Steve Hammer on May 25th, 2010

It’s taken a few days for me to process this, but my startup, Stir.com, is no more.  On Friday, May 14, we shut down the servers, turned our traffic over to Singlesnet, and began to prepare for the next phase in our careers.  That day might have been one of the hardest I’ve yet experienced.
Over [...]

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Steve Hammer on April 15th, 2010

Just a bit ago I was named General Manager of Stir.com.  It has been an interesting transition to stay the least.   We’ve always had a very open environment and generally had some great team chemistry.  We had a nice set of principles that everyone agreed with, and we all had a shared vision of creating [...]

Continue reading about Moving from Marketer to General Manager

Steve Hammer on October 31st, 2009

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 [...]

Continue reading about Long time no blog, breaking my silence

Steve Hammer on February 20th, 2009

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 [...]

Continue reading about Valentine’s Day and Dating Sites

Steve Hammer on January 25th, 2009

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 [...]

Continue reading about A sigh of relief after our official launch

Steve Hammer on January 6th, 2009

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 [...]

Continue reading about Staying Busy That’s for Sure…

Steve Hammer on December 5th, 2008

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 [...]

Continue reading about Finally – we’ve moved to our real name

Steve Hammer on November 6th, 2008

Before joining our startup I worked for a media company.  Just like any jobs you had good days and bad ones.  During the bad ones I always had the option to shut the door to my office and calm down.  There were plenty of ways that you could feel better, from calling a friend and [...]

Continue reading about Ups and downs for a startup

Steve Hammer on October 6th, 2008

Today the password came off of our dating site (www.free-singles.com), allowing me to start test marketing the site.  The url isn’t what we hope to be on long term, so we’re keeping our spend very low for right now.  It’s still a chance to test out what works for our site.
Let me start by telling [...]

Continue reading about Milestones and morals

Steve Hammer on September 17th, 2008

The one thing I haven’t talked about too much is the actual startup I’m working for, rather than the experience, so a bit of background seems in order.  The company is ready to launch a new free Internet dating site with an interesting angle.  We are working to make the site as honest as possible.  [...]

Continue reading about More about my startup