| Type | Privately held company |
|---|---|
| Industry |
|
| Founded | 2005 |
| Founder(s) | Nick Carter |
| Headquarters | Indianapolis, Indiana, United States |
| Services | Web applications |
| Website | addresstwo.com |
Carter and Company, LLC (dba AddressTwo) is a privately held web application company based in Indianapolis, Indiana. The firm was founded in 2005 by Nick Carter as a marketing consulting company. Carter began developing applications for customers in 2007, including a small-scale CRM application that evolved into the company's flagship product AddressTwo.
Since August, 2008, the company's focus has shifted from marketing consulting services to the development, sales, and marketing of AddressTwo and related products. AddressTwo was first commercialized in August, 2008 as a Saas product, followed by ApplyTwo, PostTwo, FriendTwo, and HereTwo. Founder Nick Carter published Unfunded: From Bootstrap to Blue Chip Without the Fuel of Round-A Capital in February, 2011 encouraging Entrepreneurs to follow his example of starting a business without Venture Capital.
The company's legal name is Carter and Company, LLC, an Indiana-filed Limited liability company, but assumed the legal DBA of AddressTwo in August, 2009.[1]
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The company's initial business model was centered on marketing services including graphic design, copywriting, as well as web development. By 2007, the company had 6 employees and was serving Fortune 1000 companies such as GlobalSCAPE and 3D Systems. However, as Nick Carter later commented in his book, "I could not work my way into wealth. I still had a job, not a business."[2] In 2007, the company began to introduce a series of SaaS-model web applications that each failed to monetize.
In June, 2008, the firm developed a simple web application to meet one customer's request for online lead entry and tracking. After two months of use, Carter decided to re-invent the application as a CRM product for public use and commercialized on August 11th, 2008.[3] The name AddressTwo was reportedly selected because of an inane debate the developers had with the original customer over the inclusion of a second input field for the second line of addresses, arguing that the goal of the program was to maintain utter simplicity.[4] By September, 2009 AddressTwo had grown to an installed base of 500.[5] Several new features were released at a user conference called the Hullabaloo held on September 16th, 2009 in Indianapolis, IN.[6] The new features included email marketing module, task management, and a dropbox feature personified in the character Addy. As of January, 2011 AddressTwo reported an installed base of over 5,000 representing 800 different companies.[7]
In his book Unfunded Nick Carter alleges at least three instances when venture capital was offered and refused[8] but no public record or securities filing can verify the offers. Nick Carter keynoted a business conference for Rainmakers Marketing Group speaking of his experience growing AddressTwo without venture capital on August 18, 2010.[9] Indiana Secretary of State filings do confirm that as of 6/1/2011 Carter and Company, LLC (dba AddressTwo) is a single-member LLC with the sole managing member being Nicholas R. Carter.[1]
After the initial success of AddressTwo, several ancillary products were introduced to augment or complement AddressTwo's functionality. All of these are freemium model SaaS products.