George Taylor McKnight

Our first photo taken at our first event on December 12, 2008

Yesterday, December 12th, marked our two year anniversary for Phobooth. Things have gotten pretty crazy, especially over the last 6 months…

At the end of 2009, I wrote down a few goals for the upcoming year. Have Phobooth pay for itself and get 2 bookings, paid or free, per month. We were only serving the Gainesville/Ocala market, so this was a reasonable if not short-sighted goal.

12 months later we’ve found ourselves in a completely different position. December is already a record month for us in number of bookings, some days with all of our booths booked at once. We have four booths now and we serve the entire state of Florida, a move that multiplied our bookings by many fold. Just this month alone we’ve served everything from high end weddings to Whole Foods’ corporate party in Miami to Grooveshark’s holiday party in Gainesville.

We now have a team of 6 people. My stepdad quit his job and started working full-time on Phobooth this month. We have a branch in Jacksonville run part-time by my good friends Thomas & Stephanie, who on their first date ever snuck into an event we were doing and got their photo taken. Our Tampa branch is run part-time by my step-mother, who taught me a lot about business when I was a child, so it’s cool to show her all the hard work paid off.

Last non-risque photo from Grooveshark’s
Holiday Party at ~2am December 12, 2010

We’ve literally made improvements on the booth every month since we were founded. And I still think there’s plenty of room for improvement, but our #1 focus is still offering the best quality photos at a killer price. I think we are doing a kick ass job at this. It, surprisingly, doesn’t get old either. I still love to go in there and get my photo taken. It’s kind of magical what a camera + black box + props can unleash.

We still have road bumps. Tracking expenses/income accurately is probably the most difficult. I have no excuse, I got an A+ in Financial Accounting at UF. It’s really not a passion for me and my sister isn’t yet experienced enough to handle it all herself, so it’s something we still need to get on top of. Managing the daily email flow + dispatching jobs in a timely manner are something else we’re finally catching up on.

I continue to use Phobooth as an opportunity to learn about Adwords and refine what it means to write compelling ad-copy. I relaunched the site 2 weeks ago with many of these things in mind. Two skills that haven’t really had a place in Hype Machine but ones that I will definitely need for SCHED.

My vision for Phobooth has expanded a bit from simply a way to help my sister pay for college. I’d like to set a new goal for 2011. I want Phobooth to provide a full time livable wage for two of my parents plus my sister. Here we go…