Naymz Interview: the Online Dating/Orbitz Roots of a Paid Search Identity Management Start-up
(This interview is 3,068 words long and requires about twelve minutes and forty seconds for reading. I'll be creating the minute and a half version when I get back from lunch.)

Naymz launched recently. They offer identity management services for individuals.

For $5 a month (first month free, you can also buy a discounted yearly subscription for $47.50.) users get an ad for searches on their names, a customized ad on MSN, Google and Yahoo, and a customized landing page.

Pretty nifty stuff for the dating set, the online professional and other folks whose names are pretty much their brand.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Tom Drugan, a Naymz co-founder, who went indepth on his background at Orbitz, in the dating industry, and how these experiences informed his newest project and very first start up.

I have to preface this interview with two totally unrelated statements.

1) Drugan's responses are some of the most engaging I've gotten to date. He's a strong writer who's clearly excited about his first start up. And he's very open about his work at Orbitz and how the Naymz teamed formed on the top of the talent pool there.

2) Drugan gave me a free Naymz account.

Check out a search on Garrett French.

If he ever removes that account I will immediately replace *this* interview with the *other* article I wrote about Naymz. I don't think I need to say anything more ;)

Without further ado I'm very proud and excited to give you Tom Drugan of Naymz:

You have a strong background in the dating industry. How did your background there help you develop this concept?

For me personally, the Dating Industry is where I cut my teeth in terms of search engine marketing. I starting managing large scale campaigns for Great Expectations Dating Service a few months after AdWords initially launched and GoTo re-branded to Overture.

It wasn’t too long ago that the dating industry was the hottest thing around and I had the fortunate opportunity to work with a very healthy budget.

Naymz may certainly serve a purpose for the dating industry. It’s no secret that the first place that many daters go to is Google to find digital dirt on that Cherish.com or Great Expectations set-up they have for Thursday night.

Naymz would be a great way for daters to be found in the search engines and claim what online content is about them and what isn’t.

We are starting to look to establish partnerships with dating, social networking, career, and any other sites in which Naymz would be a useful tool for their customer base.

We are in the process of building a white-label version of Naymz that would seamlessly integrate into other sites.

what did you learn at Orbitz professionally that you were able to apply to Naymz?

At Orbitz the online marketing team is closely integrated with the product, finance, merchandising, management and branding teams. This really helped us understand all the different pieces and parts of running a large scale online company.

Orbitz (along with sister company CheapTickets) also spends a significant amount of money on search marketing.

Google and Yahoo work closely with Orbitz to help push the envelope in regards to search engine advertising. Orbitz was doing some really cool, cutting edge stuff. Google and Yahoo would also look to Orbitz to test out a lot of efforts.

This allowed us to get a good grasp of how to run large scale PPC campaigns and what the current limits are with the various ad platforms (Adwords, Yahoo Search, AdCenter, etc).

Orbitz hands down has some of the smartest people in the industry, travel and beyond.

Because of this we have received some outstanding feedback and recommendations from our network of colleagues there.

We left Orbitz in good graces and everyone there has been really supportive of our jump into entrepreneur-ville. It also helps that we didn’t start-up a competitive travel site ;-).

where did the concept come from? how did it evolve?

A couple of years I was working on building out a keyword list for one of my clients.

On a whim, I decided to throw my first and last name into an AdWords campaign to see if Google would accept it. To my surprise, the ad I created for myself popped up seconds after posting it.

After pondering the possibilities of this, I decided to get creative with the idea of vanity search results.

I have a friend who happens to have a very attractive younger sister. He also happens to hate when his friends tell him how attractive his younger sister is. I decided to post a sponsored result for his name which had the following copy…

Brian Barnes

Brian has the hottest

sister ever.

www.brianshotsister.com

I sent Brian an anonymous e-mail telling him to go “Google” his name. The ad I posted happened to link to a photo of me with a big grin on my face, so he quickly knew who the culprit was.

Unfortunately, my prank didn’t earn me a date with his sister.

Over the next few days I “punked” a bunch of co-workers and friends with similar ads for their names through AdWords. The ads I put up began to spread virally and I saw the impression and click volume skyrocket for the names I had bid on. That’s when I knew I might be on to something and the wheels began to turn.

The original product plan was called “Gunked.com” which was a mash-up of “Google” and “Punked” ala Ashton Kutcher.

I had wanted to build a site to allow user to place ads for other people’s monikers which would link to Onion-like articles about them. A five minute conversation with an attorney put the kibosh on that concept due to slander and defamation issues. Gunked eventually morphed into Naymz which is far more practical and far less lawsuit prone.

please describe the team forming process... how did you guys find each other at Orbitz? how did you go about forming an actual company? how long did it take?

