9 Clouds

What it does: Online marketing
Founder: John T. Meyer, 25
Website: 9cloudsinc.com
Based: Sioux Falls, S.D.

Meyer started his first company to do search engine marketing at age 22 from his dorm room at Luther College in Iowa. After going to work for Accenture (ACN) in Minneapolis, he took a buyout in 2009 to return to his native South Dakota and start 9 Clouds, an online marketing consultancy. Meyer's goal: help organizations that aren’t very Web savvy get online. "Especially here in the Midwest, there’s a lot of people who need the help," he says. Meyer used a $15,000 economic development grant for seed money and launched the company in June 2009. Two months later, he hired his brother Scott, 28, to lead sales. 9 Clouds now has a staff of five, an office in Sioux Falls, and more than a dozen active clients, including retailers, professional firms, and colleges such as South Dakota State University and Lehigh University. Meyer says the business had $50,000 in revenue in the second half of 2009 and he expects $200,000 in 2010. —JT