I just started a Chordoma blog with the first post titled, A Plea to the Chordoma Community. If you follow this blog because of my occasional Chordoma related posts, you will want to follow this new one instead.

I am hoping to use Google AppEngine on a non-profit open-source project. To help me get familiar with AppEngine, I made a very small, simple webapp that sends a short message to any signed up users when they make a HTTP-GET request to their assigned URL. It’s useful if you have a very long running simulation or compilation that you would like to walk away from but be notified when it completes (or errs.) Assuming the email address used for your Google Account is also the one used on your smart phone, it basically mimics SMS without the headache.

The message should be shorter than 78 characters. Anything longer will be truncated. The message will be the email subject. To (feebly) prevent a quota DoS attack, each account is limited to 100 messages a day.

P.S. I learned only minutes ago that AppEngine apps cannot receive email from custom domain addresses, a feature I think my non-profit app will require. FAIL!

Notice: I am a die-hard capitalist and a quasi-libertarian. This is not a post from some “proto-typical non-conformist with a vaguely leftist doctrine of beliefs.” This was written by a guy who enjoys Ayn Rand.

In freshman year of high school, I made a lot of money spamming. Some of this success can be attributed to being lucky and being a teenage boy. Teenage boys basically have an option on life. If they do something really risky and it pays off, they get the rewards. If they do something really risky and it ends very badly — well, boys will be boys. It’s a pleasant asymmetry (for the teenage boy.) However, a significant portion of my success as a spammer can be attributed to a simple fact: writing a spammer was very interesting. It was challenging. It was a perpetual game of cat and mouse. Money was more of a collateral benefit than a primary motivation. Majorska vodka is not expensive.

Immediately after college, I had a minor existential crisis. This is not uncommon. College was great. College afforded me a ridiculous amount of free time to pursue my intellectual interests. This is not because college was rigorous; this was because college was not rigorous. I learn best independently. Going to college on my parent’s dime allowed me to spend practically all my time playing in areas that I found fascinating. The conclusion of my undergraduate career brought with it the termination of my favored learning style.

I was not happy. In order to reacquire my intellectual freedom, I did what any irrational, over-confident fool would do: I tried starting an online dating website. I wanted enough money so that I could sit in front of my computer and in my reading chair for a few years. I wanted to continue exploring. Writing an online dating website was not interesting. It was not challenging. It was not a game. My motivations were purely monetary. It was a project for cash — a means to an end. The result? It did not solve any of my problems. When I finally realized that the project was a bad idea, I sold it for about $35,000 on nine months of work. Considering the project’s purpose: FAIL!

Presently, I will be undertaking yet another web development project titled Fundify. My motivations for Fundify are not financial (at least, not in the typical sense.)  This project must be done and I am capable of doing it. The reward for me: it may help save my life. This is a (perhaps too) strong motivation. Since I have not yet left my job (another week probably), I have not been coding it yet; I dislike the after 9-5 job context switching. Instead, I have been planning the project to a degree that is unusual for me. Running a project Monte-Carlo simulator in my head for two weeks is a new experience.

My initial instinct was to release Fundify as an open-source application. It is a product for empowering the fund-raising arm of small-medium size non-profit organizations — specifically a small non-profit that has the potential to greatly benefit me. (I really like me.) An open-source project seemed like a particularly good fit. However, the simulator that is my brain was quick to point out that charging a nominal fee for hosting and maintaining this product would be just as beneficial to the non-profit organizations as an open-source product…while making me money. Finding a developer to install the software, set up an SSL certificate, and create a merchant account all take time. The goal of Fundify is to minimize time spent fund-raising by non-profit organizations. They have better things to do. Paying, say, $50 a month might actually be cheaper than spending time finding a volunteer developer.

Given this conclusion, I started to enumerate all of the responsibilities associated with running a business around this product. My motivation depleted — quickly. This is roughly the time I finally learned my lesson: money isn’t everything. If I were to build a business around Fundify, the set of mundane tasks would (significantly) overwhelm the set of interesting problems to solve. For me, costs({Legal Issues, Client Obligations, Heightened Security Concerns, Banking Issues}) > benefits({Money Earned, Testing my Fund-raising Hypothesis, Raising Funds for My Cause}). I’d rather burn through my savings building Fundify while dealing with the interesting bits than earn money for my labors while adding mundane responsibilities. Money isn’t everything. (I wonder what else my mother was right about.)

To be clear, I still want a bank-vault sized pile of money but I have accurately recognized why I want it. I don’t really care about a big house and a fancy car. I might someday; I don’t right now. My cramped apartment is sufficient. What I really want is the financial freedom to sit in a quiet room by myself and explore my ideas. Money provides this opportunity more than an academic career. The latter still imposes constraints that I am unwilling to bear. Maybe it’s a symptom of Peter Pan syndrome. (Although, if it is, I am sure it is very common amongst g33ks.) I prefer to think that being unconstrained can allow for long jumps versus incremental improvements while searching for novel solutions to problems I find interesting. An equally plausible explanation: I prefer no responsibilities. That does sound like Peter Pan syndrome.

