For a young company, early success can define you as much as it can ensure your immediate survival. The question is whether staying with that success is good, in the long run, for the company.

Brand Thunder has been fortunate selling its custom branded browsers early on to major teams in major sports leagues. It wasn’t a surprise as sports teams regularly encourage the connection between the team “brand” and the fan. What was a surprise is how slow certain verticals, like TV and Movies with equally avid fan bases, have been to get on board and how quickly the comment of “oh, you do that sports-browser thing” came up despite having strong clients like the Huffington Post, HowStuffWorks.com and Universal Music Group.

As a start up, anything that moves you toward profitability in a significant way is vital to pursue, but equally vital is continuing to do the hard work of building the full market potential of the product. It’s still early in our company’s life to predict its outcome, but it feels right to keep pushing toward the broader market. I credit our business-development lead, Ryan, for bringing sales discipline and structure to the company. We did the formal planning of which markets would be a priority and how we’d go about approaching them. It was painful at the time, as it felt like we should be selling – sending emails, making calls. Those came in time and we’re hopeful we’ve chosen the right priorities. While sports is among them, it’s not the only one and we’re making our in roads.

Check out our Gallery, there’s lots of progress. You’ll see the latest cool launches for the Chicago Blackhawks as well as a special-addition Playoff Boom! for the Canucks. You’ll also find lots of other new Booms! for brands like the leading pet community sites Dogster and Catster, Hard Music Magazine, How Stuff Works, FLW’s Fantasy Fishing game (good fun, btw). There’s even a few of our own offerings like our holiday spin for Mother’s Day and a Boom for fans of The Office.

And when we hear “oh, you do those cool Boom! browser things” we’ll know we’re really on our way.

Tags: brand thunder, Branded Browser, browser boom, Catster, Chicago Blackhawks, custom browser, Dogster, HowStuffWorks, Huffington Post, Universal Music Group | Posted in Commentary