How Meet Market Was Started - I went to Seneca College to study outdoor recreation and then went to Club Med and taught scuba diving. Some of the places I taught at were singles resorts which got me thinking about providing a service for the singles market. I then went to Whistler Blackhome and Disney Cruise lines where I was in charge of shore excursions. I met my wife, Natalie, on the ship and we moved back to Ontario. I looked around and many of my friends were singles who were sick of the bar scene and, at that time, there was nowhere else for singles in their 20’s to go. Online dating was just starting up, speed dating hadn’t come to Toronto yet and I saw a need by talking to some friends so I started up Meet Market.

I created a terrible little website myself using FrontPage and got a lot of my friends to help me out on the technical side. I created a homemade flier with my wife and went to every downtown office building in Toronto. We went into the offices and told people we were starting a company with events for singles and asked them to post the flier in their lunchroom. We got a lot of great feedback from the people we met and the flier drove people to the website we created. This was June 2000. In September 2000 we ran our first tour which was a hike. We had 25 people. From there we built up slowly going from 1-2 events per month to 40-45 per month. Our new franchise in New York City is already putting on 30 events per month!

Advice For Startups - Read as many business magazines as possible. I read INC, Fortune, and PROFIT, among others. I go into Chapters when I know nobody is going to bother me. I turn off my blackberry and I scroll through them all. Business magazines tell stories of entrepreneurs, their successes and challenges. They give you great ideas for marketing and I schooled myself through them. I’m not much of a book person and I’m a visual learner so magazines work well for me.

Get a mentor. Mentors have been very important for me. If you can find a mentor in and around your industry, that’s even better. Find people at networking circles, tell them you really liked their story and ask them if they would mind if you called them for advice. I was recently at a conference in Miami – it was the largest online dating and social networking conference in North America. I met some great people and made some amazing connections. Exchanging views and ideas with other people is very important. My wife’s boss had a big impact on me in the early days. He’s in the hedge fund business and grew it from $400k to $1.5 billion in 10 years – all starting from scratch in a flat in England. He has been a good sounding board for me to bounce ideas off of whether it be venture capital, other funding, or just plain old common sense. He told me to go with my gut and that’s important because I do make a lot of decisions based on my gut instead of business sense. For example, we partnered with an experience company where you buy gift certificates. They were a very small company run by 2 guys in the UK. We hit it off and decided to partner. They had a 100 person database and ours was 15,000 strong. We were giving away a lot more exposure than we were getting. A year later they were bought out and their newsletter is now in a much larger audience. Now the emails which promote Meet Market are going to 100,000’s of thousands of people. I had a good feeling about it and went with my gut – it paid off.

Do your research on your potential partners. First, find if there is a fit. It doesn’t make sense for me to partner with a toy company or family companies when I deal with singles. Next, you want to make sure they are reputable – do your due diligence. Talk to some of their other partners and see if they are getting good value. If I’m sending my clients to a partner’s site, it’s a reflection on my business so they have to do a good job. Also try to get equal value in return for what you are offering. We send our staff out on all the events to make sure the quality is there, that there is a good fit, and that our partners deliver what they say they will deliver. When you find a great partner you can call them up anytime because you have that relationship. We help do a lot of promotion for our partners. We bring people to their establishments and for many people it’s the first time they’ve been there. It’s a great opportunity for repeat sales for our partners. We also promote them off our website and in our newsletter to give them extra exposure.

Ask for advice. When I first started the company, I emailed a number of tour companies. Some where doing adventure travel, some were doing singles events in the US or Australia. I told them that I was in Toronto and was building a new company. I asked them what advice they had. They could have seen me as a competitor but 80% of them wrote back with some advice. I do the same thing now with people who ask me for advice. I won’t help my direct competition but I do help a lot of companies who are in the singles market. Don’t be afraid to ask other people for advice.

Network as much as possible. I used to belong to a chamber of commerce and a number of different organizations. In my business it’s not as important to network because I’m B2C and not B2B. The organizations were not the right fit for my business but if you are selling B2B it is very important. Those are perfect spots to build clientele and get your name out there.

Get everything in writing. Whether you are dealing with partnerships, partners, something between you and a client, or any other kind of deal, always get it in writing. Back yourself up so you have proof. We rely on our tour operators to run our events and give our clients a great experience. If they don’t do what we advertise it looks bad on us so we make sure to get everything in writing so there are no disputes later as to what was promised.

Build positive word of mouth. Word of mouth has been our biggest source of new members by far. 80% of the people who have joined Meet Market have heard from their friends. If people like your service and events they will tell people about it. We’ve had so much word of mouth that we’ve cut back 90% of our marketing budget and we’re growing much faster than we were before!

Provide great service. Providing great service is the best way to build up clientele and establish an excellent reputation. We have mechanisms for our clients to tell their friends about us. We have a system in place to allow for comments after each event. We’ll call the customer back and ask them what went wrong if we get negative feedback. We follow up on negative experiences and ask what could we have done better? We give them gift certificates for another event. Our response time in responding to clients is above average. We’ve created a community where people come into our website. They can post messages for other people. We’re building a whole new platform around social networking and allowing each member to have a profile. We’re going to expand that and allow them to post pictures, upload videos, and invite friends into the community. If you get invited into the community you get instant access. We’re creating a community where people are coming back to see what’s new. If you provide great service and build a loyal community you’ve got the foundation for an excellent business.

Mistakes To Avoid - Get things in writing. Back to my point about getting things in writing, it’s important especially when dealing with clubs. One day they’re open, another day they’re closed. The biggest event that we had in our first year was our New Year’s party. We were supposed to have the whole top floor of a club and they ended up opening it up to everyone so we had couples in with singles. It was an amateur mistake on our part. People were complaining and the club said that they never promised us exclusivity over the floor. From that day on we learned that we needed to get everything in writing.

Get payment upfront. One of my biggest mistakes was taking people’s word that they would pay at the door for events. We ran our first dinner cruise and 150 people booked but only 30 showed up. It was a bad weather day, the DVP was closed and we did not get the people’s money so they were not serious about showing up. The boat would not leave without me paying for 150 people even though we only had 30 show up. I lost $1,500 that night but it was a lesson learned. I started looking into online payment that night when I got home! The evening ended up turning into a positive because I made sure those 30 people had a great time. If something is going wrong do not tell your clients and make the best of it.

If I Were To Start A New Business...

I think niche social networking is going to be huge. Just look at Facebook and how they started off by targeting college students. The whole Web 2.0 is also going to be a big market as is wireless networking. I saw some fantastic demos that Nokia has with their new GPS phones. You can hit one button and invite friends from your social networking group that you’re in a certain bar and it will send them driving / walking directions to get to the bar!

I’m starting another business called Inspirational Sarcasm which is a calendar combined with quotes and sarcastic sayings with each. A friend of mine came up with the idea. I think they’re fantastic and there’s nothing really out there like it. We’re also doing a line of greeting cards for guys to cover off occasions like missing your wife’s birthday and your buddy’s getting married.

As a parent I also think that companies who offer an overnight babysitting service would be great. We had to get a live in nanny because our family is too far away. For us to go out for a night to dinner is hard. There is a huge market in babysitting.


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