MeetMoi hopes to revolutionize social networking with the first truly location based mobile dating service. I thought it might be interesting to share with you how I got here.
It was a little more than ten years ago, when I came up with the idea for sixdegrees.com. I was an attorney at the time. It was 1996 and there was sense that something big was going to happen around the Internet. I wasn’t particularly technical, so along with a friend of mine, we put together a group of individuals to meet once a week and brainstorm Internet ideas. One guy in the group was a programmer; another a designer; and another had a business development background. I was the lawyer, although I always fashioned myself as an entrepreneur.
We set ground rules at the outset. If anyone came up with an idea, they would present it to the group. If the group liked the idea they would quit their jobs and build the company. If people were unwilling to quit their jobs, the idea belonged to the person who conceived it.
And then there were assignments and ground rules for coming up with ideas. We assigned magazines to read and areas to study. We agreed that we needed to come up with an idea that could only be done on the Web. For us, this meant a platform where every user was a publisher. It also disqualified ideas that bigger more established players who had yet to migrate to the Web were already doing offline. A sports news website was ‘out,’ because it was only a matter of time before Sports Illustrated and ESPN dominated the space.
The idea for sixdegrees came to me when I was thinking about this notion of everyone publishing. I kept thinking about what information I wish resided in a database, but couldn’t be found in any single place. I kept thinking about my life of trying to meet the people I didn’t know through the people I did know.
I presented my idea for sixdegrees to the group – who were initially excited. They weren’t impressed enough, though, to quit their jobs. So I quit. First the group. Then my job. I found a marketing guru to join me, and we took an office with no windows (and initially no computers). Two desks.
In the course of five years, we raised a little over $25 million and grew our member base to over 3.5 million users. We sold the company in a $125 million stock transaction to YouthStream Media Networks, a public company based in
Until the bubble burst. And Youthstream had to shed staff and then shutter the business.
Until Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, Hi5 and every other social network staked their ground in Web 2.0.
‘What changed between when you started and these guys started?’ I’m asked all the time. And my answer is always the same: “Nothing changed about the social networks and their functionality. What changed is cameras. Everyone got a digital camera between 2000 and 2005. Everyone grew to have digital photos. The photos changed the social networks changed completely.
I remember a Board meeting we had at sixdegrees where we evaluated the cost of asking people to send photos via the postal service, which we would then scan into the computer. We couldn’t do – it was too expensive. Nonetheless, we recognized two dynamics of social networks: first; regardless of what uses we told people they could make from our social network, almost everyone used it for dating. Second, photos make a world of difference in dating.
Fast forward to 2007. The second generation of social networks has long since arrived. The big question for me was what’s next?
My answer: mobile. And instead of the old model where individuals get online and search for someone, we’ve inverted the experience to let people become “Available” and having their profile sent and then seen by those close to them.
