Develop Your Own Cult Following From underground phenomenon to national icon, your business can be a leader in its own right. Entrepreneur's Start-Ups magazine - March 2001 By Geoff Williams (click here for the full article) Know The Rules…And Get A Cult Of Your Own Chi Modu, 33, and Steve Proctor, 34, are founders of ephotos in New York City, which has no cult following to speak of. But a company within their company, diverseimages.com, does. Their clientele? Entertainment editors at magazines and newspapers. Modu and Proctor, both photographers, co-founded ephotos in 1996, and in 1999, they developed (no pun intended) diverseimages.com, a company that provides photos of minorities, especially celebrities. So diverseimages.com may not have Jennifer Aniston, but they will have Jennifer Lopez. And entertainment editors know this. Newsweek, Time, Entertainment Weekly, Vanity Fair, The New York Times--they all use diverseimages.com. Modu and Proctor could have stuck with ephotos, of course, which will likely have that picture of Jennifer Aniston, but diverseimages.com is easier for a harried editor to remember. "The editors are always under pressure," says Modu. "So if you can bring them relief and keep in mind your job is to bring them relief, you'll know how to get them on your side--because they're always under the gun." Their strategy seems to have worked. In 1999, ephotos brought in $500,000--and 70 percent of that, estimates Proctor, came from diverseimages.com. As you think about developing a cult following, remember, you can only do your part; your customers have to do the rest. Starbucks' founders and employees, for instance, made their coffee and gave the stores a pleasant atmosphere to sip in--but it was the masses of people, dropping in all day long, that inspired bookstores to implement cafés, coffee bean stores to pop up in malls and You've Got Mail to feature Starbucks in a movie about something that, you could say, has the biggest cult following in the world. You can't pay your customers to like you that much. But they can pay you.

Terms and Conditions
	© Chi Modu 2004-2008