A Little More About Us (part III)

The growth of SCS, the Fan Club, and trying to make time for family.

Note: this article started out as a simple attempt to explain more about what's in store for SCS in the days ahead, but has since grown to epic, book-length proportions. I'm presenting it therefore as a series of articles. In part I I explained what we're attempting to do with the gallery this month. In part II I talked about the beginnings of the Splitcoast community.

Membership explosion!
The big explosion in membership growth and traffic came just before and during last year's Stampin' Up! demonstrator convention. We'd gotten favorable mentions on some stamping-related mailing lists, and Beate had promoted us on various Yahoo! groups and other places. The all-new Splitcoast Fan Club was about to be unveiled, and everyone was excited. We began to get new member registrations at the rate of 100 or so each day (and we still are!).

Convention craze
And then convention struck. Unlike this year's event, all the big Stampin' Up! company announcements were made during the single convention session, along with the rollout of the new catalog. Word got around that Splitcoast was the place to be for the latest scoop on everything, and things got busy around here - thousands of new members in the course of just a few days, and a huge spike in traffic.

A look at my e-mail records back and forth to our service provider during this time, and we were frantic just trying to keep the site up and available. The dedicated server that I'd had such high expectations for had helped, but our leap in traffic was already enough to overload the new machine, and it was bogging down and crashing multiple times each day.

And lo, an angel appeared
Fortunately for us, we were visited in this time of need by the angel Jason, a member of the technical team at our hosting service. Through minor hardware upgrades, software tweaks and other divine interventions, Jason helped keep our server alive all during convention, while we handled 2-3 times the amount of traffic we'd ever experienced before. I gave him a "you go girl!" at one point, and I'm not sure he quite knew what to say to that.

Another move
Shortly after convention ended, so did the relationship with our second hosting service. A higher-end server was needed, and I wanted to be able to call up and actually get someone on the phone when we had a problem. We found a better deal with RackSpace (still our provider today) and by the end of July, Tom had helped me move the whole site once again.

Money, money
Revenue was becoming an important consideration - the server and bandwidth were ever-larger expenses as our traffic grew each month. More and more of us were spending more and more of our day on the site, and I knew a strictly voluntary operation wasn't a sustainable model. I wanted a free site for our members. I didn't want to turn the place into a huge blinking billboard of advertising. But we needed to generate revenue to cover direct costs, and we needed a way to compensate those who worked on the site.

Becoming a real community
Personal relationships are built on trust, and I wanted to extend that idea into the Splitcoast community as we sought to make it self-supporting. Have you ever been driving out in the country and seen a roadside stand offering goods for sale, with just a box to stuff your coins or bills into? The farmer (or whoever) offers up his goods with no guarantee of payment in the hopes that I (the city slicker) will see the inherent value and be willing to pay a reasonable price. You have a hunch that these same farmers also lost their house keys long ago but don't care because they never lock their doors anyway.

Fan Club to the rescue
We devised the idea for the Fan Club in early June of last year. We had just begun accepting donations to offset our growing costs and we needed to thank those who were supporting the site. I wasn't interested in traditional subscription systems, whereby much of the most valuable content of a site is held behind a wall for "members only".

Beate and Jenn took the Fan Club idea and ran with it. They helped refine the original idea (early on I was referring to the Fan Club gallery as the "donors gallery", glad that didn't stick!), recruited the first twelve members of the Dirty Dozen (see the original twelve and other recent members on our Alumni page), coordinated the rollout, and hyped the heck out of it. Oh my how they hyped it. Truly shameless.

I wanted that small-town, community relationship between the site and our members, like the farmer with his roadside stand. We would continue to offer most all of the site free to anyone who dropped by, and trust that those who received something of value would support our efforts. The Fan Club gallery would be our thank you for that support. Based on what I knew of our members and the support they'd already given, I was confident that the Fan Club would be well-received.

Launch day
The Fan Club was officially launched in mid-July and was an instant success with 100+ new donations on the first day, and many more in the days immediately following. The artwork from the design team was beautiful, everyone was excited about the new site feature, and we could begin to plan for the future with the possibility of a steady source of funds.

Team Members
Revenue sources like the Fan Club, some limited advertising, and eventually the Splitcoast store allowed us to begin compensating some of those who are most closely involved with day-to-day operations of the site. We rely so much on so many of our members (the design team, moderators, and others) but none more completely than Splitcoast Team Members.

Tom, Beate, Jenn and later, Julie, had become a critical part of keeping SCS operating and their daily work had truly become "work". Tom handles most of the server-related chores, Jenn is involved in just about everything including managing the gallery, Beate works side-by-side with Jenn in the gallery, writes tutorials and handles support e-mails, and Julie coordinates all the design team activities.

Problems at home
So many good and gratifying things were happening as the site continued to grow, but that success was the proverbial "two-edged sword" and it was starting to hurt. Even with Tracy pitching in I was now working the equivalent of two full-time jobs between what my employer was paying me to do during the day, and what I really wanted to be doing, at night.

Time is money. We've heard it a million times and now I was learning what it really meant: if I wanted to give more of my time to the site, I had to be able to replace the income from my employer. Otherwise I could give up Splitcoast, or continue working like a madman. The former I wasn't willing to consider, and the latter was becoming harder and harder on me and our family.

Meanwhile the grass in our front yard was full of clover, the garage had turned into what looked like the receiving area of a transfer station, my friends at home had forgotten who I was, and our girls...they just wanted to get on the computer once in a while.

Next up, part four: The 'B' Word

Posted by: daven on Oct 05, 05 | 6:00 am

A Little More About Us (part III)

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