Hello Everyone,
I think it’s very important for us to involve you in this process. Over at Spicy Bear, we are trying to figure out the right thing to do for cVillain, cvilleStyle and cvilleMUSE. It’s been a lot of fun working with the 15+ regular writers and the hundreds of supporters, and tens of thousands of readers. But, we’ve hit a wall with what we can do.
Our sites continue to be incredibly popular. Just for cVillain, over the last month we had 16,000 unique visitors, 140,000 page views, 41,000 visits and 400+ RSS readers. Over 80% of these readers are from the Charlottesville area. We’ve thrown relatively few resources at the sites in the last year or so, but now we think it’s time to explore options.
Spicy Bear needs to grow into a more mature organization. We didn’t realize it needed several people working on it full time. We recognize that we’ve taken it as far as we can without bringing in a professional team. That professional team can do things like throw more events, fix technical issues (e.g. archives and comment delay), fix comment formatting, do better reporting and make the experience better for everyone.
For this reason, we’ve been talking to several local companies about acquiring Spicy Bear. We don’t know if that’s the right move, but we do know that we have great people involved and they deserve to pay their bills. The truth is, we need someone bigger than us to make this their baby. That someone has to be a good fit for the Spicy Bear vision and we’ve been very clear about that.
We will continue to help out that new partner for as long as they need, but we wanted to put this out there for critique and to seek ideas.
If you want to contact me personally or have other ideas please email me at kyle@spicybear.com.
Thanks for understanding,
Kyle and the Spicy Bears
[pic from flickr]
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