Interview with Tim Kunin, CEO of The Hunger Site

The Hunger Site was founded by John Greene who at the time was a computer programmer. He came up with the idea of a click-to-give model where people would click on an Internet banner that would be sponsored by a specific site or group. Each sponsor then pays a royalty to charity.

The response was very dramatic. Traffic jumped from tens of people visiting per day to hundreds of thousands visiting per day. It became very difficult for John (the founder) to maintain the site, because he was working by himself. At the time, he was running it off of one server, and working extreme hours to keep it up and live. He decided to sell the site to GreaterGood, which was also one of his larger advertisers in the spring of 2000. They began running it, because realistically it would have been impossible for one person to run it.

A person registers at GreaterGood for a charity of their choosing and when they purchase through the affiliate links the associated commission is split between GreaterGood and their selected charity.

As a company we acquired GreaterGood, which had ran out of money. Our biggest responsibility when we acquired their assets was to turn the company around. We wanted to ensure that it became a solid and profitable entity. The money that we are raising for our charity partners only exists as long as the company itself breaks even. This was our greatest challenge, and every decision we make is driven by that goal, which includes the extension of our network. We have accomplished that goal, and are now profitable.

We acquired the company in August of 2001, and soon had to deal with the significant market issues associated with the tragic events of September 11, 2001. We had to reevaluate the plans that we had put in place and in essence scrap them. It has really been an iterative process. For us, it is about providing good service to our customers both the clickers and to the people who buy products through our sites. We sell and source products and hope to provide good value to our customers. That became the business, rather than focus on the overall tech solutions. We completely changed the focus from being on the technology solution to focusing on the end customers. Our goal was to make the user experience as efficient as possible, ensure each business was strong, and grow from there.

Very simply, our goal is to satisfy our customers. Once that is done, the business itself is quite easy. Our business is no different from any other. Every business relies on it’s customers enjoying their experience and getting value out of some type of transaction. The customer experience for our business is that they must feel that by their coming to the site that they are contributing to making the world a better place. That is what we are about, and that is what drives us. We have to continue to find other ways for our users to continue to contribute. If that all works then everything else will fall into place. Being small, privately funded, and not looking to do an IPO it allows us to continue focusing on our core businesses.

All of the new people coming to the Hunger Site are driven by viral marketing done by our existing customer base. Part of making this a breakeven business is that you cannot spend money that you don’t have. We can’t pay money now for traffic down the road, we have built a business that finances itself with current revenues, which drives future growth. We are not using money to acquire new customers, we are using it to improve our customer experiences and provide more services. They in turn have promoted us to their friends, family, and acquaintances.

There are a number of things that we do, that many other sites do as well. These include; email-a-friend, email newsletters, etc. Where we differ is the fact that we give 15% of our gross to charities, and that connects directly with our customers.

They all attempt to make the world a better place in one way or another. Our different sites incorporate models such as click-to-give, affiliate commissions, and ecommerce. All of these models allow us to provide different solutions to different customers. Our customers can then choose which models to use, and how to use them.

If you have limited resources you have to be able to determine what will have the highest return. The key to that is simply trying a lot of different things to find out what works and what doesn’t. We try to have feedback mechanisms and measurable criteria for when we launch different initiatives.

We are very careful not launching a site if it has the potential to cannibalize one of our existing sites. With every new launch we try to increase our overall market penetration, both for new customers, as well as new charities. There will be overlap, but it is our goal to increase a customers involvement, not to shift their from one area to another while at the same time opening up our services to entirely new customers.

We want to continue expanding our offerings in such a way that our customers can contribute in all new ways to new charities. It is also very important to us that we continue to provide information on each of our charities, and educate the public about them. Keeping that in mind, it is vital to a small business to sustain your current business and not losing focus on that group. We are expanding slowly to ensure that the addition of a new site doesn’t reduce the traffic and business that we are generating from our other sites. We are committed to expansion, but we are committed to it in a way that allows us to grow smartly.