Soon after I first developed the general product plan I changed jobs and shelved the idea to focus on my new roll at Orbitz.

In May of 2004, a really bright guy in my department by the name of Nolan Bayliss approached me with all these new business ideas he had come up with while in Grad School. While he had some great concepts, they all needed a lot of resources and several million in capital to get off the ground. I happened to also float a few ideas I had conjured up by him.

When I told him about the ability to bid on peoples' names in the search engines, his eyes lit up. He immediately saw the same big picture that I had and came up with tons of different directions that we could take it in which I had never thought of. We eventually just looked at each other, shrugged, and said “Let’s go for it”.

A few weeks later, after writing a brief business plan, we approached Tony Czupryna who was a Sr. Developer at Orbitz and happened to be very familiar with search engine marketing. He was the perfect fit to make this idea come to life. Tony fully understood the business concept and opportunity and shared the same entrepreneurial spirit that Nolan and I did. Tony eventually became our third partner in the new venture.

Over the next eight months we fleshed out a business plan, built a prototype, raised capital, reviewed the idea with our peers, and resigned from very good positions at Orbitz. Shortly after we left, we were contacted by two other Sr. Developers at Orbitz who were very interested in what we were building. After disclosing what Naymz was, they both got excited wanted to help see the idea become a reality. In April we moved forward hired Michele Lopatin and Brian Pontarelli.

They are both incredibly talented and by far our biggest assets.

are you profitable? if not, who's funding you?

Unlike most start-ups, we do have a revenue model coming out of the gates. We generate revenue from premium subscription sign-ups and through advertising. We just launched a few weeks ago (June 9th), so we have a ways to go before we break even. Ideally we would like to get there before end of year. Let’s just say we need A LOT more premium subscription sign-ups before we get there.

We raised our seed capital from friends and family. Depending on how things look in the next few months, we may need to raise additional rounds from angel investors to stay afloat. We also may start dropping our business plan on the doorsteps of VC’s to see if there is any interest there.

may I micro invest in your company? I'd like to put in, say, $1,000. what would you give me in return?

Currently we aren’t looking for any additional investors. For our first round, we had a minimum investment of $50K. It’s TBD if we drop that for future rounds.

Now if you are giving out personal loans, we should have an offline conversation. I could certainly use the cash.

what if I could find 500 more people willing to invest at that level?

We are trying to not have too many cooks in the kitchen. Keeping investors up to speed with everything that is going on and assuring them that they made a good investment takes time and resources. To deal with 500 additional investors would be a whole job in itself. If someone were to approach us with an opportunity like that, the investors would have to be silent and we would want one or two point men/women for communication purposes.

Who are some notable Naymz that have set up accounts thus far (besides me of course ;).

According to our database, George Bush, Britney Spears, and Nacho Libre have all created profiles with Naymz. However, my guess is these aren’t valid profiles ;-).

We’ve only been available to the public for a few weeks, so our reach hasn’t been extensive. Some important industry bloggers have built profiles with us such as Emily Chang of eHub, Andy Beal of MarketingPilgrim.com, Pete Cashmore of Mashable.com, and of course the legend himself Garrett French from searchenginelowdown.com.

What do you think of Merchant Circle - You guys are slightly in competition, though if you get in there quickly there might be some good partnership possibilities...

We’ve definitely been keeping an eye on Merchant Circle. There is also a company here in Chicago called Local Launch (http://www.locallaunch.com/) that has a similar platform to Merchant Circle. I can certainly see some overlap between our offerings in terms of individuals whose names are essentially their brands (Real Estate Agents, Doctors, Attorneys, etc.). Merchant Circle is currently a more comprehensive online marketing solution for small business owners. Naymz is casting a bigger net and offering a tool that can be used by just about anybody.

How do you prevent me from bidding on my company's name?

We know where you live, so don’t do it. We have some super-duper top-secret form validations that we do when new sign-ups come in. We also have a small enough flow of new accounts coming in that we manually review each one. If you were to try and submit a company name, we would take the profile off-line and send you an e-mail asking you to change it.

What if my name is actually, say, Homer Simpson. What happens then?

“Internet! Is that thing still around?” – Homer Simpson

There are inevitably some names we are going to lose money on (clicks cost more than $4.95/month) and other names we are going to have to turn away all together in regards to a premium subscription. It’s the nature of the business model.

We have written in our terms and conditions that we can set budget constrains on certain names which will result in extremely high click counts. This means that the sponsored result may not show for every set of search results over the course of a day. This is certainly the exception, however.

We are going to learn our thresholds as we go and adjust accordingly. In extreme cases we have the right to cancel a subscription and refund the fees if we deem necessary.

