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Early stage investments in creative and well executed ventures.

Imagekind: Curious Office’s own little baby

Curious Office is sure to develop another of our own companies. Sitting in a board meeting today reminded us that we have made good progress with Imagekind - the first company we developed internally. Rewinding a bit, it would probably be a reasonable question to ask why we incubate our own companies in the first place. The answer, in short, is that we believe we can better evaluate opportunities if we’re in the trenches ourselves. Driving traffic, recruiting developers and identifying solid concepts is really about being close to the game. More importantly, we simply drive more economic leverage by funding and starting our own projects.

The market continues to give Imagekind good reviews. One of the better ones I’ve read recently comes from Empty Easel.
Imagekind

Our traffic is considerably higher than what is shown here but its great to see that we’re leading our sector in any case. Speaking of traffic, Marcelo Calbucci of Sampa does a great job maintaining traffic lists for Internet start-ups in Seattle. Our traffic continues to go up since this list was compiled but it shows Imagekind is in the top 10-15 highest trafficked web start-ups in Seattle.

Our partners, like Snapfish, drive an immense amount of traffic and sales for us and it reminds us that more partnerships like this would surely be a hit. We’re going to be announcing other partnerships to include some prominent stock photo sites and may possibly even consider a commercial unit catering to hotels and retail chains (such as Starbucks for example.)

Snapfish

Gross revenue continues to climb. Exact revenues are not shared but it would be safe to say that the company is now at about 20 employees and we’re not in a position that absolutely requires us to do fund raising.

Gross revenue

Overall, we’re very pleased with the progress and I’ll try to take more time today sharing our experiences and plans for Imagekind.

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