TwitPic creator, entrepreneur plans move to Charleston

TwitPic creator Noah Everett is making enough money from his Twitter application that he quit his full-time job in Oklahoma and is moving to the Lowcountry.

Everett launched TwitPic, an application that allows users to upload photos to their Twitter accounts, in February of 2008 as a way for him and “maybe a few friends” to share photos, he said.

The application is now the No. 1 Twitter application and is adding 20,000 new users a day, he said. Everett expects the number of users to hit 1 million this month.

One of the first images from the US Airways plane crash into the Hudson River in February was released by one of his users, who uploaded the photo from his cell phone to TwitPic.

The TwitPic application started out self-funded, about $100 a month for the first four or five months. He absorbed that cost from his full-time job as a Web developer in Tulsa, Okla.

Venture capital offers started coming in, but Everett declined. He started putting ads on the site in August, and, by December, the site had exploded. He had to build a new platform for the program as volume grew from a few pictures a day to tens of thousands.

Ad revenue growth was so steep, he quit his job last month to work full time on the site. And now, he is looking to hire two people — one to help manage the hardware and another to work on development.

With no strong ties to Oklahoma, he started to revisit the idea of moving to Charleston, which he first hatched while watching The Patriot in November.

“It started out as an imaginary idea, then I started researching it, looking at cost of living. Then it just turned into reality,” Everett said.

He brought his family on vacation here and says he liked the area a lot. He found an apartment on Daniel Island the first day he started looking and plans to move in 12 days.

Although he’s gotten two offers to be bought out — he said the last one was in the $3 million to $5 million range —he wants to grow the site himself for a while before selling it.

“The technology is available now where you are able to create these apps much easier. There’s a much lower barrier than in the dot-com boom,” he said. “It only takes one idea — something that fills a need.”