The Final Product

Jake Carlson and I worked tirelessly on the details of what Snabbo should look like, how it should perform and what type of interactive features someone in the Baby Boomer demographic might like to have available for use.

We researched other Baby Boomer websites and other niche social networks. We tried to cull what we liked and didn't like from them all. Jake is an extremely talented programmer and he was able to develop any new ideas we decided to implement for the site.

As I have mentioned before in my earlier blogs, all meetings with Jake were basically "virtual". Either we met on the phone while looking at the development site for Snabbo or we discussed points via email. For me, it was a very unusual way to start a business, conduct business or just discuss important business matters. I bring this point up again only because I find it relevant to Baby Boomers who are thinking of re-joining the workforce. You might want to take a course or two on how to conduct searches on the internet and how to most effectively use email and all forms of social media.

Anyway, back to Snabbo.

So, Jake and I would try to thoroughly talk through and refine each feature of Snabbo before we went on to the next level of development. I must say here that I was chomping at the bit to get the website finished and launched. But Jake was influential in persuading me to slow down and take the necessary time and thought to create a product that was sophisticated and elegant in its functionality. I feel we did that with Snabbo. It was very tempting to rush through the process and get a website publically launched as soon as possible. Other programmers had offered that "carrot" to me as part of their development quote. In the end, I believe I would have sacrificed a lot of design techniques and features that, by developing the website thoughtfully with Jake, I feel we now have on Snabbo.

The final product works like this. Members upload one photograph of themselves taken any time during the 1940’s through the 1980’s to serve as their identifying “Member Profile” picture. The concept is that Snabbo enables the Baby Boomer generation to behave as if we had both the internet and social networking sites when we were young. On Snabbo, we can have a ‘face book’ experience--only with the same ‘face’ we had in our heyday.

Finding friends on Snabbo is easier than on other social networking sites since members list all the names they have been known as during their lifetime. For example, you may have been known as Margaret Smith in elementary school, Maggie Smith in high school, Tootsie Smith in college and finally Meg Eldringhoff when you got married. Members are also able to list (with corresponding years) towns they grew up in, schools they attended, companies they have worked for and organizations they have joined, including the military. The more information members provide about their past, the more likely someone can reconnect with them. So, if a person only remembers that in 1959 they went to a party where they met a girl whose name was Jane and she lived in Toledo, Ohio where she went to Mercy College School of Nursing-if she is a member of Snabbo-It’s a BINGO!

As a bonus, and unique to Snabbo, the website automatically creates a move by move, place by place chronological personal history that the member invariably finds interesting and reflective. Ultimately, Snabbo members have the opportunity to become a community that builds an extensive, searchable database of their peers, thus opening abundant reconnection possibilities.

In addition, Snabbo features a slick and easy photo tool. Members can create, manage and share eye-catching albums. Snabbo also provides opportunities to form or join groups with shared interests and the freedom to document their thoughts, opinions and feelings on a blog. Private messages between members can also be exchanged within the site. All under the aegis of strict privacy controls….and it’s free.

Snabbo is as mature-user friendly as we could make it. We tried to keep in mind that our target demographic may or may not be Internet savvy. A significant number of baby boomers have not yet been exposed to social networking and we wanted Snabbo to be a successful first time user-experience for them.

Even Snabbo’s advertising model caters to the desire to reminisce. Throughout the site, members will encounter nostalgic-focused products that relate to this inimitable generation.

What do you need to start a website?

The indisputable answer to that question is- my programmer, Jake Carlson of the web development firm Dragon Eye Design. Jake started out as the person I hired to be the web programmer for Snabbo, but his job quickly morphed into becoming my official Consigliere. If you don’t know what that word means, either rent The Godfather or look it up on Wikipedia. Jake has advised me on everything from purchasing more domain names that were similar in spelling to Snabbo to how to write this blog!

Since there are so many items to attend to when you are a novice in starting a website, I have decided to neatly bullet point as many as I recall:

• Write a business plan. It is boring and tedious, but the task itself helps you focus on what you want your business to look like. In the end, you may never need to show it to anyone, nevertheless, it will prove to be a useful exercise.
• Register for a trademark as soon as possible. The process takes FOREVER and you want to have your logo secure when you launch if possible.You can either hire a trademark attorney. I recommend John Cone of Hitchcock Evert in Dallas Texas. You can also do it yourself www.uspto.gov/teas, but it is very confusing and time consuming. There are a number of costs involved and in the end you don’t know if you did it correctly and may need a lawyer anyway to fix it!
• Purchase all domains that you can think of with similar spellings to your website. Your programmer can then point the DNS to all those domains. Then, if anyone makes a mistake in the spelling of your web address they are correctly directed to your website.
• Do research on web hosting services. Your programmer can probably help you make that decision. Make sure they will offer you a refund if you are unhappy with their performance.
• Apply for accreditation with the Better Business Bureau. Look into obtaining a certified privacy seal confirmation from TRUSTe.com. Both of these companies charge yearly fees, so you should weigh the options about user confidence in your website versus money out the wallet.
• Incorporate your business. A good Certified Public Accountant can assist you. I recommend Dale H. Quenzer in Dallas, Texas. If you choose to incorporate you will need to keep up with your shareholder meeting notes.
• Have a Non Disclosure Agreement available. You can cherry pick from templates on the internet and make your own. You just need to have people you tell about your idea sign this agreement. Hopefully, it keeps everyone honest.

