Part 1 : A peek at success

Aaron, you've got around 300,000 subscriptions to your email lists - what's the secret of your success?
300,000?! We don't have 300,000 subscriptions to our email newsletters. We have 400,000 subscriptions! (editor's note: remind me to get a new researcher). As for a secret... it's our own special recipe: one part hard work + one part great staff + two parts creativity and some secret sauce (you gotta have the secret sauce) baked at three-hundred and fifty degrees for slightly more than two years in a trial-by-fire brick oven.

Kidding aside, we simply took one day at a time and just kept trying to do things better and better. If you just keep learning and plugging away towards a goal eventually you'll get there.

What's the biggest challenge in running such large volume email publications - the technical side of email management, generating content, selling advertising...?
All of it is challenging, but I would say the biggest challenge we have is actually customer service. With the hundreds of thousands of people we entertain daily via email and the Web site, one is bound to get a few questions now and then.

The sheer volume of viewer email can be overwhelming at times when you are trying to make sure they all receive helpful and timely responses. In addition, viewer questions range from technical queries to simple requests to emails that are just extremely weird.

It is difficult for a single person to determine the correct response to all of the questions and we have to often work as a team to get all the mail answered. It is important to all of us at FunnyMail.com to make sure that our viewers are happy because they have made us who we are.

How do you see the future of email advertising - are you secure for life, or are you looking at other means of generating revenue?
Secure for life? I wish, but the email advertising model has only just come into existence within the last few years and is just now going from its infancy to toddler stage... perhaps it may even learn to walk soon :)

So here are some predictions on how email publishing will evolve over the next couple of years:

• More HTML and rich media publishing
• More competition from the big Web sites
• Consolidation among the smaller companies
• More email publishers with multiple ezines and newsletters

Therefore, with all of these challenges of increased competition and consolidation, bigger competitors and new technical advances, I would say we are not secure for life but we do have a running head start. The shakeout among email publishers will come eventually and we will only survive if we rise to meet all of these new challenges and keep working as hard as ever.

Your latest mailing list is a weekly freebies list - a break away from humor. What's the thinking behind that?
Well FunnyMail.com is about humor, jokes and fun and what's more fun than free stuff? Besides, think spin-off, baby. From the psychiatrist in Cheers came Frasier, from the Tracey Ullman Show came the Simpsons, from the creator of the Simpsons came Futurama and from FunnyMail.com will come... wait... oh no, I said too much. But don't worry, some day in the future it'll all make sense (insert evil laugh here).

So this spin-off "one step at a time" approach is a deliberate policy?
Absolutely, when we launch a new list we make sure that it is supported right, right from the start. So we only launch one at a time because that way we can ensure that it receives the necessary attention.

Continued...