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CafeMom Interview With Paul Bannister and Matt Zarzecki
Yesterday I met with CafeMom execs Paul Bannister and Matt Zarzecki. Paul is SVP and runs everything but sales and Matt focuses on design and user experience. CafeMom is a social networking site for moms. On March 18, 2008, CafeMom announced a new round of funding.
CafeMom has a celebrity co-founder in Andrew Shue. Andrew is best known for living next to Amanda and Jane on Melrose Place. Parent company CMI Marketing began operations in 1999 and promoted their ClubMom brand which Matt described as the "AARP for moms" – basically a membership club like Upromise. They had the ups and downs of Web 1.0.
In 2006 the company decided to start CafeMom and Paul split from the CMI main organization, took seven employees with him and began work on CafeMom. The initial site took seven weeks to launch and officially went live on November 15, 2006. They started their marketing plan in January 2007 and today report over 100 million pageviews per month and 2.3 million unique visitors per month. The average member loads 160-200 pages per month. In my past life I spent many years marketing to moms online and this is one of the most lucrative sectors as moms believe that using the Internet is their "me" time.
They struggled with targeting a specific type of mom or going after all moms. They decided with the all moms option and 97% of the CafeMom traffic is U.S. based. The team is currently 45 people.
One of the topics we discussed was revenue and Paul made a very true statement that ad sales lag pageview growth by 3-6 months. Their marketing plan focuses on MySpace and SEM keyword buys on Google. I asked about why MySpace and Paul noted that MySpace allows CafeMom to target ads directly to moms with kids providing for a very high ROI.
Matt spoke about their internal process of "how can we find what’s designed for geeks and then apply it to moms". He also said that the site is Web 1.5 as they have a combination of old and new to provide the optimum user experience. Paul quickly responded by suggesting that CafeMom is more Web 2.0 without the geek speak. Their main competitior is Maya’s Mom.
They closed the conversation by noting that they are in a good place now and "people want a good site that offers value."
I met Matt last summer and had a few beers with him at a Viral Marketing conference in San Jose. He really knows his usability and user experience design — we also had some great conversation around different Web 2.0 sorta features. Very level headed and in tune with his audience (at least it seemeed — I’m not a mom but I am married to one).