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UPDATE: The Position was filled 8/21/07. Thanks to everyone that applied.
An extremely special position just opened up and we’re looking for a very special person to fill it.
We are seeking a new Community Manager and the sky’s the limit as to how deep and profound an experience can be for the person that fills it. We’ve got a great 500,000 member community that thrives on the safe, fun, hands-on, supportive environment we’ve created. Our new community manager will be in a position to build out a sustainable infrastructure for millions of members all who will get to enjoy the same rewarding, meaningful experience found on the sites now. This is a chance to build out a scalable civic infrastructure, work in an office that is seriously fun, and make millions of people happy.
The entire job description is below or can be seen on our website. For the sake of the compassionate community maven out there whose raison d’etre is this very position, we’d be most grateful if you could help us bark the word out.
Community Manager Job Description
Woof! Meow! Do you really care about online community? Do you really care about dogs, cats and people? Do you want to work somewhere that is truly special? Dogster.com and Catster.com are on the prowl for a new Community Manager to oversee the community experience on two of the most vibrant passion-centric sites on the internet.
The ideal candidate will have oodles of experience overseeing online community activities. You’ll know how to keep the peace like Switzerland, nullify grumps and be a silver-tongued communicator (online, on-phone and in-person). You’ll know what it means to work at a fast-paced, rapidly-growing profitable start-up. And yes, having a profound love of dogs and cats would be very helpful. Your reward will be watching your happy, thriving community grow while members adorn you with praise for nurturing an environment that is so meaningful to so many.
Your responsibilities will include:
- » Keeping on top of all aspects of our 500k+ community
- » Going the extra mile to make sure our members have a wonderful community experience
- » Solving community disputes, enforcing community rules
- » Representing the community perspective in feature development, marketing initiatives and partnerships
- » Taking an analytical approach to improving the efficiency of community and customer service processes
- » Determining how to scale the community oversight responsibilities as we double and triple in size
- » Managing the teams of volunteer moderators that oversee the forums, adoption areas, groups
- » Working in concert with the Customer Support team to ensure an all-around great user experience
- » Performing the functions of the job with empathy while at the same time maintaining objectivity and emotional distance
This is a full-time, on-site position located in the Potrero Hill district of San Francisco. Salary based on experience. Attractive benefits program. Growth opportunities based on achievement.
Dogster.com and Catster.com are the sites of Dogster, Inc. a three year old company founded on the premise that the web should be fun, informational and always pleasant.
Email your resume and cover letter to jobs@dogster.com
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 Last night I presented at the STIRR entrepreneur event called “Founder Hacks.” The hack I shared was how moving from ad networks and affiliate programs to doing direct sales inside made us profitable and changed our 2006 revenue from an estimated $225,000 to $1,100,000.
Here is my presentation.
In 2003, when I started working on Dogster AdSenses and other just-add-water ad networks we’re just getting going. So I knew if Dogster.com was going to make money it would have to be from advertisers directly buying inventory from me.
Once Dogster.com unexpectedly took off much faster then I thought I knew my experience building web apps and communities was not going to make this the business it could be. I knew that I needed to find a business partner that would be as passionate about finding advertisers and sponsors as I was about making a great community site. After courting as much of Silicon Valley I could reach out to, I found that partner from with my own circle of friends and made an equity partnership agreement within 30 days that has lasted us to this day.
Later in 2004 when AdSense and other networks were generating buzz that you could get a $1-$2CPM we thought we were home free. We forecast with great glee how much money we were going to make from simply publishing their advertising and taking our cut.
But our revenue lagged and it was because if you’re not showing ads related to sex, liquor, gambling, free ipods or deceptive email harvesting campaigns, you’re most likely going to get $0.25 cent CPMs and less. If you’re serving 10 million pages a day or working alone, preferably both, there is decent money to be found from all those quarters, but when you do the math, serving 250k pages a day is $75 a day to $1200/mo.
We also made very erroneous forecasts on how much money we’d make by offering affiliate programs on our site. Directing people to PetSmart, REI, and Target’s online store is very easy. You’ll get 7% of all pre-tax purchases, but unless you are selling hundreds to thousands of items every week, you’ll probably get what we did, about $250 a month.