In 2004, I was diagnosed with a very rare type of cancer. Following my surgery and an extended period of reading the academic literature on the disease, it became obvious that I was not cured.  Worse than that, there was little active research that had the potential to cure, or at least manage, Chordoma. Being an insufferable libertarian, I opted to start a 501(c)(3) organization, The Chordoma Research Foundation, with the sole purpose of aggregating funds and awarding grants to researchers.

At the time, (as a result of well-hidden bug,) I believed I would soon have access to a lot of money. Consequently, I formed the Chordoma Research Foundation as a funnel through which I could increase my donor potential (i.e. receive tax deductions.) I was largely uninterested in developing a proper full-fledged not-for-profit effort. I understood how research worked; the need for interdisciplinary facilitation; and the importance of starting projects sooner rather than later. I just wasn’t motivated. If my big payday came, I could buy research. Money opens doors. If I could spend my time doing what I had a passion for while being able to pay for research myself, it would have been ideal. My big payday did not come (and has not come – yet.)

Happily, pure dumb luck intervened. My parents, fueled by desperation coupled with a bit of good old fashioned common sense, decided to send a letter to our family and friends explaining our compelling need for research. The concise version:  please give us money so our son has a chance of not dying before his thirtieth birthday. It raised tens of thousands of dollars – quickly.

Inspired by the success of this campaign, I envisioned a web-app that could replicate this success across many people affected by Chordoma. Unfortunately, it was a pretty uninteresting project. Web development is not intellectually stimulating. My potential big payday project was (enjoyably) intellectually exhausting. The brief inspiration and motivation I experienced after my parent’s campaign was insufficient. Instead of building my web application, I only designed a simple website explaining the cause to other people with Chordoma.

Serendipity intervened — again. By this point, my small website for a very rare disease was receiving about three phone calls per day – a not insignificant amount. Initially, this produced mostly friendships (shout out to Bill Dorland, Michael Torrey, and a collection of other friends who do not have URL end-points.)  Soon, it yielded more tangible rewards. One day in August, while stuck in traffic heading to a Counting Crows concert, Simone Sommer called me. Her son, Josh, had gone through roughly the same experience as me and she also found the current state of research to be unacceptable. She wanted to be involved. To be precise Dr. Simone Sommer – a credential that, shockingly, opens doors in the medical community – wanted to be very involved.

Over the next few months and after many extended phone calls with both Josh and Simone, it became clear that they were willing to do all the things I knew had to be done but was uninterested in doing. More than that, Simone’s M.D. and Josh’s proximity to Duke – which housed one of the few researchers who was making headway into Chodoma research – meant they could do it better than I could. I (happily) passed the torch to them while I pursued my big payday (which is still, as of 2009, yet to arrive). They established the Chordoma Foundation. I dissolved my foundation and folded my assets into theirs.

For a while, I played a minimal ongoing role in Chordoma community. I continued to speak with a lot of patients, but only because I had already established relationships with them. I continued to follow papers on Chordoma – and discuss them at length with Josh – but that was mostly to satisfy my perpetual curiosity. (I am a if the plane is about to crash, I want to be in the cockpit type guy.) My father sits on the Chordoma Foundation’s board. I do not. My mother coordinates community outreach. I do not. However, late last fall, it became clear that they had reached the point at which money was the primary bottleneck. Earlier, the Chordoma Foundation had hosted a fantastically successful international, inter-disciplinary research conference. Cross-pollination of ideas occurred. Research was proposed…and, undertaken. Interest was piqued. Now, the low hanging fruits were gone. Now, there were calls for money. I was compelled to develop a prototype.

Initially, it worked well, although I am not convinced it raised money above what would have been raised anyway. It did help by connecting many people to each other, acting as an ad-hoc, emergent support group. This might not have translated directly into money, but it obviously was beneficial to the community.

Why didn’t it work as well as I expected? It was a sh*tty implementation! I hacked it together in four weeks in anticipation of the Thanksgiving fundraising season. We even launched it two days prior to Thanksgiving. It’s not really shocking that an idea only half-conceived was not fully-successful. Fundraising was not attributed in real-time; was not always accurate; and the feedback mechanisms employed were noisy. Additionally, one of the most important features, coaching (i.e. nudging) was never included. Unfortunately, disinterest asserted itself…again. I halted further development and took an internship in DC. Fundify was not yet to be.

Fast forward one year – present day. I just quit my job in order to properly build Fundify. This time, I am motivated. The project has not become interesting. It merely ceased to be something I can push off any longer. All paths are now dependent on larger grants being awarded. Larger grants require money. Enter, Fundify.

