Name of your website?PinoyStruck
Your name?
Robert Regnier
Your Location (city, etc)
Winnipeg
Please give us a short summary of your website?
Our site enables phillipinos to find people with the same interests and make friends and form relationships. It is completely free with no hidden fees.
What inspired you to launch your own website?
My partner met his fiance, who is philippino, on a dating web site in Canada and have recently visited the Philippines. He found when he was there that there wasn't a good web site made specifically for pinoys that was easy to use and completely free so we thought we'd write one ourselves!
When did you launch your first website, and what was it?
This is our first and it's we just published a strong beta version of it.
How did you decide on a name for your website?
It wasn't wasy but we wanted to have something clearly philippino but also related to the site content so we mixed Love Struck with Pinoy and got PinoyStruck!
What makes it different from other, similar offerings?
The real difference is that it's completely free with no hidden fees or anything. You create an account and profile and you're good to go. It's also very easy to use and pleasing to the eyes.
What is your eventual goal? (To sell it, keep it for income, secure a book or other mainstream media deal?)
We will eventually put some ads on the site in order to allow us to keep putting time and energy into it, but for now we just want to grow our membership.
How does your investment of time and money balance against your success?
Given that we both work full time and this has been a side project, the time and money has been scarce, so that means that we need to be very wise in how we spend them. We think this will work in our favour though as the site stays simple and true to it purpose without fluff and members will appreciate that.
If you had an unlimited development budget for development, how would you change your site?
We would finish with the prettying up of the site and provide other means to access it via friendster, facebook, etc. We'd also add mobile support to it too.
If your site got really big, really quickly, would you be able to keep up with the demand?
Yes, that's what we're hoping will happen! :-)
What unexpected costs and headaches have you had to deal with?
Some time spent on features that it turns out would not great ideas, or at least not good ideas for now. Basically it's been just finding time between our jobs and families and busy life.
What has been your biggest challenge?
Again, finding the time to do what we want to do. We're both computer professionnals so the technology aspect was straight forward however we still have lots to learn (don't we always!).
What method has been most successful for promoting your website?
Google adwords has been working well for us but we are trying out other marketing avenues to see what happens.
How has running your website differed from your expectations?
We thought building it would be the hard part but turns out it was the easy part because that is what we're most familiar with. Marketing on the other hand is new to us so it turns out that it's more difficult and time consuming that we thought it would be.
How long have you run the site already, and how long will you continue to keep it up if you don't enjoy big gains in traffic, income or popularity?
We've recently (less than a week ago) just upgraded to a version that we're happy with and that has addressed lots of great feedback we got from our beta users.
What is your website address?
PinoyStruck
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