I early 2005 we recruited an ad buyer. He could bring in five digit direct buy deals. He had contacts in the industry, could close deals and responsible handler involving and forwarding payments. But his 35% cut was too dear and had to do all kinds of presentation support for him as he didn’t really understand our brand. He had no passion for our product. He was just as happy to sell ads for any of the sites he represented then for us. And he pitched us with about as much fervor as that when meeting with potential advertisers.
This whole time Steven, the business parter, heading up biz dev was working full-time at CitiGroup. He’d end up playing phone tag all week with prospective advertisers and partners. Far too much time would pass just to get the right person on the phone. Once Steven could get them on the phone he had a great closing rate. Only Steven could explain the passion of our users and benefits of becoming part of our community. Only he could see why advertisers shouldn’t buy banners, they should by an integrated presence in our site. And only he could present them with a contract in such a way they got the ROI they wanted while still meeting all the quantitative demands they were under.
Around that time we had been considering, and teaching ourselves all the big investment opportunities in the book. We pitched $3M to VCs, we sought angel investors, we consider loans with notes and warrants. None of it was working because we didn’t want to bet our whole future on a premise we hadn’t fully proven yet. We had to know we could become a profitable company with good monthly revenues before we were willing to bet the farm that the most optimistic outcome for Dogster would be achieved.
So we finally tuned that all out and said how much money do we need for the three founders to work full-time for 6 months, get a small office and a laptop for Steven. We decided the only way we could know if it was a business was to cut the umbilical cords and see what happened when we could all work on only Dogster and Catster.
It turned out that number was only $100k and we did a very simple family and friends round. The first four people we approached invested. Within a week Steven had quit his job and was working the phones and preparing proposals and doing industry research all day long. Within 6 weeks we were profitable and still had about $80k in the bank.
One of the first two people we hired was a sales person who has now been with us for 15 months and now 1/5 of our company staff is sales. Having a full-time sales team that is 100% passionate and committed has made all the difference.
You’ll often hear inside sales is expensive. They’re right. Though sales people should pay for themselves, on bad months and even quarters your just pouring money out the door. But relying on a 3rd party to sell your ad and sponsorship inventory is, in most cases, more expensive due to the opportunity cost. With ad networks we would would ahve been a $250k company in 2006. With Direct Sales we were a $1.1M company.
Thanks Niall, for the suggestion.
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UPDATE: I BELIEVE THE SPACE HAS BEEN RENTED
Move your company to our building. An office just opened up with 3k to 7.5k sq feet @$1.50. I think you could get’em down to $1.25 ;> We’d be neighbors. The rent is cheap, the landlord is great, plenty of street parking, easy 101 and 280 access, close to SOMA and downtown, lots of lunch options.
AMENITIES:
- Ground floor entrance seperate from rest of building
- HUGE Class Room/ Meeting Room
- Private Kitchen
- Reception Area
- Many Private Offices & Conference Rooms
- Work Areas
- Storage Areas
- 3 Private Rest Rooms
- Off-street parking
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Brad Feld, a long-time internet technologist, a very popular blogger and one of our most active investors, wrote a guest blog entry for Embrace Pet Insurance.
If you’ve ever wondered why people bring dogs into their lives, you’ll learn the answer. You can read the entry now.
To give you a hint I posted badges each of Brad’s current and sadly missed dogs.
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Congratulations to our good friends at Citizen Agency, who’s company just turned one.
They started a consulting agency from scratch and have stayed in the black the whole time. Furthermore they’ve opened their conference room (aka CitizenSpace) to anyone, there offices to more geek gatherings that I could count and travelled all over the world - mostly on their own dime - helping others consider their problems and solutions. All the while they’ve made their clients quite happy and are on track to build up more social capital then Ben & Jerry’s.
Keep up the good work!
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 Advertising Age magazine named Dogster a top-three site in their article ‘Rethink Your Web Strategy or Fail.’ Author Nilofer Merchant of Rubicon Consulting highlights Dogster, along with Tivo and Threadless as the three best examples of sites that excel at creating an experience that fully embraces visitors and give them plenty of reasons to stay there.
