When bad hair days lead to VC funding

For many entrepreneurs in the first dot-com boom, the name of the game was "portal-matic." Spin a wheel, pick a niche interest group, build a comprehensive Web portal aimed at that group's needs and cash a venture capitalist's check.

While many of the venture-backed portals were quickly shuttered, some other sites, often built by amateurs, have survived. Thanks to a surging online advertising market and an Internet audience accustomed to clicking to find an authoritative voice on obscure topics, their reward may finally be coming.

Take NaturallyCurly.com for instance. The site, founded in 1998 by two journalists in Austin, Texas, as a resource for curly-haired people, has grown its readership to about 180,000 monthly readers, without marketing. More impressively, it has built a stable of hair care advertisers, like Aveda, Paul Mitchell and Redken, among others, and generated annual revenue in excess of $1 million (although the founders won't disclose how much).