Upsize is a magazine with a single mission: to help Minnesota's small-business owners build bigger and more profitable companies, and to connect CEOs with the people, products and ideas they need to grow.
Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/66695
Q&A Best of Upsize sites to sell that space. So they think, if we'll pay a couple of hundred a month for a subscription for the tools, it makes sense for us to sell our own ad revenue. Upsize: You'll continue to develop both types of business, then? Dahl: They tell us in business to strengthen a variety of revenue streams. So those two are solid. We also provide weather data to ad deliv- ery systems or ad management companies that are out there. They're responsible for delivering and managing the ads. They're creating really cool ads that are a takeoff of what we're doing, and they're paying us for that weather data. Upsize: Did you change your business because of a "eureka" moment, or did the change evolve over time? Dahl: It was a re-focus on the importance of the ad space, because weather content can be gathered from anywhere, from a million differ- ent places. But advertisers are still advertising on some of those traditional media outlets, and so the aha moment for us was to emphasize the importance of that ad space. And we use weather essentially as a vehicle to deliver an attractive, interactive ad. So the emphasis has changed. If it was a pie chart, that slice of pie would now be turned upside down. Upsize: Did that drive a stake into your father's heart, to say that weather was just a tool to deliver ads? He is, after all, Mr. Weather, Weather, Weather. Dahl: That very well might be true. He through and through bleeds weather! I haven't asked him that; he hasn't said that was the case. He wants to run a successful business, that's the main thing. For us it was an evolution. It was: this is what our customers are asking for and we can evolve in that direction. Upsize: You mentioned you can get weather from everywhere; you were like everyone else for a while. Dahl: That's true, we were for a while. Our product is strong because of its usefulness. It's in places where people are spending time. The world is mobile, but still the way you experience the Internet at work, or on your desktop at home, we're really reaching out to those individuals. There are something like 2,000 weather apps at least, so if we were adding just another weather app, then we would just add to the white noise and we would lose focus on what has made us successful so far. Upsize: How much annual revenue are you generating now? Dahl: We started the business on more or less a shoestring budget. We bootstrapped this thing. It was the opposite of the way a lot of people start a business. Dad and I started with just the two of us, and now we're in year four, and now we're looking at investment. We want to Mr. Hubbard, and we asked if he'd be interested in investing. He did. This past week we took our second investor. Now we're looking to raise upwards of $500,000, and we have a good start. So how do we get those investors at $10,000 or $25,000? You'd think it would be easy, with Dave's name, and that's the kind of message that we're spending a fair amount of time on right now, building up the business with investment capital. We need a salesperson. We need an 14 UPSIZE ONLINE THE GROWTH GUIDE 2012 www.upsizemag.com