Story of Stardoll.com - a co-founder's story, Part Three

I was aware of my mother's crazy paperdoll page, and I was basically just happy that she had a great hobby. Like most men, I didn't "get it" at first. When she called me and told me that her statistics say the the site receives 8000 users each day, I realized something very special was going on. At that point I was studying classical composing in Sibelius-Academy and my summer vacation was just around the corner. We agreed with my mother that I would look more into the website and try to find out ways to monetize. I started to study internet business like crazy. I understood that there was this whole market of girls, for which there was very little online entertainment. Women/girls make up 50% of the online population, and they weren't been served! That plus the fact that the web traffic kept growing like crazy, made certain that we had a business at our hand.

Together we decided that my mother kept doing what she loved the most, which is to draw dolls and design clothes, while business and product development, and managing the company were left for me. This gave me a lot of enthusiasm. I was also a regular poor student, so every extra euro was welcome. I read everything I could about internet business and running a company. I studied HTML and Flash, but not in order to code, only what can be done with them. I studied advertising systems and we experimented with them. We moved out (were kicked out) of different hosting service providers before we got settled for one. That was because our data was downloaded mostly from USA and other international locations, and the overseas bandwidth costs were too much for the small hosting companies.

We got the advertising systems running and boy we were happy when we saw our first revenue coming in. On business development side, we came to conclusion that the service could be two-sided: we could get money from companies who would want to advertise on our site, or display clothing lines, promoting stuff, etc. And also we could get money from users, subscriptions, VIP functions, shoutboxes and so on. On product development side we figured that the girls would probably want to create their own doll and start buying it clothes with our own money system. Also saving dress-ups was important. By this point we understood that we needed technical help.

Part Four