By early 2011, theCHIVE had about 20 million visitors a month and the advertising world could have cared less. Advertisers didn’t consider our young startup much of a brand. Even today, nobody in New York or Silicon Valley wants to wrap their minds around a website that measures itself by its heart, not its bottom line.
Still, with theCHIVE serving out over 1 petabyte of data every day our hosting fees skyrocketing, we had to keep the lights on. That’s the double edged-sword of digital media success. Even if you find a measure of success, hanging on to control is difficult unless you have a little bit of change in your pocket, we had zero change. I even broke out my parents’ emergency credit card one lean month. With the vultures were circling, we had an idea..
Always remember with your back up against the wall, go with what you know. We liked t-shirts… and Chivettes. We would double down on both. People thought we were nuts, “You guy need to hire a nationwide sales force. T-shirts and Chivettes? That’s not a business model.”
“Yes but we’ll put the t-shirt on the Chivettes. See what I did there?”
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