Three-peat

Recently we (W&R Studios) made Inc. Magazine’s list of the fastest growing private companies in the U.S. Dan and I first made the list with our software company IRIS, LLC. We, along with our partners Edward Ureno and Maggie Etheridge, were listed #193. The year was 2000 and we had just sold our company to HomeSeekers.com (but that’s another story). It was also special because Inc. Magazine featured us in the actual Inc. 500 issue. They wrote an article about our story, and sent out a photographer to take pictures of us. it was very cool. They apparently were fascinated that we were all equal partners and didn’t have a CEO.

After we left HomeSeekers.com, Dan and I joined Stu Siegel, Dave and Jerry Meyer, at eNeighborhoods. eNeighborhoods had a great team they were re-building after selling, and then later getting back, the company they had sold to HomeStore (but that’s another story). We also brought a lot of our crew over from IRIS. At the time they provided neighborhood reports for agents to hand to their customers. We had the simple idea of adding MLS data and expanding the reports to include CMAs and such. We figured in doing so we could raise the price as well. Stu was the first to really understand the power of subscription based software sales. eNeighborhoods was doing this pre-internet. Instead of updates via the net they would mail CDs with new data each month. Long story short, we executed and sales just took off. eNeighborhoods made the list at #84. Along the way Dan and I learned a lot from Stu, Dave and Jerry.

eNeighborhoods was sold to Dominion Enterprises, who also had bought, Advanced Access, and Homes.com in 2007. Great timing it turned out (but that’s another story). Dan and I started another company, W&R Studios, our first product was called Dwellicious. Dan wanted to scratch his own itch. He thought that social bookmarking and real estate was a perfect match. We got a lot of publicity on the major sites like Mashable and TechCrunch and were on our way. But the agents didn’t understand what social book marketing was and a clear revenue model wasn’t apparent. We later sold Dwellicious to a company in Chicago called, VHT, Inc. I thought some of the features from Dwellicious would be a great fit for an online CMA. Dan agreed and we began working on what we would later call Cloud CMA. I started blogging about our experience building Cloud CMA and in late 2009 Lauren Hansen from IRES, LLC, an MLS provider in Boulder Colorado, said she was interested in a site license of Cloud CMA (and we still hadn’t launched it yet). I never forget when Lauren asked if it was okay to pre-pay for the first year of the site license. As a young self-funded start up is was music to my ears.

In February of 2010 we launched Cloud CMA. Now we have over 110,000 active customers who have created over 2 million reports.

Earlier this month Inc. Magazine notified us that we were #644 on their Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing private companies in the United States. Although we didn’t break the 500 mark (damn!) we are still very honored.

Dan Woolley and I first started to work together in 1992. We are both very lucky to love what we do. From our first real estate software product, Lightning (which were sold on 5 1/4 floppy diskettes) to our latest, Cloud Streams. And we know that none of our success could ever happen without the support and friendship of hundreds of people, many of which reads this blog.

Thanks for making this happen.