Finding a Programmer for Snabbo.com

By this time, it was April of 2008. I didn’t know where to begin. My web designer, Marianne Guillen of http://www.array-design.com/, put me in touch with a fellow she had worked with before on another project. On her recommendation, I called Jake Carlson of the web development firm Dragon Eye Design. I told him about the project and asked for a quote on the work. He got back to me with a price. In the meantime, a friend suggested that, since I had such limited funds (a.k.a. my personal savings account) I should call a university’s computer science graduate department to see if they had a grad student that could do it for less. I met with a professor at University of Texas at Dallas. He was interested in the project, but could not help me with any students due to their heavy work loads as doctoral candidates. I met with a professor at Southern Methodist University. She was interested in social networks and put me touch with a graduate student who was going to need a summer job anyway.

Even though I had gotten comfortable with working "virtually" with Marianne, I liked the idea that the grad student was located in Dallas. We met and settled on an agreeable price to both of us. He began work on the programming of the site. This was June. I got back to Jake Carlson and told him that I was going to be working with the grad student, but if that didn’t work out I would get back in touch.

As the summer went on, I thought our meetings were productive and that launch of the Snabbo.com website would be by the end of the year. Then on Labor Day, I got a phone call from my programmer. He had just started his Fall Semester of school. He felt that his graduate studies work load would be too much for him to handle along with the programming of Snabbo. He was sincerely apologetic, but believed he should drop out of the project. I cried for two days.

I called Marianne who gave me a friend of hers name who might know someone. I also tried posting on Craigslist.org and got a huge response from programmers who work in India. Their price was right, but I was too worried about quality control and I wanted someone that could be as emotionally-invested in this project as I was.

I called Jake Carlson, again. I had never met him personally since he lived in a different city. I was gun-shy about putting my entire trust in another programmer to finish the project. Jake’s idea was to build Snabbo from scratch instead of cobbling together social network applications that were already available. After a several phone conversations, I began to feel confident about Jake’s grasp of the Snabbo concept and his programming abilities. We signed a contract and he began work at the end of September, 2008.

A Social Networking Neophyte Learns How to Start a Website

I felt comfortable that the results of my research indicated there was a niche to be filled by starting a Social Networking Website for Baby Boomers. So, how do I start a website? First, I got a mentor. We have a family friend whose son, Jack Moffitt, is a computer scientist and software developer. He is co-author of the GNU GPL licensed streaming media server Icecast. Then he went on to develop http://www.chesspark.com/ and most recently http://www.collecta.com/. Jack started his first company while he was a student at Southern Methodist University and I guessed that he only had a shoestring budget to begin with too.

I contacted Jack by phone and he was amazingly generous with his time and advice. I took copious notes and tried to implement all that he suggested. He said that first I needed a web designer. Jack recommended Marianne Guillen at http://www.array-design.com/. She agreed to help me with the concept and began working on the templates for the website. Communicating by emails and phone calls, we talked through the possibilities of how my concept should look. At first, I was unsure how you could work with someone without ever physically meeting them. But I got used to the “virtual” meetings fairly quickly. After a short time, Marianne had some ideas to show me. Not only does Marianne produce beautiful website designs, she is able to quickly grasp the ideas that the client is trying to communicate. Marianne understood I was a novice-both in starting a website and owning a company. She was a wonderful resource for connecting me with friends of hers to talk to about the joys and pitfalls of being a web startup.

Next on the to-do list: Find a computer programmer.

The Social Networking Site for Baby Boomers that I Envisioned

Since I wanted the website to cater exclusively to Baby Boomers, I started searching for a domain name to illustrate that idea. I found that other people must be interested in Baby Boomers because most of the domain names with either of those words were already taken.

I finally settled on an acronym- SNABBO-Social Network Allowing Baby Boomers Only.

Once I had purchased the domain name, I became consumed with figuring out what the website would look like and what features it would offer. I looked at as many other social networks I could find online, noting what I liked and didn’t like about each. Most of the ones that tried to appeal to the Baby Boomer demographic seemed to focus on topics that pertained to a middle aged person’s life. I thought that was useful for getting important information out to my age group. But, personally, I preferred to think of myself as younger and hipper, than someone who has embarrassing incontinence issues when they laugh too hard.

