Dwolla Inc., earlier this year, raised $5 million in venture capital. The mobile-based payment company made a splash when actor Ashton Kutcher was revealed as one of the investors.

Seemingly every time you turn around, Ben Milne’s company wins another award.

Dwolla has been held up as a standard for Iowa-based technology start-up companies. Tech leaders say they would like more companies to be as successful as Dwolla has been so far – in other words, more companies that can be touted as Central Iowa success stories.

The Business Record caught up with three players in the tech scene to get their take on which company could be the next technology-based company to achieve high growth and become a well-known name.

– Kyle Oppenhuizen

Tikly LLC

• About: Tikly is a Web portal that allows artists to sell their own tickets to shows and charges customers a flat 10 percent fee for all purchases. It is designed mainly for bands that aren’t mainstream and play at smaller venues.

“I think when you are going to try to go into a market where there is no market, it’s pretty hard to invent a market. There’s a ton of people who have had a ticketing experience. Almost all of us have bought an online ticket somewhere. There’s this 800-pound gorilla, Ticketmaster, which has very few fans. So there is a market, an ever-expanding market, that entertainment people are pursuing. There aren’t a lot of avenues for the beginning band. When I look at what they have, it’s a very defined market. There’s a huge pool of people not using automated ticketing who could. So to me, it’s an underserved market with a recognized need, a very straightforward product, and what hasn’t been there (in the past) is the self-serve aspect.”

– Mike Colwell, executive director, Business Innovation Zone

Goodsmiths LLC

• About: West Des Moines-based Goodsmiths is a website for people to buy and sell handmade goods. It is similar to the crafting website Etsy. Wood also talks about its similarities to Kickstarter, a website that encourages people to fund creative projects.

“They’ve been hitting a lot of milestones lately. They’ve opened a new office; they keep adding to their team; they have new product releases coming out. Of all the start-ups I watch, they’re the ones who seem to be most on the breakout track. I think it’s kind of unique. They’re joining a space that’s been defined very well by Etsy, and now (people) have Goodsmiths as an option. You have an Etsy competitor, which is a viable strategy. You go after a space that has already been defined. Then they have this Kickstarter-like component to it, where you can do group buying. It’s kind of this weird combination of Kickstarter and Etsy that I think has shown, initially, that there’s a lot of interest in it.”

– Geoff Wood, chief operating officer, Silicon Prairie News

WebFilings LLC

• About: WebFilings, with offices in Ames and California, produces software to help public companies prepare Securities and Exchange Commission reports. The company, which now has more than 400 employees, is already of the early stage start-up phase.

“From what I know, (the business) is growing just leaps and bounds. There’s been rumblings about them for a while, and they’ve been growing that business very rapidly for quite some time. So I think that if the rumors are true, they’ve got to be doing a pretty good business and you’ve got to be getting to the point where there’s probably something on the horizon, not only because of the longevity of the business, but also because of the longevity of their sort of high-growth period. They’ve been growing fast for a while. That would lead you to believe that not only are they able to sustain and support that growth, but there’s a reason they keep growing at that rate.”

– Andrew Kirpalani, facilitator, Startup Weekend Des Moines and OpenIowa