LearnThe Startup Story of Carbonmade

Author Note: Spencer Fry has offered up 5 Carbonmade “Whoo!” Accounts. To be entered to win one, follow instructions at the bottom of this article.

Back in 2009, around the time when the global economy broke, a lot of creatives found themselves out of work. It became increasingly important to have a strong online presence, even if the medium was more of an offline commodity (sculpture, painting, illustration, poster design, etc.).

A well-designed and much under-the-radar portfolio app, Carbonmade, experienced a surge of growth as a result of these conditions and the creative collaboration and vision of the three co-founders: Spencer Fry, Dave Gorum, and Jason Nelson.

Carbonmade is a simple, beautiful, portfolio application for a range of creatives (photographers, web designers, sculptors, and even user experience designers) to organize and promote their work within the community and outside to clients and prospects.

The Story

I’m a sucker for a great startup story. I find stories of startups to be as more fun than teenage vampire love stories.

The arch looks a little like this: co-founders find each other, and in spite of all logic and possible/impossible circumstances they get together, experience an emotional and at times stormy relationship in which they make good, bad, and future-altering decisions, and with smarts, love, and a bit of soul selling sorcery luck build and launch a successful app, idea, product, and produce a magical revenue stream. Errr, well, either that or they’re totally drained by what was an epic-worthy love.

Let’s dive into the story of Carbonmade, I can guarantee love, high-class drama, an affair with another app, and much more .

Origin Story

Three bright guys co-founded a small web design and development consultancy. Among their pet projects, Dave created a small personal content management app to manage and display his often-changing and growing portfolio. Within a few months he scaled and distributed the app among friends in the design community who shared the same need.

By the end of 2007, Dave, Jason, and Spencer put aside their consulting work to focus on Carbonmade full-time, self-funded, they launched a $12 per month plan. Viola! Instant ramen revenue! They never marketed it outside of friends and family, and yet, its user base grew at a steady rate.

The team planned to create a series of products for creatives like 37 Signals does for small businesses, and by 2008, this trio was fully focused on an entirely new app. A funny thing happened, towards the end of 2008 they asked the ever-wonderful, obvious, and existential question:

What the hell are we doing? We have a app, a passionate community whom we love, and making Carbonmade is just fun!

In spite of having another creative app close to completion, the decision was pretty easy, Carbonmade could be even better, bigger, and more useful to the design community if it was the sole focus and product.

Carbonmade Today

Fast forward to today, in anticipation of a very aggressive upgrade (to be delivered summer 2010), Carbonmade upgraded to some spiffy new threads about a week ago, and pushed out a gutsy feature to provide transparency into the upgrade taking place.

Marvel away at the striking, whimsical, design (unicorn, moustache, octopus, mountainscape, and all-too-cute rendering of the founders themselves), but don’t let the eye candy fool you, looking under the hood at the inner workings is just as sexy as the pastel pixels on the surface.

Carbonmade Community Members Come From All Over

• Illustrator — Lena Guberman
• Cartoonist — Marcel Borges
• Multi-Discipline Artist — Carly Allen-Fletcher
• Fashion designer — Christian Lacroix
• Web designer — Tim Van Damme (super talented & freelances for Gowalla)
• Painter — Eddy Werthem
• Designer/Carbonmade co-Founder —Dave Gorum

Finer Features for “lovers”

• Lead generation lovers – look at the sign-up experience, and try it out! Choose from one of two plans: “Meh.” (free) or “Whoo!” ($12 per month). Pay close attention to the sign-up button, which changes from “Sign Up” to “Moustache.”

• Content strategy devotees – examine the copywriting, I think you’ll find that it’s a rich repository of awesome and exceptional examples of how to infuse voice into clear calls to action, user instructions, and brand expression (they call Carbonmade’s headquarters “The Magic Distillery”)

• Damn good designers – have fun scoping out the iconography, color palette (changes per page), and the self portraits of these guys. Rules are definitely broken, but in ways that may make you want to break some rules of your own!

Carbonmade, The Gutsy Progress Page, & This Summer’s Launch

I’d like to drawn your attention to Carbonmade’s “Progress Page.” As Spencer explained, back in December, amidst advent calendars and a love for the popular MacHeist system, he floated an idea to Dave and Grant–how could the development of Carbonmade’s next generation app be shared with the community and involve and inform users around major milestones?

Ultimately, they scrapped the MacHeist and voted for an advent-calendar-like approach, which has been brought to life on the Progress Page. Look closely and you’ll see the guys at the bottom of the mountain, with each milestone, they’ll use update this page to tell the story, trickle out feature developments, and share some struggles and they’ll update the design as they go along (don’t be surprised if at some point Spencer is dangling by a thread off the side of the mountain).

To date, I haven’t seen this kind of transparency employed by any other web app and I’m excited about following the story and being a part of it myself. The Progress page will be complete when the “explorers” have reached the top of the mountain.

Sure, they’re leaking their feature development and roadmap to the competition, but they’re doing it out of a love for the community to create conversation about design, development, and user input, and if it really is about the execution of the ideas themselves, I’m betting Carbonmade will own the space regardless of competition.

Q&A With Spencer Fry

Q: You three have been together for several years now, and it seems like you’ve been able to leverage a small team to create a big product. What advice would you share about how staying small has helped you? Has it ever hurt your ability to grow or scale to your user’s requests or needs?

Yes! We’ve begun by hiring talented designers like Grant Blakeman and Sam Brown for small consulting gigs. Carbonmade is definitely looking to expand our band of explorers during the next few months by bringing on some more full-time people — especially designers.

We’re a design first company, which means that everything we do is led by design. This is why we have an abnormal ratio of designers to programmers.

We’ll probably be four designers to one programmer by the time we hire another programmer. That, and Jason Nelson is that good. 🙂 We like to compare ourselves to Apple in that if the design and implementation doesn’t make sense then we’re not adding that feature to Carbonmade just for the hell of it or because it might drive sales. That’s like playing with fire to us.

Q. How do you optimize your conversion practices when you do things that are so dramatically different (e.g. using “Moustache” instead of “Sign-up”) from typical conventions?

Q. What’s the story behind the logo? Why a girl with a unicorn horn?

One of Dave’s best friends is a beautiful and kind girl named Bee. Bee is a bundle of joy and one of the coolest girls on the planet. She’s also extremely funny and should be followed on Twitter and Tumblr. 🙂 Hi, Bee!

Dave and Bee are roommates and one morning she woke up with “morning hair,” and Dave mentioned she looked like a unicorn as it was sticking straight up. From then on she was known as “Uni” for short and an illustration of her became our logo.

Q. Where do you fit into the competitive landscape? How is Carbonmade different from Sortfolio and other services?

Q. With 200k+ users, can you break down any metrics on your user groups? Who’s using Carbonmade and in what capacity?

Q. You’ve offered up 5 “Whoo!” accounts to Think Vitamin’s readers, how should we give them away?

To be entered to win one, create your free “meh” carbonmade portfolio and post your Carbonmade url in the comments on this post by Friday, March 26, 2010 at 12PM ET.

We’ll pick the 5 winners Friday and announce them in Think Vitamin’s Friday’s news roundup. I’ll  feature our favorite on Carbonmade’s Examples page, which draws an audience of over 10k readers per new post! Insta-audience!

Startup enthusiast Andrew Hyde also wrote about Carbonmade’s launch, and shares more perspective on his blog.