Stay tuned.

(My experience with Tryst.com)

Dollar Bills Ya’ll

Markus Frind’s free online dating website, Plenty Of Fish, earns around five million dollars a year in advertising revenue.  Andrew Conru’s FriendFinder Inc was recently bought by Penthouse for $500,000,000. SparkNetworks, of JDate and American Singles fame, is on the market in the $100,000,000 area. Obviously, I was attracted to the online dating industry because of the proven profit potential. People are willing to pay for online dating.

Metcalf’s Law

Unfortunately, I learned through failure that this profit is hard earned. Let’s pretend that you have created an algorithm that is 100% efficient at matching people. In other words, if the algorithm matches you, it has mathematically found your soul mate. This is all well and good but you are still bound by geography. Clearly, if the algorithm matches a person in Guam to a person in Brooklyn it is of no value. Even the person who is completely dedicated to finding their supposed soul mate is not likely to travel more than 50 miles.

On the other hand, let’s say you don’t claim to match users but only offer the ability to search by whatever criteria you find important. This is roughly what Markus Frind does. His website might not be flashy or use unnecessarily complicated math, but it has claim to a tremendous set of users. Additionally, with the exception of age, gender, sexuality, education, and appearance, most factors are going to be garbage in, garbage out.

The important thing to note is that in both cases, match making and browsable profiles, the websites value is derived from the size of its user base. Metcalfe’s Law is a bitch. While I, like many people, was attracted to online dating because of its proven profit potential, I misread the costs of entry. Programming, hosting, and bandwidth are all so negligible that they are not really relevant. The advertising dollars needed to reach a minimum level of geographical saturation are extremely high and often overlooked. In the beginning, given the low conversion rate resulting from a low saturation, you are not going to feed AdWords and earn a profit. In other words, my mistake was the oft repeated one of under-capitalization. Unless you have a brilliant idea combined with a bit of luck or say, a couple hundred thousand dollars in burnable cash, an online dating venture is unlikely to succeed.

A History of My Projects (learn from my mistakes)

Version 1

The first version of Tryst was targeted to American users with no part of the site externally visible – as in viewable without login – except for the tour and signup page. The concept was to have a Craigslist style dating network where users posted “Trysts” (dates they want to go on). There was no free tour. The website converted terribly (read: no users). Clearly, if the user is going to pay for an online dating website, they expect a free tour because nearly every website offers one. No matter how good an offer may appear, there should be a free tour.

Version 2

Realizing that the advertising costs needed to reach a decent saturation of users was going to be well beyond my budget, I set out on creating a free, advertising supported network that could be fed by search engine hits. Again, I was interested in creating an “I want to go on this date” oriented network, as it was at least, an underdeveloped area in the online dating industry. The search results did slowly advance but after two months I was only earning around $10.00 a day in advertising.

Version 3

Discouraged by the slow growth of Tryst Version 2 and apprehensive about the possibility of a bubble in PPC advertising, I set out to create Tryst
version 3. This version was also tried to create real world dates, but in a different way. Users would login and be presented with only online users that matched the gender, sexuality, and age group they were interested in. They could then send messages back and forth in an instant message / conversational way. This version was not free but did have a form of baiting. You could see the profiles of other members, but you could not message them unless you had a paying account. Free members could respond to messages sent by paying members, but they
could not initiate the conversation.

This version actually had a high visitor to free member rate (between 20 – 35%). Unfortunately, my estimates of the CPC costs for Google’s geographically targeted visitors were erroneous. I was assuming (using Google’s estimator tool) a PPC rate of between 40 cents and 1 dollar. At this rate, I also assumed I could expect several hundred visitors per day, per city (also from the traffic estimator tool). In reality, targeting NYC costs a minimum of around $1 CPC and, more alarmingly, generated only a couple clicks a day. Tryst version 3, like versions 1 and two, could not work.

Advice borne of failure

• The barriers to entry in the only dating industry are, in fact, very high. You are in a race to acquire new users before your old users are discouraged. Until you reach a certain point of saturation, you are going to be burning advertising bucks.

• Do not base your costs on one set of estimations. I used only AdWords’s Traffic Estimator tool which severely underestimated the CPC and available traffic leaving no chance of success with my chosen business model.

• Do you really want to make an online dating website? I really had no interest but was attracted by the low entry cost and proven profitability. I found both assumptions to be false and more importantly, because I wasn’t interested in solving any problems in online dating, had little continuing motivation.

• If you do decide to start Yet Another Online Dating Website, be original! PlentyOfFish created a free network for online dating when the industry had none. EHarmony was one of the first networks to offer comprehensive matching (aka voodoo but still). I believe the future in online dating is going to be more real world date centric. Find ways (and funding) to get people out and dating with people they could potentially enjoy.