Everyone wants to be the sexy startup, the next Instagram or Twitter, but the reality is that often the most successful businesses are the ones that serve an unsexy purpose. There are plenty of services that are needed by a wide range of customers and can deliver a steady, solid income to their founders even if they don’t come with a whole lot of glamor.
One company that’s a great example of that is LabelsOnTime.com. They do one job and they do it well: making sure their clients get their much needed thermal labels on time.
That business model has kept them going since they launched in 1998, after co-founders Alex Choong and Russell Ossendryver got frustrated when one too many time-sensitive label order came in later. Their solution was to create a service that guarantees speedy delivery of thermal labels to the people who need them.
They way they do that is by having four warehouses across the country, insuring that no matter where in the States you order from, there’s a warehouse nearby. They longest any customer has to wait is three days, with plenty of areas being served in only one day, as seen in the map below.
LabelsOnTime.com delivers thermal labels for all of the popular printers, including Zebra, Intermec, Printronix, Dymo, and Sato, to name a few. They can also create custom thermal labels, for those of you who are interested in that sort of thing.
The site serves everyone from Fortune 500 companies to mom and pop shops and, yes, startups. No matter how big or how small, companies that work with LabelsOnTime can rest assured that they’ll get the same speedy service.
So yeah, maybe labels aren’t the sexiest thing out there. They’re not Instagram or Twitter but when you’re thinking about what kind of business you want to found, consider something that provides a real utility, even if it’s not the most glamorous. You could do much, much worse than running a profitable business for over 16 years.
