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Frequently Asked Questions. Is there a guarantee? Our team will promptly and courteously cancel your subscription. Michael coded up a system that enabled designers to create shareable electronic greeting cards. And I went out and sold ads so we could generate revenue from those cards. I was in my mids and Michael was still too young to rent a car on a business trip, but we made it. We were processing over , greeting cards per day. It was fun. We were lucky to work with very smart people who were also our friends.
The startup atmosphere of the company allowed us to keep experimenting with business ideas. In , I was burned out. So I had to move on. After spending my 20s worrying — about salaries, whether the office was locked at night, what would happen if a server died just as our traffic spiked, etc — I wanted time without responsibilities or obligations.
I spent my days cycling. I devoured books. I read the Wall Street Journal cover-to-cover. May not sound like fun to some people, but for me that was heaven. And I traveled. Nothing extravagant. I kept it simple. In , I got started on one of my dreams: to be like the mentors who infected me with a passion for business and taught me how to build my company.
I started speaking at colleges and even scheduled one-on-sessions with people who wanted my help. It was all very small, slow and not very fulfilling. Then, I read about this underdog who was running for president. His name was Howard Dean, and even though he was a nobody he was suddenly growing a movement.
I thought the key to his success was his local meetups. We had some similar hopes and dreams I think way back in the day. And so we tried that and decided to move on. We also did something for awhile that actually worked pretty well, which was what I call a browser redirect. What it was was, we teamed up with a non-profit organization to help categorize different websites and the companies behind those websites in terms of how environmentally and socially responsible they are.
So you could get a little bit of information when you went to a certain website about the ethics of the company. If you went to a shopping service, we either gave it a green thumbs up or not. We would also have a redirect there that would automatically switch the URL so that we would get credit for the sale so that the person could make their donation as they wanted to.
Andrew : So painful. Looking from the outside I would say, if people are on your site anyway and they want to go to Amazon, not all of them, most of them would definitely type in Amazon.
I mean, there were certainly certain people that did it, and we had, we experimented. At times we would have, we had one shopping service offering; another time we would have many offerings.
In the end we just decided none of it worked, really. Andrew : OK. Randy : Right. We were promoting it a lot and we found other ways to generate more money. But one funny anecdote, just to show you how far we went, was we actually registered a site called Piggypoop. We literally went out into the field, collected this, ground it all up, bagged it and sold it.
We sold thousands of dollars worth of this. Part of it was just a publicity stunt, but it was also really good fertilizer. And I think one or two other services like greeting cards that are viral in nature. Or do you just try anything that sounds viral and make it part of your community? We have the great benefit of having been early in the game and then gotten to critical mass which now makes it easier for us to try things maybe than for startups. Andrew : You said something that I wrote down here; that if it was easy and viral everyone would do it.
Even if you like it, you may never come back. I think inherently that the twist that you have is key. I mean, you look at the difference between YouTube and, there were a lot of video sharing upload services at the time YouTube went crazy. So you have to really understand your audience and what motivates your audience to want to share things and if you can do that well, you have a chance at least of creating a viral service.
We do a little bit for a couple of things, but generally almost no advertising. Technology I talked a little bit about in the early days where the technology was. Randy : I wish. Andrew : Better experiences like what? How does building it yourself create a better experience than buying from someone else who specializes in these, in tools like photosharing? If a system needs their own proprietary account system, it needs to connect with our account system.
It just becomes a challenge to link all those up and keep the passwords in sync and all of that. Not in the last 6 months probably as much, but a year, year and a half ago we struggled a lot with database latency because of them. This is a profitable business, right? Andrew : And outside of the funding you put in personally from your past business, your greeting card business, has there been outside funding?
Randy : There has, yes. What do you tell investors who invest with the idea that an exit would happen at some point. What do you tell them or how do you deal with them when the company becomes more of a lifestyle business? Randy : Well, we still hope that someday [cough]. Excuse me. Part of my mission is to demonstrate that investors can do well while doing good. That they can actually make money while doing good things. At some point we definitely want to have a very positive liquidity event for those investors.
Some of them have been in for 10 years or more, and so I think for awhile they probably wrote us off. Andrew : For example? Randy : Well, there are secondary markets; there could be strategic investors that come in and buy a chunk of the company and take out part of the existing investors. You said now that things are going so well. How do you mean? I wanna be able to do something here similar to what Randy did. You know, Care2 is, to a great degree, a destination site, although we actually have widgets, such as petition widgets that publishers can put on their site.
We call it the take action platform. So we are still muchly defined, maybe, or seen as a destination site. My number one advice would be to go to where the people are. Fish in the river where they are. Facebook is an obvious example of why so many companies have glommed onto that, and Twitter and others. And so, I would say…or work with Care2 or something like that. Andrew : Do not be the destination. Go where the people are, and then create membership opportunities there, create interactions there that lead to membership opportunities.
Andrew : What else? What about one more thing? Randy : I would say make sure you are understanding what those people you are trying to interact with value. Randy : You know, there are benefits to doing that that go beyond directly increasing sales, I would say.
Especially in this area which we are in, in terms of what we call conscious consumers, people that are cognizant of these social and environmental issues. Almost every interaction is an opportunity to create a member on Care2. So if I am collecting points, in order to collect points I need to be a member, obviously. When I try to comment on the site, or when I go back after commenting, the first time I do I become a member.
I give me an opportunity to become a member. So to sum up that long winded way of explaining it, every interaction that you create is an opportunity for your users to become more than users, to become members of the site. Randy : Absolutely, yeah. Even thepetitionsite.
When we connected, I heard that you have some news that you might want to release. I just want to give you the opportunity to say whatever it is you feel you need to say, or want to say. Randy : Yeah, thanks. So, if you can direct those dollars to do more good by buying from companies that are moving in a more responsible direction, then that is a positive kind of vote with your dollars; and the economy makes a huge impact on the overall good balance out there.
Andrew : Care2DailyDeals. There seems to be so much money in the deal space. There does. I forgot his name. Randy : Sen Deep. He used to live in Los Angeles. He moved up north to San Francisco somewhere. Randy : Yeah, one of the early, the first marketing guy with Kiva actually as well. Check out Care2. Thanks for doing this interview, Randy; this was really good. This was a lot of meat, a lot of good information here. Randy : Good. I appreciate it.
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Randy Paynter Care2. Andrew : [laughs] Randy : That has nothing to do with environment and human rights. This interview's sponsor Site5 — Want an inexpensive way to bootstrap your Ruby on Rails, Python, or other applications? Related topics Master class course. LeadPages founder on why you should be embarrassed by your first launch.
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