I heart Carbonmade’s graphics.

This past year has been hard on most companies, especially small businesses. How are you guys holding up?

I think part of our success has been tied to the recession. Artists and illustrators are getting killed right now. A lot of our members are super talented and never needed a portfolio. Now that they’re out of work – they do. They also don’t have time to spend creating one, or don’t know the html code to do it. We’re here to help them out.

Who are your main users?

We thought it was going to be web designers and graphic designers, but it’s all sorts of people. We have interior designers, architects, photographers, and sock-puppet makers. If you go to our site, there’s a list of all the categories that have 500 or more portfolios. Photographers and illustrators are our #1 – we have 10,000 of each.

So how did Carbonmade start?

Dave and Jason, my two partners, started the company. They met in 2001, in a chat room, and started doing consulting work. They were some of the first designers for scribd.com, a huge start-up that does online text storing.

They built Carbonmade in 2006. Dave, the designer, wanted a tool to help upload his work, as opposed to manually editing HTML files. He wanted to create a system. Jason did the coding for the backend. It was really just a private system, until a few of his design buddies wanted access to it, and he opened it up. Carbonmade wasn’t built for money; we didn’t even have a payment plan for the first 6 months. It wasn’t until server expenses started to ramp up that we had to find a way to cover it.

SilvioAR’s Carbonmade portfolio – http://sar.carbonmade.com

How did you get involved?

I met Jason and Dave online, wanting to hire them to do some design work. We got along really well. They needed someone with business experience to do the day-to-day stuff – marketing, support, copy etc., so I came on board. During 2007 we were mostly doing consulting to pay the bills and Carbonmade was a side project. Mid-2008 it became “ramen profitable.” We could track our growth and see that we were going somewhere.

What gets you excited about working on Carbonmade?

Yesterday we had out biggest sign-up day ever – 466 people! That’s crazy. I love the idea that a bunch of creative people are coming together to use our product, and show off their work – that they think our platform is good for that. It makes me want to come to work every day. Yesterday, I was on the phone with a customer for an hour. He didn’t understand how to create a portfolio, and he would have been pretty lost without us.

That’s customer service!

In 2008, I made it a goal that we were going to be really good about customer service. That we would support our users and make sure people understood that we are listening to them. I answered 6 months of old email. You learn the business by talking to your users.

Do you incorporate your users’ requests for features into the interface?

We’ve been working a new version of Carbonmade for over a year now. Hopefully it will be released in a month. Creating something that looks simple, and seems simple, is the hardest thing to do. It’s also what’s made us popular. If we screw that up it’s going to be bad! We have 160,000 users. Coming out with a new version and introducing them to a new experience is very nerve wracking. We want to create new features and make the interface more flexible, but still keep that simplicity. It’s the hardest thing in the world.

Super easy-to-use interface for updating your Carbonmade site.

Do you have any other advice for those looking to start their own company?

If you see a need, and have a problem, chances are other people have that problem. It has to be something you enjoy doing – not for the money. You can’t put yourself into a project fully if you don’t care about it. I can see myself working on Carbonmade for 5 or 10 years, or even scary as this sounds, for the rest of my life. As long as you really like it, you will eventually make a profit, and be able to continue to work on it.