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Wednesday, March 17, 2010
The Pitch
CustomMade Ventures matches woodworkers with custom projects
By Brendan Lynch
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CustomMade Ventures Corp.
Headquarters: Cambridge
Email: mike@custommade.com
Founded: 2008
Employees: 8
The Pitch: CustomMade is looking for an investment of $750,000 to $1 million to upgrade its site, hire employees and ramp up marketing.
CustomMade Ventures runs CustomMade.com, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) website that woodworkers can use to sell their services and show off their wares. For consumers who need a custom-built piece of furniture, the site is a repository of craftsmen from whom they can receive quotes for projects.
Fixer-upper
When Seth Rosen needed a new coffee table a few years ago, he noticed CustomMade.com turned up in search results disproportionately compared with other sites offering access to woodworkers that could customize a piece of furniture. Rosen and partner Michael Salguero were impressed with the site’s traffic and domain name, but not its appearance. “The site looked horrible, it was really bad,” Salguero said.
Both Rosen and Salguero had worked in real estate while in college, and the pair saw an opportunity in the online real estate the website occupied. “We equated it with a shack right next to Central Park in New York,” Salguero said.
Salguero and Rosen bought the business, which had been around since 1996, for $140,000, in January 2009 — four times the company’s revenue at the time. They replaced its pure-HTML format with a dynamic, database-driven site that allowed woodworkers to upload their own content, such as photos.
Funding
The company took in about $500,000 in friends and family investment last year. Now it is looking for $750,000 to $1 million. The company can operate for about another nine months without funding, Salguero said, and some of its previous funders are interested in investing more. The founders are open to exploring venture capital and angel funding, though they’re looking to get by on as little outside funding as it takes to grow the business, Salguero said.
“The venture capitalists want you to take too much, the angel groups want you to take too little,” he said.
With funding, CustomMade plans to change the technology behind its web site from PHP and SQL to a Python/Django framework. Using Django will help the company implement changes more rapidly, and in a more modular fashion, Salguero said.
“We can roll features out on a weekly basis, which will help us keep up with sales progress,” he said.
Down the road, the company plans to enter similar vertical markets as well, including glass products, metalworking and upholstery. Salguero described his company as a custom woodworking version of Alibaba.com, a Chinese business-to-business and retail e-commerce site, helping an old-fashioned industry find new customers online.
“The friction is that these woodworkers don’t know how to access these customers,” he said.
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