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Outside Magazine, October 2006

The Power of Two
Heather Stephenson and Jen Boulden
Founders of Ideal Bite

By Kevin Kennedy


O'Neill and Rigby | Cousins and Sullivan | Gerlach and Parsons | Stephenson and Boulden | Benegas and Benegas

They met at a New York bar in the winter of 2003. Stephenson was a confessed "corporate hack" looking to align her career with her values. Boulden was finishing an environmentally focused M.B.A. at George Washington University. They both had too many cocktails. "We were gobsmacked that we had so much in common," says Boulden, 33, who lives in Bozeman, Montana. After a string of successful eco-business consulting projects, in June 2005 they launched IdealBite.com, a Web hub dispensing advice on green lifestyle choices and providing market research to companies targeting the Whole Foods set. BIG MOMENTS: Sending the very first Ideal Bite daily tip to 300 friends; today, the subscriber list is 55,000-plus. This past February, the partners netted $215,000 in a family-and-friends round of investment funding. ROLE PLAY: "I bring in new subscribers, and Heather monetizes them," says Boulden. "There is a definite yin-yang there. Ask either one of us to switch roles and we'd vomit." BLAME THE ALTITUDE: "Our entire year-two strategy came out of a hike in Montana," says Brooklyn-based Stephenson, 33. "And then we got back and frantically put everything into the laptops." UP NEXT: This fall, Stephenson will relocate to San Francisco and open a new Ideal Bite headquarters. A book is planned for next summer.



Next Page: Alpine Climbers

O'Neill and Rigby | Cousins and Sullivan | Gerlach and Parsons | Stephenson and Boulden | Benegas and Benegas