Nilofer describes Dogster by saying:
It’s all about the subject, and advertising is placed as “sponsorship,” which puts it in relevant context to users’ passions or obsessions.
It’s taken /a lot/ of work to get it to this point and maintaining the delicate balance requires constant attentions. When I think back to our first homepage, and think forward the upcoming homepage and UI redesign, I can’t help but thinking “you’ve come a long way little doggie.”
I’m sure she must feel the same about the immersive experience in Catster too =^.^=
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In May I flew all the way to Denmark to spend four intensive days at the 9th installment of the Reboot Conference. I traveled solo and knew no more then 5 people before I arrived. I can honestly say I left knowing 100. I never got a chance to post it and it’s still a worthy read.
Reboot’s premise is that it’s extremely healthy to shut everything down regularly and do a hard reboot. While most of the sessions are purposely conceptual, theoretical and philosophical they are all rooted in the reality of the immediate present and I returned home with an extremely confident vision of what the next 6-12 months will hold for web-oriented development. My mind was not blown but my RAM buffer was ;>
The closest U.S. conferences in terms of content experience would be SXSWi (which is much bigger and a much higher percentage of PR, marketing and financiers), BarCamp (which are much smaller but equally forward looking) and WebZine (which is smaller and more open-ended).
 As Jeremy Kieth said in his Reboot review this year, you wouldn’t want Reboot to be your only conference of the year (because you miss out on the practical topics) but attending offers web technologists a more profound understanding of exactly what it is we are doing and will be doing.
Here are what I found made Reboot excel at achieving it’s premise.
The event is all in one small building. The is very little reason or temptation to leave.
There is a great but small lawn just outside with a cafe that serves beer and drinks, meaning conversations can flourish and you can’t help but meet others.
The panel schedule is organized, but extra rooms are available for anyone to speak on any topic, unconference-style.
The event organizers do it for the love and purpose it serves. Their own web businesses were not mentioned or promoted anywhere. Seriously their projects we’re even ‘media sponosors’ or on the program materials at all.
The actual event sponsors are passionate about the community. Their dollars are more spent in a goodwill brand-awareness manner then in a calculated ROI.
The website is the best participatory website conference site, period. Attendees can make profiles that allow for easy exploration by matching interest by picking keywords from a finite set. It was easy to comment on panels, events, each other or simply check ‘I was there” or “I am interested”. In the end the site framework could be considered a wiki-enabled social platform and worked excellently.
Every time I asked someone what they did or why they came, they said what their skills or interests were. The name of who they worked for wasn’t nearly as relevant. Conversations stayed squarely focused on the realm of all possible development, not a chest-thumping match or drole name dropping.
Dinner was served at the event the first night. A majority of the people traveled to be there, so most everyone preferred to stay at the event as long as possible.
If you are not European you get a rapid and profound immersion in a much more global understanding of usage, wants and challenges. If you are European you get to confer with your peers, each struggling for the right blend of keep distinct cultural traits in tact, while still offering features universally.
The invited speakers change each year, keeping everything fresh. You can actually sense the evolutionary change as many of the speakers referred to ideas posited at the previous year’s event.
Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, the primary organizer of all nine Reboot events, is a very rare blend of humanist, technologist and entrepreneur. His aspirations for society are high, his moral compass is strong and his business skills are honed from years of use. But the first thing he’ll do when you meet is ask you questions about you’re experiences.
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This Saturday Noah Kagan and the CommunityNext crew are putting on a conference on massive community growth called “Viral! Getting from Zero to Ten Million Users”
Three of us from HQ will be there diving into the flow and going deep. To be honest I like these 1 day Saturday conferences because no one has to take the day off, but if you’re going to spend a Saturday discussing online community you really care about it. The last one was a blast and I expect the same this time.
There are only 25 tickets left so it’s time to make up your mind. If you care about nurturing online communities, you should be there. Pownce, Meebo, Flixster, ICanHasCheezburger, MyBlogLog, Jeremy Liew, Justin.tv and plenty more will be there too.
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