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[quote=jsteele][quote=Anonymous]When did DCUM begin?

When you founded it, did you intend for this to a full-time job, or did it just evolve? [/quote]

In 2002, our friend Sharon Winick started arranging get-togethers for new moms. Our son was born about the same time as Sharon's daughter so Maria was included in the meet-ups. As the meet-ups got larger, they were organizing them through email and that was getting problematic as the number of people grew. I was managing mailing lists (listservs) for a few companies then and had all the hardware and software necessary to run them. So, I suggested starting a mailing list instead of relying on the "to" and "cc" fields of email. Maria and Sharon were moderating it and then people started using it for all sorts of parenting topics and it grew well beyond its original purpose. I wasn't really involved for a while but as the list grew, Sharon was too busy to stay involved and I started helping Maria. We created a website but it was only to help subscribe to the mailing list.

Then, "nanny posts" -- nanny search and nanny available -- posts started taking over the mailing list and it was making it hard to find non-nanny posts. We decided to offload them to a forum on the website. In addition to the nanny search forums, we created a General Discussion forum. One day, we noticed that forum had a lot of traffic. Based on what we saw in that forum, we created a few more. Then they gained traction and it became clear that web discussion would be popular. Therefore, in 2007 I completely redid the forums to its current format. I was still working full-time and doing DCUM on the side. We had started running web ads without much expectations but after a few years we noticed significant year-to-year revenue growths. First Maria quit her job to work on DCUM full time. Revenue growth was so predictable that at some point I decided that I would be able to quit my job in three years. That's exactly what happened. Three years after that I quit and have being working on DCUM full time since then.

Other than that three-year time period, nothing was ever really planed with DCUM and we never expected it to grow like it has.
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