Interview with Steven Sikes Founder of YouAnd.ME and Domainer

Steven Sikes is co-founder of YouAnd.ME, a rapidly growing online dating site. He is also a domain investor who found domaining almost by accident after offers for names came in after he would purchase a name for a new business idea. After seeing the value of domains he began investing and has recently been successful with his .ME domain investments, but without further ado. Here is Steves interview:

Steve, I have to ask, what drove you to travel around the world at 18 years of age?  That sounds like an amazing experience.

I received an academic scholarship to my university, Vanderbilt, and took high level science classes like organic chemistry, theoretical physics and molecular biology my freshman year; and I'd enrolled at the age of 17.  Like many others in my dorm, I was pre-med.  But I was overwhelmed by the course load, while also participating in intramural sports.  

When I returned home for the summer, I worked as a construction worker and read travel books at night. Books by Graham Greene, Hemingway, Bruce Chatwin, and Paul Theroux.  So I decided to break the news to my parents that I was going to take a leave of absence from the university and that I was giving up "pre-med" to pursue a life as a "writer".  Of course, this was some romantic notion and foolhardy at the time.  But my parents always let me follow my own path, so they agreed and I sold my car and used my summer work money to pay for this trip around the world.   I first boarded a Polish freighter ship in Wilmington, NC and went across the Atlantic and got off in Le Havre France.  The "around-the-world" ticket allowed the passenger to use it within one year, with the stipulation that you had to move forward or diagonal in flight, and never back-tracking.  So I combined this global journey with ship, train, bus and air travel, and the occasional hitchhiking.  All in all, it was a fantastic experience and highly educational.  I definitely made it on less than $10 per day, mostly by living in hostels or camping outdoors and cheap eats.    

Care to share any stories from your travels or any or your other outdoor adventures?

The trip opened my eyes to the world and other cultures.  When I enrolled back in the university, I had a new global perspective and increased confidence.  After graduation, I worked at an array of jobs - while trying to write novels - a rare wine buyer, free-lance journalist, teacher, football coach at a prep school.  I soon moved to Paris and enrolled in a graduate cinema program affiliated with the Sorbonne. I lived in Paris for over a year and worked a variety of jobs such as an English teacher, a crewman on a boat that went down the River Seine to Marseilles and eventually through the Mediterranean and the Dardanelles, and did some free-lance writing for local magazines and even worked as a private tutor to a billionaire's daughter - and we got to take her dad's private jet to their country house in Ireland where I got to ride racehorses.  Actually, one of these horses was world-famous and won the Irish Sweepstakes and another won Belmont.     

I then lived in other countries - Mexico and Brazil - and lived in the jungles in Chiapas and the Amazon, and settled in for one year living in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. I supported myself there by writing, working on documentaries, teaching and translating.

 You have a wide and varied background, what drove you to domaining and web development?

Purely by accident.  I had returned to teaching at a few universities, and I took a sabbatical of sorts (non-paid) and hiked part of the Appalachian Trail with my golden retriever who died just last year.  I was tired of my erratic lifestyle, so I decided I would start a business, even though I had no knowledge of business.  I read all these books on writing business plans and starting your own business. This was when Silicon Valley was hot in 1998 with all these start-ups.  So I thought I'd use my language-learning and cross-culture skills to start an e-learning company focused on language learning and cross-culture training.  I learned how to file patents and trademarks and I wrote a business plan and put together a team.  Then, right before I received my first term sheet from investors, a major telecom company contacted me and said they wanted to buy my intellectual property (domain names and trademark). I turned them down over a period of several weeks, but then they made me an offer I could not refuse, so that's how I learned the value of intellectual property. So, now when I start new ventures, I make sure we have solid trademarks, domains, and patents.

I'm currently the co-founder of two telehealth software companies and a Web 2.0 overseas adventure living site, and we have world-class management teams (I'm not one, just a founder) and board members.  I've been very diligent about our IP issues - domains, patents, and trademarks.  For one of the software companies, we had to make a very costly domain acquisition because our company name was already trademarked in a country where we intend to do future business.  So we bought the name and filed a trademark, strictly for this country. 

Care to share some examples of your domain investments?

I really stayed away from investing in domains, because it seemed so arcane and I really did not understand it.  I continued to buy domains, really only as potential names for future companies. And to my surprise, I would receive offers for these names from companies worldwide.

Then I began reading the domain blogs and joining the domain forums and I leaned about the value of premium domains, so I started investing in arenas that I liked and considered to be future trends - mobile technology, apps, green energy, clean tech, and Geos.  Like you, Bruce, I love the GEO space, as it seems to be one of the safest paths to monetization. And maybe this love for Geos is related to all my travels and peregrinations.

