and, based on an algorithm, we would kill any picture that got clicked on too
much. So it was community-regulated and that worked pretty well.
I sent an email to the founder of DoubleClick telling him about us and
requesting his help getting into 24/7. He responded saying that unfortunately
the first picture he got when he went to our site was a naked woman. He said
that right now we were innocent until proven guilty, but we needed to move to
a guilty until proven innocent model in order to get advertising.
So we decided to build a moderation system. I originally had my parents
moderating since they were retired, and after a few days I asked my dad how it
was going. He said, “Oh, it’s really interesting. Mom saw a picture of a guy and
a girl and another girl and they were doing . . .” So I told Jim, “Dude, my parents
can’t do this any more. They’re looking at porn all day.” We decided to
open up the community of moderators to the public. You had to apply and write
an essay to get in. It was basically built on the BBSs of the old days that had different
levels with different skills.
We told the moderators to reject any pictures that were inappropriate,
looked like an ad, or had contact info. (Pornographers were including fake
email addresses to get people to email them so they would spam them later.)
And then we got a bunch of emails from people saying, “Hey, I was meeting
people.”
We quickly realized that we needed to make something to allow people to
meet each other without letting all these porn people in. So we came up with
the “Meet” system, which required a little more work than most dating sites,
because it requires both people to be active. You can’t just post an ad and wait
for emails to come in, so it’s harder for porn people to come in and take advantage
of it.
As we were solving the problem of keeping the site clean so that we could
get advertisers, ad rates were dropping. We had to come up with something
that we had more control over, and that’s when I thought, “Can we charge for
anything?” We started charging $6 per month to belong to the Meet Me system.
We chose the pricing based on what we thought would be an impulse buy.
In retrospect, it’s easy to see that we had this dating system that was slapping
us in the face, but it took us a while to think that we could charge for it,
because the Meet Me system was never built to make money. It was only built
in response to the porn issue. It’s ironic that I have an MBA and also started a
company before that had raised venture capital, but the one idea that worked

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