It feels strangely good to get back to writing again. I’ve been oddly silent for a few months, for a reason that I’m about to explain. During this time I learned a lesson about what really drives me to do this, and how hard it is not to write.
The reason I’ve had to be silent is that I’ve known that we were going to be moving away from our dating site of downtoearth, and creating a meet and hangout site called stir.com. It was a drastic change of course, and revealing that information would hurt downoearth in the meantime. Why would you sign up for a dating site if you knew that it wasn’t going to be a dating site in a few months. I’ll have a post on the genesis of stir in a bit. There’s a lot to it.
I will say it absolutely stunk to watch out numbers go down month after month. There were somethings that people couldn’t see in our traffic, most notably that it was actually growing among young people, but as a marketer growth is my business and it felt like I was failing as as the numbers fell. But again, why would you continue to execute hard against a site that you knew would be transforming in a few months. Even worse, I couldn’t say anything in response. (I’m sure that PR people would advise never to comment on traffic numbers) I knew DTE could be growing, but I knew that I’d intentionally taken my foot off the gas.
I tried writing a few posts about things other than my life in a startup, but they didn’t really seem inspired. For that matter, I didn’t even want to write about the dating industry since I wouldn’t be part of it directly in a short bit.
Oddly it’s that life in transition stuff that you really want to talk about the most. Speak when you should be silent. Silent when you should speak. Just generally awkward. I was always worried I’d say the wrong thing. I had written a post about the “last” feature we’d ever launch on downtoearth, user interests, but deleted it when the tone seemed somber rather than triumphant.
In short, it feels good to be back. I’ve had a chance to launch two brands to the web in just over a year and that’s a pretty rare experience. It’s made me grow as a marketer and that feels great.
Tags: dating, downtoearth, Marketing, stir.com
When you are a kid, there are a lot of influences on you and your general outlook on life. Parents are obvious, music is pretty common, teachers are important. For me, there was one that was critical, and seems pretty unusual: the movie ‘Real Genius’ It happened to be on cable last night, and I couldn’t stop watching it.
Certianly, the movie has it’s fair share of quotable moments, but for me there was something deeper. There were a couple messages in in that I just needed to hear at that moment in my life. For that matter, I need to hear them often.
The first was that it’s OK to be smart. It’s possible to be smart AND cool. Prior to that moment, the two seemed on opposite ends of the spectrum. Once my eyes were opened to that possiblity, I started to meet more and more people that fit into that bucket. There was one, who’s name I will never remember, that introduced me to punk rock. He just oozed cool, and that moment of influence is still with me. It’s worth mentioning that I met him on a state math team competition, so it’s pretty obvious that the smart was there too.
The second lesson was that it’s possible to work too hard. There are times when you pour yourself into what you do. I’m guilty of it all the time. I love what I do, and success is important to me. I want to save the world, be a good dad and make a good wage while I’m at it. But, push too hard and it’s pretty easy to realize that you are likely to miss on one of those many goals. It’s pretty easy to crack under the pressure. I’ve found myself doing that on many an occasion, and when I do, I realize that i’ve let myself get out of balance. Sometimes you just have to let go and have a good time for a bit.
The third lesson was that you have to question authority. Ok, this might be a bit of a stretch. But the two geniuses were betrayed by their professor with less than pure motives. It meshes well with my general philosophy (and the punk rock from lesson one) so it seems important as well. People’s motiviations aren’t always what they seem. While it’s easy to be cynical about that, you can also just accept self-interest as a fact of life and expect it without assuming malice.
In the end, its one of those watershed moments that make you set off in a direction. Since then, I’ve wanted to be charming, smart, driven, fun, and inquisitive. It’s doubtful that the movies creators had such lofty goals in mind, but it really was an influence on me.
Tags: authority, life balance, Real Genius, work
One of the real advantages of working in a start up is the relatively limited number of meetings. I’m no fan of the meeting. It usually seems like there’s 10 minutes of useful information for every hour in a meeting. I do understand that they have some merit at times, but too often they get thrown for the sake of having a meeting. So much of our team conversation is informal and happens in small bursts. For that matter, we’ll often instant message one another, even when we are in the same room. It leaves my schedule very open, but my days really busy. Strangely, it feels perfectly natural to work in that way.
However, my home life is the complete opposite. The kids have to be dropped off and picked up at defined times. If my wife and I are going out, we have to plan for a babysitter and schedule that. It’s not uncommon for us to have three or four things that are scheduled in a day. There’s lots of overlap. We’ll have friends over, wine tastings, hockey games, skating lessons, church, and any array of other things. Of course, I also work lots on the weekend so I fit that in during all of the gaps. I kind of end up running from place to place.
