As a small business it’s always important to celebrate the milestones and that’s something we haven’t been good at, but we have definitely been better at celebrating than updating this blog.  Some high level notables:

• Menuism.com continues to chug along profitably.
• The Wedding Lens continues to grow and have very happy customers.
• PickFu, being a lean service, is profitable on it’s own.  We could use more growth here, so let us know if you have an ideas or want to try out a beta account.
• A couple side projects that bring in money but we’re not ready to share

What’s interesting about this milestone is that it feels like an eternity on the Internet and it’s surreal to watch other similarly aged companies fold due to lack of profitability or pressure from VC investment.  People ask us if taking or not taking VC investment was a hard decision for us.  In fact, it wasn’t a decision for us.  Not taking it was sort of the point of the whole venture.  We didn’t want to work for anyone else and we wanted to run our own business.  Sure we haven’t had the budgets of our competitors but we get to work on:

• what we want – restaurant review sites,  online wedding photo albums or a/b testing services
• when we want – passion for projects run hot and cold; if interest drops on one, we just work on the other.
• where we want – at home in LA for Justin, at home in SF for John (and some China last year)

Flexibility and owning your own destiny is an amazingly empowering feeling.  Here’s to 4 more years!

Justin

One thing we’ve definitely learned is to keep moving forward, and in that vein, we’re super excited to announce the first monthly Menuism Food Fight! You might have heard about it on the Menuism Blog, but a good thing bears repeating: Eat PANCAKES and win prizes! In honor of National Pancake Week (Feb 18-24), we’re looking for the BEST pancake in Seattle, Chicago, New York and San Francisco, and you can win by just eating pancakes and reviewing them on Menuism. You can win even if you’re not a pancake fan – just refer a winner and you’ll win as well. So get out there and spread the word, or check the press release or contest page for more details!

Publicity in all forms is great, and we’re really excited to be getting Food Fight coverage from the awesome guys at Tech Cocktail and WindyBits. However, you know you’ve really made it when your name shows up on a banana, courtesy of the fine folks at BananaName:

This is proof positive that Menuism’s Food Fight is something to go “bananas” over… sorry, couldn’t resist.

- John & Justin