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
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 venting to looking for something inspirational to read.
There’s two things I’m learning in the startup world. The ups and downs are much more extreme. One day it feels like the greatest thing ever, and the next is really low. Sometimes it’s only hours apart.
The second thing is that there’s no time to be “off.” As I’ve shared, I share the room with five other guys. If I’m down or snippy, they all know. The same is true if you are up. Trying to be eager and level headed is very important as a result.
This came about in particular as a particularly long purchase cycle appeared to be coming to completion. It would have been a major milestone and triggered a bunch of activities on my part. However, the seller pulled a bit of a bait and switch and things were not as they seem. One minute I could feel them momentum building, and the next we hit a brick wall.
It’s a bit later and I’m calmer now about it, but I was really angry at the time. It was a good reminder not to get too excited before any deal is closed. I learned that in business development, as every deal we ever had (and I think every deal ever) had something come up at the 11th hour. I don’t know why I expected this to be any different. We’ll take the emotion out and make the best business decision. That’s all that can really be done. 
Tags: media
Everyone knows about happy hour, that time just after work when you can unwind with a beer and your friends. In my household, we have just the opposite, the unhappy hour. Unfortunately this usually happens right around the time I get home from working on www.free-singles.com. I’m tired, and it couldn’t happen at a worse time.
Here’s the way it typically goes. I get home at around 7 most days. I’ve worked a long day, as has my wife, and both kids are home. We’re ready to eat, or getting ready. That’s when it starts to break loose. I’m not sure why, but Curtis often starts to get a bit fussy right around then. After that, Celeste starts to get antsy and want attention. Two kids need us, but we have things to do like feed our faces. Celeste doesn’t want to sit at the table with us, so she’d like to get up and play.
A tradition before kids was to sit at the table and enjoy some wine and conversation. We still try to do that, but the kiddos make it quite the challenge. It makes that short window at home for me when they are awake quite frantic.
The toughest part is that I really want to enjoy this time so much, but it often ends up being a disappointment. I’ve been working hard and I just want to have fun, but the tension level gets raised pretty fast.
I’ve been reminding myself that “it’s just a phase.” Curtis will get over his brief fussiness and be more interactive at the table. Celeste did precisely that, so I know it will go away sooner than later.
As quickly as the unhappy hour began, it ends. As we start to give the kids baths and get them ready for bed, things calm down and get much more pleasant. It really makes me wish we could move that unhappy hour to some other part of the day.
Tags: balance, dinner, evenings, happy hour, kids
In my typical crazy mode, I managed to have some fun this weekend. Audi was kind enough to send me an invitation to test out their new car as part of the audi driving experience on Texas Motor Speedway, and I was happy to oblige. My time was for 3pm on Sunday, and I just made it out there in time after spending time on the playground after Church and trying to fix a broken cable box. The speedway is some 35 miles from my house, so it a bit of a haul to get there.
Once I got there it was two hours of getting to drive some nice cars like they were stolen. The cars we drove were the Audi A4 with the 3.2 engine, a BMW 328xi, a Mercedes C300 and a Lexus IS 250. In my opinion, as i’m sure was the intent, the audi was quite impressive. It drove in a manner that inspired confidence and felt solidly built. The BMW was only a shade less desirable, mostly becuase it seemed to want to over-steer more than I would have expected for an all wheel drive car. Of course, that made it feel more like a typical BMW.
Certainly it was crazy in getting there, but on the way home I found out some bad news. Our site (www.free-singles.com) had gone down that morning, and I was still running adwords. I was about an hour away from home, with no real way to shut off the spigot. We wasted a fair bit on bad clicks as a result, but at least it was only for one day. The hard part was that it was a Sunday, which is often a pretty good day for online dating sign-ups. It was also a reminder that there’s an awful lot going on at any given time in my life right now.
Tags: adwords, Audi A4, online dating, online dating signups, Texas Motor Speedway, weekends
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 you what our brand is intended to be about. We’re shooting to have a dating site that is pure, honest, respectful. We have this rating system called realratings to allow people to verify the authenticity of the profiles on the site. We want our site to be an oasis for honest people to meet online. We’ve tried to put out the message that we don’t want people online that are just looking to “hook up” or for one night stands.
So you might understand why I’m a bit upset that my first conversion was someone looking for “erotic fun” Certainly there are a great number of people online that seek no strings attached relationships, but I wanted my site to be free of them.
Even worse, my wife was sitting right next to me as I had this “proud” achievement. Awkward… My wife is a very moral individual and this is the furthest thing from her world view.
I’m viewing this as a challenge. We tried putting the line “If you are looking for a one night stand, this site isn’t for you” Maybe that isn’t strong enough. Maybe our splash page is too urban. Who knows right now. But what ever the issue is someone we didn’t think would find our site appealing, did.
PS – No personal disrespect to the erotic fun seeker, if that’s what you are into fine. I just was hoping you’d go to a site that’s a bit more your speed.