We’re releasing a new video every week from our small business conference — Small and Special. The most recent two include Oliver Chin, founder (and author) from Immedium — an independent children’s book publisher in San Francisco, and Jon Rimmerman, founder of Garagiste, the largest independent wine retailer in the Northwest. Both videos are inspiring, [...]

Two great videos are up at Small and Special. First is Joe Mansfield from Engrave Your Tech talking about how he handled challenges in terms of the safety of his manufacturing process and how he migrated his business to a new process and set of products. Very inspiring, and beautiful engraved products. Next is Rachel [...]

My favorite florist agreed to grace us with her presence, her flowers, and most importantly, her story. This video of Nisha Kelen from Fleurish is from our recent Small and Special conference. Now you can see her entire talk. We’ll be posting a new video every week from the conference. Enjoy.

A few weeks ago we put on our first ever conference – Small and Special. It was an afternoon where we brought in eight entrepreneurs of businesses that were not only passion projects but financially successful entities in their own right. That combination (as you can imagine) is attractive to us and fundamentally a model [...]

Last Tuesday, our little tech startup put on our own small business conference – Small and Special. You may wonder, why is a web startup still in its early development taking the time, effort, and resources to put on a small business conference. I could tell you how we increased our visibility in the community, [...]

And to be honest, it was super fun. : ) We’re a little exhaustipated but feeling good about Small and Special and the tons of great and useful feedback we received. We need to do a proper recap of the event, but that might take a couple of days. Thanks to everyone who attended, participated, [...]

Hmmm… what to put in a blog post where the title already says it all? If you have a ticket, we’ll see you next Tuesday. If you don’t have a ticket follow @smallandspecial or search #SandS on Twitter for updates from the event.

John Cook over at TechFlash was nice enough to ask me to do a guest post on bootstrapping. This one is on how much runway you need to get your business over the hump. “The single biggest enemy of an indeterminate amount of time needed for success is a deadline. And nothing gives you a [...]

I’m thrilled to welcome Seattle’s very own Massive Monkees, as our newest sponsor for our event. This energetic group of break dancers will be giving attendees a quick performance at Small and Special, (less than two weeks away!) This crew of award-winning b-boy dancers turned their passion for break dancing into a business – performing [...]

As we mentioned when we announced our Small and Special conference focused on passionate small businesses and aspiring entrepreneurs, a good chunk of our inspiration came from a single book. That book is Small Giants, Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big by Bo Burlingham. While the conference speaker roster is limited to [...]

…Joe Mansfield of Engrave Your Tech. Gorgeous moleskine notebook covers with beautiful original designs is what got our attention. The fact that Joe is making a successful business out of this passionate enterprise is what pushed us to invite him to tell his story. Joe and seven other passionate small business founders will be speaking [...]

Our mini-conference is just a few short weeks away. Small and Special, an afternoon for passionate small business owners (and aspiring entrepreneurs) is happening on Tuesday June 30, 2009 from 2pm-6pm in the Georgetown Ballroom in Seattle. We’ll have a total of eight speakers for the afternoon, six of which have already been announced. We’re [...]

I realize that people, and especially the media, like to write about trends. And with the economy in bad shape, small is in. This is not to say that there aren’t downsides to a company being small. In general though (unless you’re making something like cars perhaps) I find that the advantages of small outweigh [...]

The Seattle startup community is relatively tight knit. While I think some people have valley envy, the smallness actually makes for a group of people that know each other better than they might if there were more folks doing startups. A couple of years ago at a local entrepreneur seminar I met Ksenia Oustiougova, founder [...]

As you may know, we’re putting on a little conference at the end of June called Small and Special. The conference is for small business owners and entrepreneur hopefuls who dream about creating a successful business doing something they love. In that vein, two more successful entrepreneurs have signed up to tell their stories. Andrew [...]

On the way back from a recent conference, Jenny, Walter, and myself started trying to figure out what we liked and what we didn’t like about the various conferences we’ve attended over the years. Somehow, as usually happens when we start complaining, an idea for something we could do is born. In this case that [...]