The New York Times has a story today on the wondrous Tickle, which started life as eMode and is one of those businesses that succeeded at least partly because the founders focused on tweaking the business and the product, and because they hung in there through some tough spots. Today, Tickle is making money from test fees, subscriptions, and ad revenue; they’ve just gone into the dating business and are pushing hard at the competition.
Interestingly enough, I had lunch with one of the early investors in Tickle a few weeks ago; I asked him what made him decide to put some money in, given that he was a high-tech kind of guy. His response: “It seemed like a fool-proof model–they were going to collect fees to get people to give them huge amounts of personal data–who wouldn’t want to have a detailed database of info on millions of names? How could you not (eventually) make money on that?”