Monetizing People Search: MyLife.com CEO Jeff Tinsley (Part 3)

SM: What did you do after being the CEO of GreatDomains?

JT: We ran into a company which at the time was called Snowball and which eventually became IGN. They were performing terribly as a publicly traded company. Their market cap was below their cash on the balance sheet. I approached them about a property, HighSchoolAlumni.com, that they owned. We struck a deal to buy that property which, at the time, was the top competitor to Classmates.com. We also bought the second largest competitor, which was a database company called Planet Alumni.

That was in 2002, and we then bought the name Reunion.com. We thought that was a great name to help people get reconnected and plan reunions with classmates. The business was profitable right from the beginning. We always charge subscriptions to get access to information and services. I ran the business much like I had run the previous one: I was very careful growing the business. I made sure cash was flowing, so we were able to scale little by little.

A year into the business we realized the opportunity to simply help people reconnect in a broad way, rather than just through high schools, was an obvious next step for the business. We then started to evolve it.

The way I look at it, you need three basic things for any business that you start. You need to have a well-defined product or service, a good strategy for generating customers, and you need a way to make money. It is funny because a lot of dot-com companies only seem to focus on building the product. That was very true a while back, but it is still true to a lesser extent today. People think that consumers are naturally going to come and they are going to make plenty of money just by focusing on the product. That is not the right strategy. You need to focus on all three right from the start.

We followed those three premises with this business, and as a result we have been able to scale it considerably. Now we have made some tremendous progress.

SM: In 2001 the business was Reunion.com?

JT: Yes. We started it in 2002 and it was originally Reunion.com. We changed the name after the realization that the market opportunity was much broader than just high school reunions. It has always been our philosophy here to be open minded and evolve the business. Even the name was not off limits to that evolution. Our tendency to stay nimble and be willing to evolve has always helped us thrive where a lot of other people have just stuck to an original idea.

SM: So a core strategic step was to move toward allowing broader groups and communities of people to make connections with each other?

JT: We did, and that is now MyLife. We have created the leading people search platform on the Internet. We have organized information about people. We have up-to-date MyLife profiles for every adult living in the United States. We have more than 1 billion total records worldwide. Much like a search engine, we have crawled [for] information about people all over the Web and put it into one place.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Monetizing People Search: MyLife.com CEO Jeff Tinsley
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