I felt that Snabbo should be a haven away from the realities of middle age problems. Aging parents, Viagra, and menopause need to be discussed, but not on my Home Page! I also began to notice something about my friends. Over leisurely dinners (since no one needed to rush back to let the babysitter go home) these friends were now more inclined to reminisce and tell stories from way back in high school and college. Turns out they really did miss their glory days.

Here is what I wanted the website to do for Baby Boomers:

• Allow them to post a photograph from the past as their profile picture. A photo that would let people recognize their old friends even though they might not recognize them now.
• Have a profile registration process that gleaned as much information as possible from the member. This would enable someone to search for another person and find them even if they only remembered the person’s first name and elementary school they attended. In other words, the information in the database would be fine-grained. The more information you added to site, the greater the search result yields. I also hoped that these kinds of detailed searches might allow scattered families to reunite, help genealogy enthusiasts’ flesh out their family trees, and aid any adoptee searching for their biological roots.
• As the sixties rolled through the Boomer Generation, many people of my generation began to experience a desire to “repair the world”. A concept that ancient Hebrews referred to as Tikkun Olam. The ideology of the 60’s and 70’s had once sparked my peers to get cause-conscious. I wanted to embrace that idea again on Snabbo. I wanted members to use the website to make other members aware of any worthy causes, charities, or needy individuals. I wanted to have links to such great organizations as kiva.org, sixdegrees.org, and booksforafrica.org.I hoped that Snabbo might enable the strength of the Baby Boomer population (roughly 78 million in the U.S.) to be a force for good in the world. 
•  Join similar interest groups - I wanted Boomers to be able to explore interests and hobbies that they may have put on hold while they were too busy working, raising families, etcetera.
• Lastly, I wanted Snabbo to be easy to use. Researching online use by Baby Boomers, I found that, although the figure was growing, only a small percentage of my peer group was internet savvy, much less a member of any social network website. There were all sorts of things to consider in this area. The font needed to be a bit larger, explanations of how to use the features had to be prominently displayed and no assumptions could be made that the user had ever been exposed to tools that are commonly incorporated in navigating a website.

A big list, I know, but I have big hopes ...

Snabbo.com Launch Day Reflections

www.snabbo.com

Today is the end of the first week after officially launching Snabbo, a Social Network Allowing Baby Boomers Only. Since I kept this idea pretty well under wraps for the entire 3 years of its development, it invariably came as a surprise to my friends when they received an invitation to test the site. Many expressed curiosity as to why I did this. I decided to take a stab at blogging about the experience. I hope to document this process from the genesis of the Snabbo idea, through the development phase and into the current marketing and promotion of the website.

I run for exercise about three times a week. When I run, I get ideas (I am sure I am not alone in having this experience). Over the years, I have also imagined at least 5 possible screenplays and who I would cast in lead roles. So, one day (sometime in November, 2006) after my oldest daughter, Evelyn and I set up a Facebook account for our dog Finnegan as a joke, I went for a run. I started thinking about how, obviously, as my generation has aged we don't look the same. I don't think many people who knew me in high school would recognize me now if we passed each other in the grocery store. Then I started thinking that if Baby Boomers had the internet when we were in high school and college, we would be posting photos of us THEN. Just like our kids are doing. Why can't there be a social networking website that allows Boomers to do that? The side benefits would be that the concept is entertaining, photos posted could be preserved for our grandkids to observe how hip we were, and we wouldn't be accused of stalking our own offspring on Facebook by being members.

By January of 2007, I decided to do some research.

I found that there were Baby Boomer social networking websites out there already. But no one had hit on my particular idea. These sites encouraged members to discuss aging parents, incontinence and all things pertaining to middle age. That's ok and there is a need for those types of discussion, but my guess was that most Boomers would rather reminisce about their glory days than think about whether they should have that hip replacement.

I did more research. I like research. I got my Master's degree in Counseling Psychology at University of North Texas with Dr. Bert Hayslip, who has studied retirement adjustment and other aging issues for more than 20 years. I wrote my Master’s Thesis on the fallacy of the empty-nest syndrome entitled, Psychological Hardiness and Adjustment to Life Events in Adulthood.

So I read some studies and brushed up on some psychological theories. Erik Erikson a famous developmental psychologist believed that, during middle age and beyond, adults tend to reflect back on their life. They revisit their past experiences, accomplishments and choices. Reflection can help them gain satisfaction with their life or come to terms with any regrets. In any case, my research only ignited my desire to create a website that might address the needs of my generation during this stage in life.