The family business
Husband-and-wife team Rayner Smith ’01 and Tanya Raedisch Smith ’01 latest in tradition of entrepreneurs.
by Jessie Milligan
Tanya Raedisch Smith ’01 and Rayner Smith ’01 have launched iJango.com and feedbacknetwork.com.
Entrepreneurship definitely runs in the family.
Rayner Smith ’01 and Tanya Raedisch Smith ’01, are an Austin husband and wife team who are in the midst of launching multiple, inventive Web-based services.
They have a savvy business partner.
Rayner’s father is Steve Smith, who in 2000 donated $10.5 million to TCU to build the Sarah and Steve Smith Entrepreneurs Hall. Steve Smith co-founded Excel Communications, a Texas-based telephone services company.
It is Steve Smith’s network marketing smarts that is credited for the dizzying seven-year rise that brought Excel from a startup business to a publicly traded company worth more than $1.5 billion.
Since then, Rayner Smith has joined his dad to run Ultimate Choice Travel, an Austin-based travel company that offers traditional as well as ground-breaking services. Ultimate Choice, for instance, offers a honeymoon registry where friends and family can make donations toward a couple’s trip.
Ultimate Choice is in the midst of “morphing” into a new Web-based service called iJourni.com.
The iJourni.com site is built like a social networking site, only one where people can book trips as well as post stories and photos of their travels. Users can create wish lists of destinations and then receive e-mail when iJourni offers a special package or fare for that destination
Rayner and Tanya Smith also run feedbacknetwork.com, a niche Web site helps real estate agents get responses to their listings and also allows them to post listings. That Web site is going through a remake and will re-emerge as agentia.com soon.
The family is launching yet another site, iJango.com on Aug. 1 in Las Vegas. iJango.com is, essentially, a portal to the Internet that allows users to access search engines and have Facebook, Twitter, e-mail all on one page. Most significantly, is iJango allows some users to make money. Here’s how:
A church group, for instance, could pay the $149 set up fee and $19.95 a month to become a registered user on iJango. Members of the congregation could begin using the church’s iJango homepage. Whenever anyone clicks through to another site from that home page, the registered user – the church in this case – receives income from advertisers on the landing page.
“They might not have to pass the plate anymore,” Rayner says.