No, these questions are totally cool.
Swurve is a partnership, but it is partially funded by myself. I don't want to throw around numbers but I will say that I'm in it in the 6 digits. Besides financial resources the partnership also provides the advantage of sharing resources with other holdings such as legal and accounting staff which helps keep Swurve running lighter and leaner, fitting a start up.
It was one of those opportunity meets planning = good fortune scenarios. I associate with some business owners in luxury markets which were experiencing a downturn due to current economic conditions and wanted to further diversify themselves. Additionally, a large internet marketing company that had holdings in the dating space was shedding (and is still shedding) some amazing personnel. Even though I was approached to start the company, I did write out a business plan. I think its important to always have one.
Did things go according to plan? Absolutely not, lol!
Do things ever? I think we're actually about 2 1/2 months behind where I wanted to be at this point in time, the affiliate program wound up getting off the ground a little later than I had hoped due to a last minute decision to change from 3rd party to proprietary, but even though there have been setbacks in the time line from the affiliate program's beta launch to date we have been meeting all our growth targets, and slightly exceeding them at this point.
As we built the site the first traffic we started with was small ad buys that I know from experience to be very safe / profitable sources, small PPC campaigns and such with smaller networks. That was followed by incorporating traffic from trusted partners, really I should say trusting partners because in the very early days they were relying solely on us to report stats back to them. Having to switch gears with the affiliate program was rough, but in the long we have a solution that better fits our business model being a dating property and having different needs than content sites, it also cut a recurring expense and it allowed us additional time to further fine tune the site and traffic funnels so when we launched I knew without question that the product we were presenting to the webmaster community would convert competitively with current offers.
