One month on

I've been tracking my web usage since the site went live and it's encouraging to see an increasing number of people visiting the site. The tricky bit is to get people feeding through from google. A friend of mine helpfully told me that when you type 'internet dating' into google, smingl comes up below 'Conjugal prison harmony dating' and 'Shemale dating'. Hmm - we'll have to work on this one. Meanwhile, I've been pestering my friends (well I thought they were my friends) and trying to get them to sign up. A few statistics for the data geeks out there - of all my friends contacted in the past couple of weeks, 62% responded to my email, 35% logged on and only 15% posted a photo or filled out a profile. This is a poor conversion rate especially the % posting photos. Photos and filled out profiles are what make the site feel trustworthy. You're a lot more likely to trust something if you feel other people have put their trust in it and exposed themselves. This is my small catch-22 at the moment - people are cautious. Even friends who know they can trust me are cautious about trusting the internet. Smingl is still an unknown quantity and a little difficult to summarise in one sentence so people are holding back. So the challenge for me is a) to get a better conversion rate of 35% logged in and b) to get these individuals to expose themselves a bit and stick a photo on the site.



Next big step is to get our payment facility live and to do our full live launch in September. This is going to take a bit of planning on the marketing front so I need to keep myself enthusiastic and motivated so that I can make the right decisions now for the Autumn launch. If this were the C4 documentary, it would still be all smiles but they'd be cutting to shots of cloudy weather and the odd shot of my face crumpled into a frown.



Final thought - for those who thought that you just set up an internet company and let it roll, here is the unadulterated truth. It's just as difficult and dirty as selling lightbulbs in the first few months. You have to push, push, push, find your inner salesman, pester your friends and keep thinking of new ways to get yourself out there.



Until next time ...