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Print Edition StoriesWednesday, September 23, 2009
Born in the Recession
Twitter startup launched by 'Pistachio' with funding
By James M. Connolly
MHT's Rodney Brown: App developers see opportunity in new iPhone
MHT's Efrain Viscarolasaga: How social networking is changing business
Whether in launch or relaunch mode, Laura Fitton seems to be surrounded by recessions.
In June, near the tail end of the most recent recession, Fitton launched oneforty Inc. through the TechStars program in Cambridge. In 2001— not remembered as a great time frame — she started a marketing firm, Pistachio Consulting. She relaunched Pistachio as a Twitter-for-business consulting firm last fall, just before the financial sector fell apart.
But she has worked through it: amassing a 12,000-person list of followers on Twitter and, with oneforty, raising more money than she expected sooner than she expected, and driving the company’s Twitter application store into beta.
“Frankly, I got really lucky. I raised almost a quarter of a million dollars before I had a prototype and before I had a team,” said Fitton, who is expected to announce this week that oneforty is moving from alpha to beta testing. Oneforty’s Twitter store is intended to provide Twitter users with applications that help them manage their Twitter activities, whether as followers or posters. “We have business tools that are pretty crucial if you are a business using Twitter. Those companies can use anything that makes the process more efficient,” she said.
Short messages, long road to success
A year ago, Fitton relaunched her Pistachio business as a Twitter consultancy — “that was September 5. I had a ton of consulting gigs I was going to do in New York, with media companies. That business pretty much fell through for that whole first quarter. The company very much felt a ripple effect of what was going on in the financial markets,” she recalled.
Then, earlier this year, Fitton launched oneforty as one of the original participants in TechStars Boston, an entrepreneurship program for startups. She was able to raise the funds she needed for launch within 10 weeks, and she plans to accept additional angel funding ”because people are knocking on the door right now.” The original funding has allowed her to hire three engineers as her first employees.
She sees one upside to a down economy — that it can be good for companies like hers, which offer relatively low-priced online products. She cites conversations that she has had with companies involved in virtual goods, saying, “They’ve seen an uptick in a bad economy. People can’t afford to go out and get a massage, but they can spend a dollar on a virtual pet. Small, impulsive purchases work well.”
While Fitton has met success with the launch of oneforty, hard times played a key role in her getting the company off the ground. “In a way, it’s helped a lot because my personal finances have so thoroughly been driven onto the rocks that I shed all kinds of fear this spring. You get close enough to the edge and it’s no longer scary,” she said, “It’s almost more the norm that people are struggling, so that took the stigma off some of the risks that I have had to take for my family.”
She said of one personal financial issue, “It pushed me to, and through, abject fear of financial disaster and gave me the nerve and sinew I needed to push ahead with a startup.”
Having achieved some degree of fame through Twitter, Fitton said she is “a bit mystified” by how many people follow her Tweets, and how industry notables such as Guy Kawasaki credit her as a thought leader while still more people reach out to her as a mentor.
In an effort to share her success last Christmas, Fitton used Twitter to issue a call to 12,000 followers for donations to Charity Waters, which works to bring clean water to remote villages. The effort brought almost $25,000 to the charity.
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