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