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Keith Bates

Life is precious. Take it one day at a time.

Hiking, Bicycling, Trekking, Climbing, Walking Tours, Back Packing more
  • Location: Chicago, Illinois
  • Birthday: May 18th, 2009
Joshua Way
pierre saindon Enjoys: Hiking, Bicycling, Trekking, Climbing, Walking Tours, Back Packing
MANUEL MARTIN
Ellen Isaacson
Gloria Gutirrez Enjoys: Hiking, Bicycling, Trekking, Climbing, Skiing
Kristen Bilger
6/21/2009 Exploring the TRAUMA of launching a Social Network
It’s the dawn of June 27, 2007. I get a brainstorm. Fairly severe. The Adventurers Club of Chicago, of which I’ve been a member for over 35 years, is in trouble. Because of landlord problems we’ve been forced to move the club’s location to a new and much smaller venue. Members are dropping off. We need more. The club has always been short on marketing horsepower, and now, when we really need new members there is no program in place to make it happen.

Back to my brainstorm. In 2007 social networks are hot. Facebook, MySpace, Friendster and many others are growing by leaps and bounds. Facebook today has 200 million people on board, and it’s growing by thousands daily.

What if The Adventurers Club of Chicago had their own social network? Wow! What an idea. Resident members pay $1000 a year, but if we got international members and only charged them $10/year…and managed to get only 100,000, not 200 million …that would give the club an annual income of $1 million dollars! With that kind of income we could buy our own building!

With this thought in mind I launched a social network. I called it MyAdventurers.com. No much trouble coming up with a name. However, the club had very limited resources, as did yours truly…so we got off to a slow start. But I was serious about doing this so put my advertising agency, which I’d been running since 1970, on hold. Being a creative director all my life I had no trouble designing the site and writing the copy.

I patterned it after Facebook. But not exactly. There are hundreds of travel sites set up just to sell travel (Trip Advisor). And there are hundreds of social networks set up to support idle chatter (like Facebook) But MyAdventures.com is the only site that brings adventurers and outdoor enthusiasts together. I counted heavily on support from The Adventurers Club…but it didn’t happen. I guess I didn’t inspire them sufficiently. And they had no money and were unable even to rebuild their own site to help promote mine. So we sort of split company. But not before I gave them a big chunk of stock. And gave them a page on my site. Hope springs eternal…

The next two years were full of challenges. Not many of today’s social networks have been launched by a 75 year old guy in his attic. A couple of friends invested. I used a big chunk of some dividend money I earned through a lucky tech investment. But then I had to change development teams after the first year because my first team was unable to meet my deadlines. The new team, Tecture LLC, almost had to start over. But they have done an awesome job, and we rolled out to a full PR effort in early June of 2009. People are joining up at a pretty good clip but we’ve run through a ton of money so are now actively and aggressively searching for more investors.

From a recent BusinessWeek article… “Besides the big traditional social networks like Facebook, new niche focused social networks are emerging… (which are) less about keeping in touch with friends than connecting via mutual interests (like adventure).” A recent AdMedia survey puts enthusiasm for Niche Online Media deals at 72% vs. traditional social networks at 27%. With 40+ micro-sites, the capability of micro-targeting to specific interests becomes easily accomplished. MyAdventures.com is a niche online medium like nobody elses.

If you enjoy site, like what you see…then the best that we are hoping for is that you will tell a friend and encourage them to join.

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