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I am a serial entrepreneur who has been the founder of several different
startup companies across a variety of industries yielding me
a diverse business and technical background. The industries
I have been involved with include;
telecommunications, transportation, and the Internet
as a few examples. Over 17 years, my career has spanned
the business planning, marketing, branding, finances,
human resources, and technical aspects of the companies
I have owned and worked for. My current skill set would
be best utilized as the leader/contributor of a major business unit,
working with both the business and technical departments
of an Internet based organization.
In 1990, I founded the Dallas Internet based
singles/dating and social networking website MatchMaker.com. The site was
profitable and self funded (no venture capital) until
February 1999. Under my leadership, Matchmaker.com
had over 4 million users yielding up to 230 million
page views per month and generating over $7 Million
per annum. The company was sold to Lycos for $45 Million
cash after the Internet bubble/crash of 2000.
Over the course of MatchMaker.com's
history, I was the founding President and CEO, the
first full-time employee and largest single common
shareholder. Under my leadership, media metrics rated
us as the 2nd stickiest site on the Internet, and
was growing at a rate of 8% or greater per month,
making it the largest online dating site at that time.
In 1995 when I decided to make Matchmaker.com my full
time job, I was the only employee. By 1999, I had
created a fully functional corporation with 28 full
time employees and 11 remote part time employees,
generating over $7 Million in annual revenue. By the
time we sold to Lycos in July 2000 Matchmaker.com
employed 124 people in 8 separate departments. I had
to become an expert in a variety of fields in order
to grow this company over this very short timeline.
Branding and Media buys: One
of my biggest responsibilities as the founder of Matchmaker.com
was to create an identifiable brand both on and off
line. I accomplished this through a combination of
radio, print, and online marketing. In 1997 I formed
a relationship with Yahoo! and started buying search
engine keywords on a CPM basis. I locked down words
like "singles", "dating", "personals",
etc in the Yahoo! inventory for many years. This was
critical for the growth and branding of MatchMaker.com.
It drove relevant traffic to MatchMaker.com and kept
the #2 Match.com from getting to those interested
users. The return on investment was so high with these
early search engine buys I expanded this contract
300% in the first 6 months of operations. Since Yahoo!
was returning over a 9% click through rate, I also
began buying traffic from other portals like Yahoo, InfoSeek,
Excite, AOL, Lycos, LookSmart, Goto/Overture, Classifieds2000,
Northern Light, Altavista, DoubleClick, CupidsNetwork,
American Singles, and Hotbot. As our relationships
with the various online marketing companies grew,
I negotiated some of the first CPA and CPC contracts
these organizations ever had. Off line marketing including
billboard buys in several cities around the country
as well as banners on buses and trains.
Membership Conversion: One
of the key issues I had to deal with on a daily basis
was how to get people to convert to paying members.
The marketing discussed above got people to the site,
but the revenue model was based on those trial members
becoming paying members. At our height over 22% of
trial members were converting to paid members. Those
paid members continued to pay on average for 4 1/2
months. I was able to achieve such high conversion
and retention rates by manipulating trial and paying
member benefits, increasing and decreasing trial periods,
membership rates/specials and providing a very high
quality and responsive service. It needs to be noted
that an online dating portal is the only business
in the world where you are "doing your job"
right when you send your customer away in pairs.
Strategic partnerships: First
to form Matchmaker.com Inc, I had to convince multiple
independent franchisees to give up their individual
Matchmaker BBS systems to form a single Internet corporation.
Over the course of 3 months I negotiated each franchise
owner to trade franchise ownership for equity eventually
forming a single unified Matchmaker.com Corporation.
Once formed, I was the President and Chief Executive
Officer. I also formed other strategic partnerships
as the President of MatchMaker.com, including relationships
with Blindgift.com, Savvis Communications, Nationwide
Internet, CRL, Frontier / Global Crossing, and Freeside
Networks, Worldcom, SWB/GTE.
Productizing: MatchMaker was
originally a BBS (Bulletin Board System), a text based
dial-up on-line service similar to CompuServe from the
eighties. It was my initiative to forge forward and
get my network on the Internet and provide dial-up and
telnet services to my users. I then rolled out the concept
of "Metro" and "Special Interest"
niche Matchmaking sites to better group and productize
the enterprise service. As a rule, people want to meet
others in their area, the Metro sites were domestic
mainstream dating portals targeted for specific US cities.
The Special-Interest niche sites were worldwide dating
portals targeting specific demographic groups in Age,
Religion, Ethnic and various Lifestyles.
Simply put, "birds of a feather flock together",
I figured by putting people together with more common
interests I would yield higher membership conversions.
The revenue literally tripled in only one month from
the completion of this strategic grouping and remained
about 50% of the companies total membership revenue.
It was this decision that set me apart from other matchmaker
franchise operators in other cities and MatchMaker as
a whole from other companies like Match.com in the on-line
personals business.
Finances: The ultimate purpose
of Matchmaker.com was two-fold; first to bring people
together, second to make money. In order to make this
second goal a reality I had to form both a long-term
business strategy and a set of short-term tactical goals
to grow the company and maintain profitability. Every
venture we took on at Matchmaker.com had a calculated
return on investment (ROI), and had to show profitability
in the first 90 days or I did not approve it. As a startup
company I also had to deal with the more mundane aspect
of financing, including accounting, taxes, payroll,
insurance, accounts receivable, etc…It was not
until much later in the evolution of the organization
I was able to have others handle these things on a daily
basis. The advantage to working this way is I gained
a working familiarity with all these issues, so I have
a more critical eye looking at the financial organization
of any corporate entity.
Human Resources: Matchmaker.com grew at such an
exponential rate it was almost impossible to hire people
fast enough to meet the ever increasing demand. In order
to address these personnel demands I formed several major
departments and staffed them with outstanding department
heads. I then empowered these department head to go recruit
and hire the people they need to run their individual
departments efficiently and within the prescribed budget.
The results were we had an outstanding staff and were
able to grow from 5 employees to 124 employees in 2 years.
I was able to recruit very high caliber people from much
larger, well funded companies such as; Cisco Systems,
Fidelity Investments, American Airlines, and Sabre, etc..
Alternative Revenue Sources:
As the Internet business model evolved I was able
to have Matchmaker.com evolve with it, and take advantage
of new revenue opportunities. Matchmaker.com created
an affiliates program to increase both traffic and
membership revenue. In addition, I added a new chapter
to our business plan called Data Mining. The idea
behind this is, singles creating profiles provide
a tremendous amount of demographical information,
including zip code, income level, profession, hobbies,
living arrangements, and more. Sponsors and potential
advertisers will pay much higher then standard advertising
rates to serve ads and gather survey information from
very targeted demographic groups.
Venture Capital and Funding:
In January 1999 I felt Matchmaker.com could grow even
faster with an infusion of outside capital. In a very
short 2 months I was able to secure $5 Million in
venture capital through a private placement with investors
in Dallas and the Silicon Valley. I was able to obtain
this capital while only surrendering 22% of corporate
equity and I maintained voting control with the original
founders. |
