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Jonathan Sills Interview - Manvite.com

Hi this is Kurt Kaufer with eBoost Consulting and I am speaking today with Jonathan Sills, entrepreneur and founder of Manvite. An email event invitation service geared towards guys who like to be guys.

Kurt: So tell us Jonathan, in your own words – what is Manvite?

Jonathan: Manvite is a free online invitation service for any event where testosterone is required. If you've ever used Evite, it is particularly appropriate for a bridal shower, but if you are looking to organize a bachelor party or poker night, and you don’t want a lot of frilly Appletinis and pictures of women emoting, you want something simple, straightforward, and crude - just like the guys you're inviting. So basically, it is an alternative to Evite for any event that a guy might like to organize.

Kurt: How was the idea for Manvite conceived?

Jonathan: I was inviting friends over to watch football at my house. I have "NFL Sunday Ticket" and just in the heat of the moment, I sent an email to a bunch of guys saying real men don’t send Evites because I was feeling what was just stated in the last question - it would be too frilly, and I thought to myself that will be an interesting thing to do, maybe create an alternative for organizing online events for guys because there are over 500 million online event invitations sent every year and most guys just use email and click reply all which is pretty inefficient - so I wanted to offer the functionality of event organizing websites but have a look and feel and a brand voice that was appropriate to the target audience.

Kurt: What is your long-term vision for Manvite?

Jonathan: Well, I have a day job that I love and I am very happy with, so it is not expensive particularly to get it off the ground. Right now I think that we've had hundreds of thousands of visitors, a good base of registered users, and we have not had to invest a lot of money to get there, but I think to really take it to the next level, I would be interested in finding some sort of partners or some sort of larger entity that wants to try to continue to invest in it and build a site that can really achieve a full vision of offering content, party planning services for guys. So it’s been something on the side, has been kind of fun and I have got a number of partners who have been helping me out on an equity basis but long term I think that we will continue to run it smart and scrappy until we find an opportunity that comes along to grow it bigger.

Kurt: Have you encountered any skepticism as the journey unfolded?

Jonathan: Yeah, there is always skepticism about any new venture because people don’t have the same vision that the entrepreneur has as to what it might become. So everybody, at least until the recent past, (to cite Starbucks and all their success convincing people to pay $4 for a cup of coffee, but I am sure that most people told Howard Schultz he was crazy when he started the venture). A lot of people thought it was a cool idea but really were'nt sure how aggressive we could expand or grow it. So as an entrepreneur I think it is important to know, whether you are an entrepreneur internal within your company or an entrepreneur on your own starting something, to just believe in your vision and recognize that until something becomes large and successful there is always going to be skepticism, and when you think of the best new artists winning Grammys every year, it is a band that nobody has ever heard of that's been playing for several years, you are always going to be new for somebody for the first time and there is always going to be an opportunity to prove that you are able to live up to your vision or what you think your business could be or the website could become.

Kurt: What separates Manvite from its competition?

Jonathan: Most of the online event services out there focus on aesthetics or functionality and are decidedly for a female audience. Manvite is really the only website in this whole category of online event services that focuses squarely on the alpha male demographic which, you might imagine, is both a large and attractive demographic from an advertiser perspective.

Kurt: Is the alpha male your target market?

Jonathan: I would say definitely; our target market is a gen-Xer in their early 30s, male, higher income, college educated and those are the people who tend to use our site, not people that are old enough to maybe not hooked into using the internet on a daily basis to organize or plan their lives, not young enough to be relying more heavily on mobile based applications. Not to stereotype and say that there aren’t exceptions to the rule, but in general, I think we are going after a kind of gen-x, alpha male, or somebody who wishes they were the alpha male type. And there is a whole network site, a whole underworld out there that target this audience and does a good job at creating content that is compelling to them and monetizing their views through advertising and other services.

Kurt: How do you use digital marketing to connect with those users?

Jonathan: Well, people tend to find out about Manvite through a network of sites that we are affiliated with. We have a relationship with a large company called Break Media out of LA that has their own site, Break.com and also aggregates about a hundred sites in the same category that are similar and target guys with content about cars, or girls, or sports or a combination of the three. Obviously there is some word of mouth effect, if you invite on average eight or nine people to an event, they are going to find out about Manvite and turn it into organizers on their own and then in addition to that, we have a Manvite calendar that we send out every month that has information about events, sporting events, barbecue, competitions, movies that are coming out, and that tends to get a nice distribution as well. It’s all basically organic stuff. weren't not really spending any money unlike a lot of other companies, we don’t drive the majority of our traffic through search. The application isn’t really something that lends itself into organic search that well, although some of our content does. We are not driving a lot of content and a lot of visitors through search, it is mostly through referrals and direct traffic.

Kurt: What methods do you use to track your audience?

Jonathan: I use Google analytics as well as an analytics package on the server site where we host our website.

Kurt: What stands out as a marketing channel that Manvite needs to utilize to be successful?

Jonathan: One of the trends I see in digital marketing is that there is really a collapsing of CPMs on the advertising side even though we have a great relationship with Break Media and also use Google Ad Sense. I don’t think the CPMs advertisers that are willing to pay are as high as they used to be and there is somewhat of an ever expanding amount of inventory out there relative to a more limited pool of advertisers. Where we're investing more and we need to be successful, to the second part of your question, is email marketing. We are actually able to register a decent number of visitors that come to our site, and we use email to engage them as well as send them offers and create revenue opportunities for the site.

Kurt: And lastly, what challenges have you experienced in marketing your business?

Jonathan: I think it is a tremendous challenge just to create a base awareness of your site or service regardless of how great you think it is. Getting the word out, it’s so crowded, and so difficult, so the challenge is really trying to figure out (unless you are going to spend a ton of money, and even if you are), an effective way to do that relative to the stage and size of the company you are. And I've seen a number of different strategies that sites have used to be successful in that regard. For us, we never wanted to deploy a large amount of expense against marketing, so we've tried to just be scrappy and find the right opportunities that could be effective for us; and not require us to have to deploy a lot of capital against. I have seen a number of startup companies with much deeper pockets not get as much traffic as we do. So I am proud of what we have accomplished, but there is always more we can do. So that is part of what we continue to work on.