Home Based Internet Startup Sold for $2M

Filed in archive internet business on July 24, 2007

SeattlePI blog posted about a Seattle-based Internet startup that was sold for $2 million - PremierGuide.com, a business directory.

PremierGuide Chief Executive Malcolm Lewis tells me that the two-person company, whose customers include newspapers, television stations and online city portals, was able to generate "$2 million worth of value on two laptops from a home office." It received a small $250,000 angel investment early on to get things going, but for the most part it was a lean operation.

"We owned nothing but our code IP, all built on open source technologies, and a laptop each. No office, no furniture, no employees. Our only expense was servers we rented month-to-month from a hosting company in San Francisco," says the 41-year-old.

While Lewis was happy with the result, the $2 million purchase price is nowhere near the success of his Web 1.0 experience. Lewis - who moved to Bellevue last year from Silicon Valley - was an early executive at Vitria Technology.

Indeed, Internet startups, think YouTube, DoubleClick, MySpace and other ventures started as Internet-based services and probably started as home based businesses are getting more and more attention and can be as viable as brick and mortar businesses.