Interview with Greg Helmstetter, CEO of MyGoals

MyGoals.com is the web”s premier web based goal setting site. Basically, we help people with two difficult things; one, creating a plan for any goal they want to accomplish, and two, keeping them on track once they’ve created a plan. We do that through email reminders. They can be any typical consumer with goals ranging from losing weight to buying a house, to starting a family to traveling around the world. It is very much open ended. We have a couple of ways that we help people set goals; first, we offer pre-made goal plans which are created by editors and subject matter experts that are preloaded to check off all the things on the list, and two, we let our customers create their own goals.

There are some no-brainer goals, such as for weight loss, getting a new job, buying a house, and that kind of thing. We also were privy to test data from a prototype that we were involved with. We target areas that we had identified people as being interested in. An interesting example, is the goal to stop smoking, which has very little interest among our demographic. That surprised us, but it is data we used to determine not to use resources for that type of goal. In addition to the pre-made goal plans, we have the wizard process, which lets people create any type of goal they wish.

About 60% are made from scratch and 40% are pre-made.

We have a pretty rich taxonomy which forces customers to self categorize the goal. For instance, they might start at recreation and leisure and then drill down into mountaineering, and then set a goal to climb Mt. Rainier. Our software programmatically, does not know that they are climbing Mt. Rainier as their goal, but it does know that they have a mountaineering goal. Basically, we help customers by walking them through a process that was developed in a live seminar, and which we acquired the intellectual property to this process. The seminar found that if you ask someone the steps to the goal they have in front of them, about third or a half could create a decent plan, but most people didn’t know where to start. The magic bullet that they hit on, was not asking how they were going to accomplish the goal, but what were the obstacles to achieving the goal.

Correct. That creates a way to approach the problem. Specifically thinking that a problem needs to be solved, and obstacles need to be overcome. That is counter to most traditional self-help tools in the past. We take a very pragmatic point of view, which is to identify the obstacles so that they can be overcome. It turns out, that once people have identified these obstacles, it focuses their attention on solving each obstacle individually. They are able to identify what they need to do, to specifically overcome each obstacle, which brings them one step closer to their individual goal. People answer their own questions about what they need to do. Which is where the real customization comes in. At the end of the day they end up with a comprehensive plan with a set of tasks they need to accomplish, within a certain time frame. More importantly, they have thought through the process.

Total ownership, they are intellectually and emotionally committed, and they are invested. We get feedback from people saying “My gosh, I never realized why I was never able to do such and such before.” It was because they have never sat down and thought through the process. It is kind of a shame that kids aren?t taught this in school, because it is a basic life skill. It is very important to keep them on track with the email reminders. At that point, we are a subscription-based service.

We came into this business thinking it would be a certain thing, and what we found is that it is all over the map. Everyone from college students to retired seniors, men to women, high to low income utilize our service. Generally, our customer want something more out of life, and constitute a cross section of everyone. Not everyone out there needs this service, however, when you look at defining characteristics of our users, we are constantly amazed that there aren’t any. We have PhD?s publishing papers in A-level journals, and we have people who have unemployed for a year, people on welfare. We get everyone, and their goals can be as simple as they want to spend more time with their kids to they want to turn around their company they are running. We enjoy that aspect, that our service fits a large range of needs.

Exactly, when you get feedback from people saying that we helped them do this or that, we take a lot of pride in that. Not a lot of companies get that kind of reward.

The five co-founders had all had startup experience before the boom, and if you remember in late ’99 or early ’00, it seems like every crazy idea was getting funded, and some of them on their face seemed rather absurd. We took that perspectives, and began asking what would be useful for people, and help them accomplish their goals. That is what led to the founding of MyGoals.com. We initially thought that someone had done that before. At the time there were ten online pet food stores, and goal setting seemed like a no-brainer. It seemed like one of those overlooking opportunities, and searched for other companies that were doing it. There were two or three amateur sites that were in this same area, that can’t really be considered serious businesses.

Our initial plan, was developed with the understanding of raising a lot of venture capital. We started raising money in the worst time in history, and it never happened. Due to that fact, we had to dramatically change our marketing plan. The original model was to be an ASP serving private label, or co-branded goal setting functionality into large high-volume consumer sites. Unfortunately, to do that successfully required the ability to ramp quickly, which required infrastructure, which of course required cash. We turned on a dime, and focused exclusively on the consumer B2C market, with a novel (at the time) subscription model. We primarily have used word of mouth and seasonality with New Years to grow our consumer market base. We have also leveraged media opportunities around this seasonality.

I would tell you exactly what we do, but I think everyone would begin doing it as well. It is a little bit of an in-house secret. Put it this way, without a public relations firm, with zero dollars, we have ended up on CNN six times, CNNfn, CBS Early Show, New York Times twice, Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, NPR, on and on and on.

