossed the most important threshold, the one where cash flows from the business and not from investors. So, as we don't believe in overnight sensations, the company was probably founded before 2004. We want to hear from the CEO, who maybe the original founder or somebody who took over when the original business had failed.

We want to hear about massive skepticism, huge mistakes, changes of tactics and even of strategy, near death experiences, all the usual tales of derring-do.

The company can be bootstrapped, or funded by angels, friends and family or VC. No matter where the financing came from, the entrepreneur can now say to them a) no more dilution, and b) thanks for your help, enjoy the ride.

We are launching this series later today with a profile of Jigsaw and their Founder CEO, Jim Fowler. Our earlier profile of Zoho (Part 1 and Part 2) fits the bill too.

We will also give unsolicited advice to these gritty entrepreneurs about the Great Credit Crisis (we're hoping you help us out in the comments on this).

We Want Names

If you know any gritty entrepreneurs, or you are one yourself, we want to hear from you. Send us an email or leave a comment below.

Obligatory cat pic: pasma

UPDATE: Gritty Entrepreneurs: Jigsaw, a Profitable Web 2.0 Venture; the first post in this series