My domain portfolio is quite diverse - DOTCOM, DOTME, DOTMOBI, DOTORG, DOTINFO, DOTNET, and some names in other extensions.

I buy lots of domains on the secondary market. In fact, I purchased three solid DOTME GEOS yesterday, and I made an investment in premium DOTME names. I've also sold part of this portfolio for low six figures, which covers my initial investment. Many of the buyers were and are end-users who contacted me, and one buyer acquired several of my names and he and I have become good friends, but since these were private transactions, I think it would be better not to reveal his name and/or contact information.

You have cofounded several online businesses, what have they taught you about marketing online?

They've taught me how little I know. I've learned from my mistakes, and that's why I'm so happy that my current partners are experts in this arena. I'm more of an innovator - I actually enjoy creating apps, algorithms, patents, etc - but I'm re-reading SEO for Dummies. My partners have taught me a lot about text, key words, placement of text, etc., and much more. I'm still a novice in this area. 

You have been a big proponent of .ME on Namepros.com, what drove your belief in .ME?

Some of the reasons I invested in DOTME - it just seemed to mesh with the direction of the web - more personalized and more user-generated content.  I thought the GEOS were great for DOTME  because you could develop sites with reviews, recommendations, etc, and I also invested in DOTME group names such as Teens, Teams, Family, Latinas, Boomers, Baby Boomers, Celebs, as I thought they could be great blogging sites.  I thought diary.me fit the extension well, as well as Hollywood.me and several call-to-action verbs I have like chart.me. 

You have recently had a very successful launch with YouAnd.ME, a tough Niche to crack but you have had success, can you tell us about the project and launch?

The founders and team come from diverse countries and continents (U.S.A, Canada, Europe, India), and we had some solid domains and wanted to start a social media site.  Originally, we were going to create diary software (SaaS) for diary.me, but then we saw all these articles about the online dating boom during the recession,  so we decided to go with that - and we worked a deal for the name YOUAND.ME.  A recent news release states the site YOUAND.ME was started as a way to find ME a date - not exactly true, even though my girlfriend and I did recently break up.

Why has YOUAND.ME been successful to date (pardon the pun)?

• Work, work, work
• YOUAND.ME - the name has been very catchy and it's allowed us to create a brand
• Innovate, innovate, innovate - we keep creating more features, games, widgets, etc
• Extensive and strategic marketing costs and having two SEO experts aboard
• Personalization - engaging our users
• The YOU TUBE videos - seen by over 500,000 persons
• Security - we've invested a lot in creating the most secure social dating site
• Creating a new category - a SOCIAL CONNECT site - which combines dating, social networking and social media and social utility, and we realize this is very ambitious

There have been questions about .ME and SEO , looks like you have succeeded in proving that there is not an issue, any detail syou can share?

We're ranked high in all the search engines. Our traffic was so high that our servers crashed. We're up to about 100,000 page views per day, after launching less than 2 months ago.

We have many mini-sites and we do buy keywords and we also have purchased a number of high-profile dating domains and sites in multiple extensions, including YOUANDME.NET and ONLINEDATE.NET, but YOUAND.ME is the main site. 

You are going to be launching some Apple iPhone apps, facebooks apps, and others, whats your feeling on social network marketing compared to standard online marketing?

Excellent question. I know some "dating" companies have generated more revenues from their apps than their actual sites.  Our apps are very feature-rich, very innovative and we will be able to integrate them into our YOUAND.ME web and mobile sites.  With Facebook, you have a community of 200 million, Hi5 has over 80 million, and the iPhone apps really provide great marketing opportunities as well as revenue generators.  The same for Blackberry Apps, as well as Android, and the entire social networking companies that use www.opensocial.org.  Obviously, these sites and platforms enable you to tap into a large user base - bigger than most countries.  But the caveat - you must have engaging and compelling apps, or they won't catch on and stick.  I hope our apps will.   

One question that always comes up these days is the drop in PPC revenue, how do you plan to combat that in your web development and domain investments?

Another great question I'm not really qualified to answer.  I'm focusing on increasing the value of the company with more innovative and proprietary features, and we also look at indirect competitors who are getting major companies to advertise on their sites - because they've reached the sweet spots - large customer base and the desired demographics.  We hope we'll have 100,000 members on YOUAND.ME by the end of 2009, and at the present growth rate, we should be there.

Per the other domain investments with premium domains, you are right - lots if uncertainty there. It seems for sites and companies to succeed, you will need well-developed sites, a brand, and a tribe (a following).  But what do I know - I went around the world and I still haven't "found" myself...still searching for the answers...and a girlfriend (just kidding) 

 

Thanks to Steve for taking the time to answer these questions!  I hope you have enjoyed his story.