It’s funny that the same bad habit that I had in meetings some times haunt me during my busy weekends. I’ll frequently check my messages at less than ideal times. Any little lull and I’ll make the move toward the Blackberry. It’s just as bad at home, where I’ll find my way to check not only my email, but twitter, webtrends and other feedback.
There have been nights where I have two happy hours, tickets to a hockey game, and family plans. It’s the overlap that’s the hardest part. Sometimes things just have to get cut short or blown off. I’ve had to make those drop in appearances occasionally. When there’s too much to do, that’s just a choice that has to be made.
Just while I have been writing this my wife added two things to my weekend calendar.
The strange thing is that I don’t think I would want it any other way. My family life might be more corporate than my professional life, but I’d rather enjoy the energy of the multitude of activity. I’d rather have a full day of activity than the lulls.
However, I still don’t understand people that are energized by a working day that’s full of meetings. Could some one please explain the thrill in that?
Tags: corporate life, family time, meetings, scheduling
One of the more interesting things about “living” online is the sheer number of places that we need to maintain our identity. From the social networking perspective, I have three: facebook, linkedin and twitter. All have their own followers/friends and all have different purposes in my mind. I try to keep facebook personal, linkedin professional, and twitter conversational. To me that’s the idiom that fits in each the most.
There are also a few promotional tools that are out there. We have a twitter account and a fan page on facebook for downtoearth. While I’m not the only one maintaining them, I do spend time thinking about how they are received and what is the best strategy
However, one could easily argue that a blog is another identity to be maintained. I don’t know the people who read this as well as those from my other identities, but they are very valuable to me. The public nature of my thoughts here doesn’t make it any different. Again I maintain two regularly. This one on personal matters and www.skal8.com for professional marketing observations and commentary. I also try to update a blog on wine tasting and notes, but usually don’t find the time to do much there.
Then there’s comments that I choose to place on others blogs. I’ll admit that I don’t do this very frequently, but when I do I always wonder to which identity I should link. I usually end up linking back here. It’s sort of a way to make a signature. With facebook connect, it’s even a bit different, since it brings in my profile.
To me it’s fascinating. I’ll admit there are elements of my life that I don’t want crossing. My family is a large part of my life, and i’d be willing to bet that dating industry analysts don’t have much interest. (for that matter I’m not sure I’m that interesting at all) I try to keep each area focused on a particular niche of my persona. I don’t add links to my facebook account on on skal8 to keep them separate. I’m also pretty sure that all of my personal friends don’t want to hear me trumpet every achievement I have professionally. I don’t want people to know everything about me. It’s not a matter of being devious. It’s just about being private.
It feels like I use all of these, at once (Photo: Stabilo Boss)
However, I’m not sure that’s the best strategy. It all seems to bleed over the more I get possessed and involved. All of this stuff takes time, and I have less and less of that than I ever have. I’ve seen tools that integrate some of these identites, like tweetdeck and various blog widgets. Any advice on the best way to do all of this?
Tags: facebook, identity management, linkedin, social networking perspective, twitter
It probably goes without saying that Valentine’s makes for a busy time at a dating site. It’s just sort of amazing to me that it is. It’s the middle of winter, everyone’s just gotten over the Christmas season, and yet we find time to dedicate a holiday to love. Isn’t love sort of a bit of a holiday every day? It was so busy in fact that it took me a few days to write about it.
Personally, I feel fortunate that I have a wife that honestly doesn’t care for Valentine’s. We have both our dating anniversary later in the month and wedding anniversary a month later that mean a lot more to us. Here in Dallas, the restaurants have a nasty habit of raising prices for the holiday so avoiding them saves us a bit. (No ill will to the restaurants, higher demand should result in higher prices) However, we took the opportunity to poll some of our daters about Valentines and the results were surprising. The dating survey results are here.
It amazed me how much people would be willing to give up for one day, and how important both sexes felt that it was. I guess I have the stereotype that women care, but men comply because they have to. Our data showed that it was pretty much the same for both sexes.
Any one else have any thoughts about this?
Tags: Dallas, surveys, Valentines
Times with kids can be trying for most people, but when you work like my wife and myself, it can get even worse. I get about two hours every evening to spend with them, and often I get less. That time’s filled up with dinner, bathing, reading books and lots of other stuff. I try not to work, but as I said in my previous post, I’m not always great about that. If something’s off it can pretty much wreck the entire evening, and that’s what makes it so trying. You just want everything to be perfect.
