Starting our business and getting to a point where we see a business model that is developing traction has been a year and a half. A friend asked me last night if it was stressful. I always said no, because I didn’t know any different. Last night was the first time I said “Yeah it was.”

Pat and I are in Austin for the Austin City Limits Music Festival and this is the first time in a year and a half that I feel relaxed and without concern for our business. This doesn’t mean we have built anything great yet or we are taking our focus off the goal. It just means we have brought in more revenue than our operating costs and that is a great feeling.

Monday we are launching a new photo contest with Tapatio Hot Sauce. Here is a preview.

It is a 12 month photo contest where fans can submit their favorite photos based on different themes and how they feel about the brand. One of the Tapatio’s family members and staff actually sparked the idea as we talked to them when they said every year around Halloween people email them photos of their Tapatio Man costume.

We also just signed a contract with Marathon Foto . They are the official participant photographer for the largest marathons in the world. We are running best fan photo contests for 3 marathons in Oct as a pilot with the goal of working together with all of their events next year. This is a personal favorite of mine as I think their is a lot of value in running photo contests at events that have huge numbers of spectators.

So moving forward I will be regularly writing again and picking up where I left off with the story of Collar Free, now doing business solely as Artistic Hub. Our goal is to be the biggest national and local contest application company in the US. This is all i can say about out strategy but we have some cool stuff brewing.

Enjoy your weekend and everyone and find some balance in your business. If you haven’t heard of Austin City Limits, I suggest checking it out as well as the town of Austin. This is my first time visiting and as I drink coffee and sit on the porch I realize this is a great town. I can’t imagine a better weekend of listening to great music with awesome friends. Maybe next year we can talk them into running a design competition for the event t-shirt