Monetizing People Search: MyLife.com CEO Jeff Tinsley (Part 7)

SM: Why did you raise money?

JT: We wanted to do more of everything we were doing. We had so many product development tasks that we could not do them all. We also wanted to grow faster and thought that adding some funds to marketing would help.

SM: Your value proposition remains that you are a people search engine with a subscription model?

JT: Right. We are providing ongoing services to people who pay for them. There are so many things people get when they have an account that they are willing to pay for it. We have a renewal rate that is greater than 50%.

SM: What other services do people get as part of the paid subscription?

JT: They can get access to all the people on the site and they can get in touch with them. They can communicate through the service. On the profile monitoring side they can see who is searching for them, which is extremely popular. When new people search for them or when people visit their profile, we let them know.

SM: How did you decide to get into this business?

JT: I am a born entrepreneur. I love the struggles that I have all the way. I ended up winning Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year last year for this business.

SM: Congratulations. Are you planning to go public in the next two years?

JT: The possibility exists. We are clearly a market leader. We have a huge user audience with over 30 million addressable users. There is a lot of value here, and we are just starting to scale it.

SM: So you have the phone number and email address of 30 million people?

JT: We have profiles for more than 200 million. Those 30 million have registered on the site and found their profiles.

SM: If somebody pays to subscribe to this database, do they have access to your entire database?

JT: They do, which is over 1 billion records.

SM: Conceivably, if you have sales or marketing people looking at this site they could be finding what they are looking for.

JT: Absolutely, no doubt about it. There are a lot of reasons that people want to connect with other people.

SM: It seems that you will have to go public in the next few years to allow your VCs to exit.

JT: That is definitely a possibility.

SM: Have you looked at Kosmix? They are taxonomy search engine, and they have seen a huge uptick in people search. If you key in somebody’s name, they will produce a profile for that person on the fly.

JT: We took the opposite approach. We built profiles for people as we crawled the Web. We do not try to assemble it on the fly. What they are doing is interesting.

SM: Thank you, and good luck with the next leg of your journey.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Monetizing People Search: MyLife.com CEO Jeff Tinsley
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