Kyle
The Roanoke-Blacksburg Technology Council held their annual awards banquet this week honoring local companies, and startups in the technology space.
A startup called Lujure Media LLC took home the council’s rising star award which recognizes the hard work of a locally based startup. Lujure has a web based application that allows Facebook users with fan pages to customize them quickly and easily.
Lujure also blogs about the business and semantics of Facebook and delivers information that is important to their customers. Lujure is a premium (paid) Facebook tool and according to Roanoke.com they have thousands of paying customers.
Lujure has generated over $400,000 in revenue in its first year. Their web application helps companies make their fan pages in less than 30 seconds. It’s a simple drag and drop method of putting together a Fan Page. Lujure has a number of different plans which are really based on two things.
The first factor in which plan you should take is how familiar you are with Facebook and Fan pages. This also takes into consideration either how much time you have to maintain your page and how much hand holding you need. Lujure has several plans from free to $3,000 per month. Obviously $3,000 a month may be a lot of money but Lujure gives you all the bells and whistles and does a lot of the work for you.
The other factor is how many enhancements you want.
More after the break
Lujure’s founder Nathan Latke started Lujure after losing his job at a recreation center. He tells Mixergy founder Andrew Warner in one of the Mixergy podcasts that he spent an hour a day listening to Mixergy’s founder stories and interviews before deciding to launch Lujure as a business.
Latke told Mixergy:
“I thought that I needed to start a company somehow, I had no job. So, I started researching things on line. This crazy guy, who had some gift card businesses, popped up in Google search. I’m wondering what’s this guy up to? Mixergy? I started watching interviews religiously. I set aside an hour a day to actually act on those. It turned into what it is today”
Latke is a graduate of Virginia Tech. It was at Virginia Tech where he got his first tastes in the business of social media. His first business was a t-shirt business that would have some saying on the front of the shirt and then a way to follow that person on the back. Latke said that he was literally sleeping on the inventory so he had to get out of that business.
He transitioned his t-shirt business into a social consultancy where he would handle updating clients social media pages. He quickly grew tired of that and pivoted again to a business called the Fan Page Factory which were the roots for Lujure.
This weeks technology excellence award solidifies his business in the rising startup community being built in the Roanoke Blackbsurg Area.
Linkage:
We highly suggest you check out Latke’s interview on Mixergy
Check out the rest of the winners at the Roanoke-Blackbsurg Banquet here
Check out Lujure here
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