Tonight, my daughter fell asleep on my wife as we read to her. This was one of those moments that’s just amazing for a parent, but it’s so hard to explain. I mean, shouldn’t the best times be spent when you are active doing things?
In this case the answer is no. It’s amazingly peaceful to watch your normally energetic child fall asleep on your wife. It’s an amazing bond and can be shockingly beautiful. The little life that you helped created just melting in to the person that you love. There’s nothing quite like it. For us its even more significant because we try to be very strict about putting her to her bed so that she could develop good sleep habits. Let alone is it beautiful, it’s rare too.
That’s what I call perfect.
Tags: family time, love, peace, sleep habits
One of the rules that I’ve tried to follow is to limit working when I’m home and the kids are awake. I’ll bust out the laptop if need be, but it’s really something I try to avoid. The ultimate time for me is dinner. We don’t allow the TV to be on, or for that matter any other distractions. It’s just family time, and I let everyone know.
However, the BlackBerry is a draw to hard to ignore most often. Just the other day I got a couple of messages and started to bang out a quick response while we were eating. My daughter said to me: “Daddy, no working at the dinner table.” After that the phone went to timeout for a bit. How could I resist?
Tags: dinner, Family, family time, working
The last several weeks have been rather crazy as we had our official launch. Sometimes things don’t go according to plan, but work out great anyhow. I’ve had a number of interviews, and it amazes me how many people seem to quickly “get” what we’re trying to do. We’re more than free at downtoearth.com. We’re trying to create a dating community based on honesty and respect. The community aspect is a part of it. Based on the number of emails that I routinely get that help me ferret out bad users, it appears to be working. Also based on the number of thank you emails we get, we’re trying to do somehting that matters.
A couple of my favorite points of coverage thus far:
In the frontburner, a local Dallas blog, which compared us to soylent green since we contain 100% real people.
In WalletPop, which really seemed to get what we are after and how we’re different than other dating services.
It’s still really odd to read about yourself from people that haven’t talked to you directly. Sure there’s lots of information that we’ve made available, but its still rewarding and intriguing to read an article that you weren’t expecting.
Unfortunately, it’s only a pause. We still have lots to do and a long way to go before we get to our destination. Actually destination isn’t the right word. More like toll booth. A brief stop that lets you know you’ve made the next step.
Thus far my family seems to have been holding up well with all of the work. It’s still the hardest thing for me to balance the demands of this job, my family and all of the other demands of life. OK, maybe the condo’s a bit messier than it should be, but at least everyone still remembers my name in the house.
Tags: downtoearth, internet dating, launch, media coverage
The last few weeks have had the typical Christmas and New Year’s activity, combined with that of trying to doing our startup. It’s made for basically no time off, as I was doing customer care over the “break” as much as building out our launch plan and testing our marketing.
Customer care itself is an interesting exercise. It’s a great chance to hear from your customers. Things that are intuitive for someone who spends 14 hours a day on a computer aren’t for most of the rest of the world. You hear ideas, complements, insults and plenty of problems. Even if you are only addressing a very small portion of the dating-base, the feedback can be a real gift. It does take a lot of time, but it’s valuable time.
Over the weekend, I’ve been fortunate enough to have more than a few more visitors to both this site and downtoearth. (Hi Markus) I guess I won’t be as interesting if I post pictures of my kids opening presents now… I do thank all of you for all of the recent comments, and comments are open on this post. We’ve got a lot to talk about now and in the near future.
Tags: downtoearth, launch plans, New Year's Day
It’s been a long strange trip, but our website has finally arrived at its final destination. After months of negotiation, we were able to buy the domain name downtoearth.com. For us, it’s a wonderful expression of the brand we’re trying to build in free dating. Our mission is to be a totally free dating site that has values and morals. We don’t want married people, users that are disrespectful to other users or people looking for one night stands. We want moral and ethical people looking for a safe place to meet. While our values are for the most part mainstream Christian, we aren’t limiting ourselves to those seeking a christian dating site. There’s a common thread of real, honest, ethical people that stand for what we’re doing.
My simple thought is that I want to create a site that I’d be proud for my daughter (or son) to use. That’s a very high bar.
We’re working on defining our tagline for now. We’ve been experimenting with 100% real people. 100% free to use. We might be able to do better, we might not. Here’s to the rest of the journey.
Tags: brand building, christian dating site, domian names, free dating site, online dating, product launch