We also have a basic (free) membership in which we will add ones profile page to the natural/organic search engine index for Google, Yahoo, etc. We will be more tolerant with basic member’s names since we aren’t bidding for placement.

Who else is on your team - who's in your company?

There are currently five of us who work on Naymz. All of us worked together at Orbitz. Three of us are founders and we have two full-time developers. Nolan Bayliss and I have online marketing and business development backgrounds. Tony, Brian, and Michele are the brains of the group and are developers.

We also have some outside sources helping us with business development initiatives. Once our consumer product is in a good place, we are going to look to white-label it for other sites. For example, we are in talks with a large Real Estate company to integrate Naymz into their corporate extranet so their agents can achieve top search engine placement for their company profile and listings.

what happens if two people have the same name?

This is the number one most commonly asked question when people hear our business model.

The paid search engine platforms have policies against placing two sponsored listings which come from the same advertiser. Google refers to this as “double serving”. So, if there are two Garrett French’s, we cannot put up two unique listings for each subscriber.

The only way around this is to create one general listing in the engines for both profiles. After someone clicks on that single listing, it will take them to a jump page that contains all of the Garrett French’s in our database along with pictures and unique description copy.

what happens if someone fakes my name and puts in erroneous and malicious pages?

This is going to be our biggest challenge.

We have already had a few instances of this and we are doing everything in our power to prevent it. We have flags that go off if certain content is added to a profile page. The logic behind these flags will get more intelligent as more people try to cheat the system.

We also try to manually review each profile that is added. That is going to get more difficult as we grow so we are working to try and automate the editorial review as much as possible.

Our best protection against slanderous pages may be our users. At the bottom of each profile, we have the following message:

Identity Crisis? If you notice offensive or incorrect information, report misuse to misuse@naymz.com

why don't I just buy the ad myself and create a profile page with links to all my personal profiles?

Based on your skill set, you certainly have the expertise to accomplish this yourself. [he totally overestimates me - I like that though. -G] However, 99.9% of people have never run an AdWords, AdCenter or Overture campaigns. Most people certainly aren’t going to set-up all these accounts just to own their identity in the search engines. You can almost view us as a bid management aggregation tool, ala Atlas OnePoint, for the individual.

We also feel we built a pretty slick profile creation page which gives you the ability to create your profile in minutes. You don’t have to worry about HTML, design, hosting, etc.

who have been the biggest subscribers thus far?

It’s really interesting to see the types of people who are building profile pages with us. The majority of early adopters have been industry folk such as web developers, designers, search engine marketers, and your typical Slashdot reader. This has been great, but we hope to attract the general masses as we see Naymz as a potential tool for just about anybody as one’s online identity continues to become increasingly important.

What’s been amazing to us is the amount of international sign-ups we have had. Currently our non-US accounts outnumber our domestic. We got some decent blog coverage in Spain, Denmark, Germany and Japan which has led to a good number profile creations from those Countries. Globalization rocks!

do you have aspirations beyond just buying ads for peoples' names... will this evolve into, say, a single log-in for social sites?

This has definitely been discussed. It would be great to allow users to update their profile information in one unified location for all the different social networking sites they belong to. If and when the social networking sites build developer API’s to allow us to interact with their platforms, we will certainly explore this further.

Our platform could also possibly be repurposed for small business names (i.e. Joe’s Pizzeria) and we can add local targeting to our product suite. However, before we do that, we have 6.5 billion people on this planet we would like to sign up for individual Naymz profiles first.

Can naymz users network with each other?

Currently they cannot. We aren’t presently trying to compete with the MySpace’s, FaceBook’s, and LinkedIn’s of the world. There seem to be plenty of Social Networking sites as is. We view these types of sites as the story of your life.

MySpace covers your social life. LinkedIn goes into detail about your professional persona. Flickr captures your experiences in photos. Likewise, with YouTube, you can be the leading role in the movie of your life.

We want to become the table of contents for your story. We want to be the binding that holds it all together. We also want to help people who are interested in you to be able to find your life story.

We are also looking at some different ways to build a community around Naymz that will be released by the end of the year.

who's done the best coverage thus far? What link are you most proud of (besides the one you'll be getting from SEL of course ;)

I would have to say our review on Rev2.org was probably our best and most comprehensive review to date. Sid Yadav, the author of the blog, really saw the potential of the online identity space and was also very gracious in the review of our product.

Mashable.com also gave us great coverage and addressed some important issues. It also contains my favorite line…”There’s definitely a big demand for this type of service.” We hope he is right.

I'm too hungry to think of follow up questions right now... if you have any send them to me in an email or put them in the comments. <3G
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |