Small Biz

Eugene Fernandez, 24; Richard Scalesse, 24

Unique Squared
Atlanta

"I know how crazy this sounds, but I want to be doing $100 million in sales in 15 years," says Unique Squared co-founder Richard Scalesse. Scalesse is excited. He says his audio equipment online retail shop, which he started with high school buddy Eugene Fernandez in a Georgia Tech dormitory basement in March, 2007, with an initial investment of about $6,000, is already profitable. In fact, Scalesse thinks total sales could hit $1 million by the end of the year.

The pair started the business after going shopping on a large electronics retailer's Web site and becoming convinced they could do a better job packaging complementary equipment together. For example, on Unique Squared's Web site a microphone is paired with microphone cables, because Scalesse found that other online audio equipment retailers don't normally do this. Scalesse says that by getting the word out about the business on sites like UBid, Amazon.com (AMZN), and eBay (EBAY), the duo was able to save on advertising and concentrate on managing the site's rapid growth.