A New Brunswick native, Canadian Dan Martell discovered a book on Java programming while he was in rehab at the age of 18. According to him, this was his life’s turning point. Not long after that, he started a vacation rental (or cottage booking) site called Maritime Vacations.
Unfortunately, this didn’t work out for him because he eventually got pushed out by a larger, less niche, cottage-booking site. He was focused on the small region of Cummins in Eastern Canada and as a result, his growth was limited. This is an example of how nicheing down can hurt you.
Sometime after that, he started a web hosting company called NBHost. The biggest lesson he learned was “don’t start a web hosting company”. There’s just way too much to worry about, servers, uptime, etc.
Eventually, he would acquire a role as a Senior Web Developer in a large tech consulting firm in the year 2000. It’s not clear how the timeline of his two previous ventures coincide with his work history, but nevertheless, he worked there for a year and four months and even got a Microsoft certification out of it. After that, he moved to Syncude Canada as a Technical Lead, presumably working on their internal systems. He stayed there for 2 years and 4 months and quit in December of 2003.
In February of 2003, he launched Spheric Technologies, a tech consulting firm specializing in company intranet portals. He built this company up to more than 30 employees over the span of 4 years and 4 months. In May of 2008, it was acquired by another company called Function1.
According to the press release, the acquisition “...brings together two of the premier boutique professional services firms specializing in support of the Oracle Webcenter Interaction (WCI) suite of products.”
At this point, Dan moved to San Francisco in search of new opportunities. In January of 2009, Dan started Flowtown with two other founders. Here’s an article on their early vision: http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/25/flowtown-funding/
Eventually, things didn’t work out. According to co-founder Ethan Bloch:
Built Flowtown to 26,000 business, a team of 8, and near profitability in 11 months only to be faced with the decision to shutdown the company or start from scratch on an entirely new product. That hurt. Completely rebooted Flowtown, launching Timely.is and a new version of Flowtown (Gift Marketing) in late 2010, which collectively grew to over 25,000 businesses leading up to our acquisition by Demandforce in October of 2011.
Timely.is was a product of Flowtown and it allowed businesses to automate and optimize tweet reminders. An example of this is dental offices that wanted to reduce the no-show rates of patients as it was costing the industry up to $80M every year.
3 years later, by 2012, Dan would move back to New Brunswick with his wealth and become an angel investor there. He didn’t sit on his hands though, while in New Brunswick, he launched Clarity.fm. It began with a provincial launch first, but then expanded into the network that he built while he was in San Francisco.
You can read a lot more about Clarity.fm online, but Mark Cuban, 500 Startups, and a few other big names gave them a $1.6M seed round and 2 years later, a $1.1M venture round. In February of 2015, 3 years after its founding, Clarity would be acquired by Fundable.
Now Dan spends most of his time in New Brunswick and is trying to offer his advice in the form of a course.