Absolutely. It has slammed us so hard with traffic that we have the other kind of problem. After the initial onslaught of traffic, it becomes more of a steady trickle, especially when leveraging print. Those placements are definitely where we have gotten most of our traffic. Beyond that it is word of mouth, affiliate programs, and advertising.

That is a really good question. We don’t have a good answer for that, simply because we haven’t been around long enough to see what some of the long-term goals will be. We know that when we sample goals, and some people set very short-term goals like two weeks. Too someone who has that type of goal, who are we to say whether or not something constitutes a goal or a chore. Then there are other people who set long term career and education goals. people who are looking to get a law degree or an MBA. These are people who haven’t applied to programs yet, and subsequently their goals can be a few years long.

This one is difficult to capture as well, as the same issues with multi-year goals affect understanding this metric. We don’t have good data on how many have been completed, because there are many that are still being worked on.

No, actually it doesn’t. When customers set up an account, they are able to subscribe to as many goals as they want, and we encourage them to. It is good for us, but it is also important that people have some balance in their lives and not focus on career at the detriment of their family or their health. We try to emphasize a balanced approach by setting goals that affect different areas of their lives. Also, it is good to offset the big long-term goals, with a couple of easier, short-term goals, so that you have something you can accomplish sooner.

That is very confidential, and I can’t share that. We offer a thirty-day free trial before we begin billing. That lets people try the service, and decide if it is something that will help them or not. Of course, they can look at the pre-made goal plans, which they can do before they even sign up. During that thirty-day trial, we do lose people, but the people who stay on beyond that are serious about working on their goal and they stay with us for quite a while.

If they stay for a couple months, they definitely have a propensity to stay indefinitely. There are some people who have been around since we have been in business, and they contact us proactively when they are switching banks, or cards.

I wish they were all like that. It isn’t all of them, but enough to keep it interesting.

It really depends on the individual. It is extremely difficult to generalize. We help them as much as we can with creating a plan, and keeping them on track. If people really have a difficult time, then they are trying too much at once or they didn’t want it in the first place, at least not enough to pay the price.

We are totally riding it out. Our mantra is to survive, and grow modestly. We have bootstrapped ourselves, and we are not fundraising. We don’t want to fundraise, because it changes everything. Obviously, if we raised a lot of money we could do a lot of things we couldn’t do otherwise, but what we keep is the control to run the company the way we really think it should be run. We need to be focusing on the company, and not catering to the whims of investors. Which is the reality once you accept funding.

Ultimately, we think MyGoals.com is a great piece of functionality for a larger company. Acquisition is the end game. It would never be a public company with the way things are now, or the way they will be for the foreseeable future. In our view, this hanging out till the market is more appropriate for acquisitions makes a lot more sense.

I don’t know if I would say craziest, but we do see quite a number of interesting goals. We actually lead it as well, with our pre-made goal plans where we promote some more than others. It is a little bit scary from a social engineering perspective, that people set goals simply because we suggest them. For instance, to write and sell a screenplay is one of our more interesting goals. Maybe there were a lot of burgeoning screenwriters to begin with, who saw MyGoals.com and went ah-ha, or some people thought it would be fun after seeing on the site.

Some of the other pre-made goal plans that we weren’t expecting to be really popular, but became very popular. To adopt a pet was one of those. It turns out you can do a bad job of adopting a pet, with getting the wrong breed for you family, and that sort of thing. We have found out that there is a gold mine in the how-to market. Sort of simple things, that most people take for granted, but others that are looking for that type of information and focus. One of the weirder ones, is one customer set the goal of being baptized in the Jordan River, which is pretty neat. Goals around exotic travel are also a large focus on the site. Customers set goals to travel to Thailand, South America, etc. It is nice knowing that in some small way we help our customers achieve these goals.

Given that we are running MyGoals.com as a cash company, and not as a fundraising company then it is all about cash flow. We know our numbers, and have good solid metrics. We know how many users we get per dollar spent in advertising, we know the return of investment on that dollar. Understanding that we don’t have a lot of money to work with, and if we did have a ton of money we could grow significantly faster. Every now and then we revisit the funding option, but in this market with the low valuations, we are not willing to give up enough of the company for what it would buy us. We know what it is going to take to grow the company on its own, it is just going to take a little bit longer than if we had funding. It takes patience, perseverance, sticking to the plan and responsiveness to meet our goals. Meanwhile we see other companies coming and going, and we are still here.

Weight loss, and Physical Fitness goals prevail year after year. Even people who are in good shape, want to maintain it, and stay in shape. At New Years these are especially big, as people have been eating Turkey and Stuffing for a couple of months. The interesting thing about this season, is that personnel finance goals surpassed health and fitness. We attribute that climb as a response to the economy. It is people who want to become more financially secure.