HeyChristine.com

Thursday, November 16th

Before I begin my day I had better mention this or else I will forget. Yesterday we got our 1,000th subscriber for the EBs. Now to most people that figure is laughable, especially since we rolled out the EBs six months ago. But Gus and I were very, very happy with that milestone. Aside from the fact that we had and still have a zero marketing budget for the .ORG site, we struggled a LOT with email mailing lists from the time we first launched the site a little over a year ago.

When we left the CAPT Executive Committee to focus on ORIENTED, we had the latest copy of their email mailing list, which at the time was close to 1,000 people, as we were the ones handling the website and email databases. We at first came up with a dozen reasons why we were justified in taking it. Obviously that lasted for about ten minutes. We knew it was unethical to do so, and we had to let that one go.

Instead, we decided to collect the heck out of all spam lists and joke emails that we ever received from friends and friends of friends. We even asked our friends for the email addresses of their friends, and many gave them to us. This was at a time when spam policies were still in the gray and email users were not as sensitive to protecting the privacy of their friends' emails. So between the two of us, we probably collected upwards between 8,000 to 10,000 relevant email addresses, people who are in and out of Taiwan. For a two-person group targetting a very specific niche market with no marketing budget, this was our killer weapon.

But then, I got into a huge debate with Little Joe (updated 01-16-01). Little Joe had been following our development from the get go, and when I told him (with much excitement) about what we were going to do with these lists, he was totally against it. I still remember that conversation very well because I was so very discouraged with his reaction. I argued and argued and argued with him for about a week and wasn't going to change my mind just because LITTLE JOE said so, but for LITTLE JOE to say so was the very reason why I started to reconsider. He refused to budge.

I brought it up with Gus who apparently had some doubts to begin with, but they weren't strong enough to suggest that we not spam those lists. Nonetheless, after a series of intense meetings about this, we finally decided to put those lists aside. We were not going to spam after all. We would start from ground zero, from our own circle of friends, and cross our fingers that through them we would somehow get the word out.

Granted, we didn't have a newsletter or email sign-up form at that time, so there was no way to gauge the effectiveness of our first few launch announcements, but I think what we both got out of that whole experience was a lesson on the essence of professional and personal integrity. In general we are both people of high integrity if I may be a little bold in saying so myself, but in desperate times, i.e. when you are a brand new website and you have no money and you do not know if anyone is going to give a *bleep*, you will consider doing things that you would not normally consider.

It was such a discouraging moment, more so than I could ever possibly describe in words, as we had both worked so long and so hard to put that site together and get it launched. The thought of creating such a useful resource for Taiwan's international community and then have no one know about it or have the means to hear about it was incomprehensible. But in looking back, it was most definitely the right thing to do.

We earned each and every one of those 1,000 subscribers.

Little Joe, of course, supported our decision. He was the first person to sign up for our People Directory. Oh the irony of it all... it just kills me...

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