Interview with Sam Odio, Founder of Divvyshot (YC W09)

This article is slightly inaccurate in its depiction of my previous company. It didn't explain how OdioWorks makes most of its revenue and it didn't give enough credit to the person who currently runs the company. Maybe I'll write a blog article about it someday.

I found this interesting and useful (it actually explained Divvyshot better than the site itself).

What I found most interesting was his first company which made big money just fixing PCs. I hear lots of similar stories to this (a simple idea making a nice amount of money). Is this something that just comes from the scale of a US audience (in Australia simple ideas just don't seem to make anywhere near that amount) or is there another key?

$1.5MM is impressive. i'd be curious as to how much time was spent marketing. they say "build it and they will come" but if you do an internet archive search on facebook, they had to compete with friendster who was already an established player (and myspace was too). not to mention, there were probably 2 or 3 identical ideas starting up at other colleges, particularly cornell. one fascinating thing is that facebook had tons of media coverage early on, it appears they were being disseminated by the media within days or weeks of the service launching.

i would be interested in knowing how sam got odioworks started. you hear stories about reddit, and they had a few guys making it look like an already established service (which fueled further growth). until you cross that chasm, what was done to achieve growth? these are the questions i ask every start up founder.

if there were stock up for sale in OdioWorks LLC i would definitely grab as much as i could

Hi Sam, glad to correct the article re: OdioWorks if you'd like. Let me know.

-Christa