Its founder is an experienced entrepreneur.
Chris Charuhas is the founder of Dyadic. He started out in entrepreneurship in the 1990s as a member of the Netpreneur Exchange, one of the first tech startup incubators. There he learned from AOL co-founder Jim Kimsey, Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki, and other luminaries of the dot-com era.
In the late 1990s he started his first company, Usable Technology. Like many entrepreneurs’ first efforts, it failed, but the experience taught him the value of the Customer Development process, and how to make a startup succeed.
Chris started his second company, Visibooks, in 2000. It published illustration-based technology how-to books, and sold them online as downloadable files. To adapt the books for school use, he won two SBIR grants from the US Dept. of Education for $570K. When he found the school market tough to crack, he turned the books into online tutorials.
In 2008, he released the tutorials under a new brand, In Pictures, and launched the new brand with an intensive earned media campaign. By the time he sold the In Pictures web site in 2014, its tutorials had been used by more than seven million people worldwide.
The FITCI incubator provides strong support.
Startups affiliated with the FITCI (Frederick Innovative Technology Center Inc.) incubator succeed at a 93% rate. Why? Because FITCI provides their founders with advice and guidance from entrepreneurs who’ve been successful in the past.
It also provides them with connections to angel and venture capital, as well as the professional services that startups typically need. Dyadic gets all of these things through its affiliation with FITCI.
