Steele’s Curbed.com
Here’s an awesome article about Lockhart Steele who writes for curbed.com among many other sites. Steele is motivated, passionate, and ambitious about making it big as an entrepreneur.
Here are some key sections of the article:
PASSION
While Steele describes Curbed.com as a money-generating hobby, he would like to eventually see a hefty profit. With an equal mix of ambition and bemusement, he says candidly that he hopes to make five figures by the end of the year. With barriers to entry extremely low — the cost of his domain name, site construction, and logo totaled just $2,000 — he has only time to lose.
As for Steele’s personal real estate endeavors, Curbed.com has yet to score him any personal property perquisites. He continues to rent the same Rivington Street one-bedroom apartment he has occupied since spring, 2001. Says Steele: “I got a good deal.” He should know.
BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS
Unlike his personal blog, Steele began Curbed.com with a business plan. Early on, he enlisted Alexis Palmer, a high school friend from Vermont’s St. Paul’s Academy, to manage the marketing side. With a Harvard MBA, Palmer is a finance person by day. Each night she spends several hours on Curbed.com work: developing a marketing strategy, putting together press kits, and incorporating the site as a small business. Meanwhile, Steele develops the site’s editorial voice.
A journalist by training, Steele is emphatic about making the distinction between Curbed.com’s content and traditional journalism. “I don’t have time to do the fact-checking you do,” said Steele of BusinessWeek’s traditional journalistic model. Sometimes this leads to problems.
RISK
As part of Steele’s professed get-rich-slow scheme, he left his day job as an editor at luxury real estate magazine Cottages & Gardens on Jan. 31 to become a professional blogger. Since Curbed.com is still far from profitable, Steele took a job with the blogosphere’s most successful business prototype to date, Gawker Media. Its sites commanded 35 million page views in March.
