Amber Venz Box launched RewardStyle in 2011 with a relatively modest goal: make enough money to move out of her father's house.
The problem with that strategy, Box says, is that people could take free fashion advice from her blog without actually hiring her. Early fashion bloggers weren't yet commonly using affiliate marketing technology, where websites drive traffic to a retailer's online shop in exchange for a cut of those eventual sales.
They each spent $500 to $1,000 of their own money to build a website that could accommodate affiliate links, she estimates. When they realized they could sell similar tech to other bloggers, RewardStyle was born.The couple scraped together an additional $1,000 from friends and family, some of which went toward renting a single-room residential apartment as their first office space, says Box.
They hired a software engineer to help run the site and used liquidation sales to furnish their office space. "We found a defunct business in Fort Worth and drove over in Suburbans and trucks, and loaded up some chairs and some desks," says Box. "For my birthday that year, I got a Keurig, so our sole engineer was happy that he had coffee."