In mid August I came across a press release by a company called First Beat Media, announcing their launch of their soaps.com website. Not being much of a soap opera fan myself, I ended up on their corporate website and was intrigued to find out that their business is to buy premium domains and develop them. So I contacted the company and had a conversation with Rafi, their president.

Frank: Hello Rafi, thank you for taking the time to talk me today - glad you could make it after the storm.

I first heard about your company, First Beat Media, via your press-release about the launch of soaps.com. Can you tell me a little bit about your company?

Rafi: Thanks for giving us the opportunity to share a little more about ourselves. First Beat Media is a relatively new company based in South Florida with a major focus on buying premium domains to build portals around. The management team consists of experienced domainers as well as project managers, who combined, know that having a built in traffic source is a huge asset to starting any new site.

Our first target market we are focusing heavily in on is women surfers. Our first release, as you have seen, is Soaps.com with our next 2 major projects being CelebrityGossip.com and adorable.com in which we plan on doing a lot of cross marketing together. We are also working on TeleNovelas.es, which will be using the same backend as Soaps.com but just converted to focus on the Spanish speaking soap opera market. Still early in getting writers and everything, but it is also in our plans within the next month or two.

Frank: How many employees does First Beat Media have? And how of them are women, considering your choice of initial target market?

Rafi: Currently First Beat Media consists of roughly eight employees, with six other sub contractors who update the sites daily for us. Only one woman is part of the staff, who happens to be the Managing Editor of Soaps.com, Chrissi. There are a few other women who are contractors that write the daily soap opera updates as they happen daily.

Frank: How many domains First Beat Media owns at the moment?

Rafi: We currently we own roughly 100 domains.

Frank: As many domainers are talking about developing their domains these days, would you mind sharing some of your process of picking domains and target markets to develop for? I think many domainers have trouble choosing which properties to develop.

Rafi: First thing we did was define what market we wanted to target. We decided on women, then set out to find domains we thought would best target them. In retrospect we are entering a very crowded market (soap operas) controlled by a select few big network sites and 1 or 2 independents. We felt though with the daily traffic flow soaps.com gets naturally from type-ins, plus the branding we had an opportunity to penetrate it. But to answer your question, I think it is best to develop domains in which you think have the best chance to penetrate a market or something in which you enjoy. We personally plan only on developing very generic domains. We think it is cheaper and more effective than trying to think up an off the wall term that will take years of branding to become effective in crowded markets.

Frank: Are you already seeing an uptake in traffic compared to the type-in traffic the domain had before the launch, or is this too early to tell? I would imagine that you could already see a change in the amount of return visits.

Rafi: It is really hard to tell as we have a big advertising campaigns started with adwords, msn, yahoo trying to brand the site heavily. So we cant tell how much effect the actual typeins are having. One thing I do know is soaps.com is easy to type in and easy to remember so I am sure typeins will only get bigger as we grow and word of mouth spreads. Overall though, we are very happy with the growth of the site. We are averaging roughly 325 new registered users a day, and currently have over 5,000 registered users in just over 2 weeks of being live.

Frank: That sounds very good - also glad you already answered one of my other questions, regarding branding and advertising the site.

How long did it take you to develop soaps.com from start to launch? How many people were working on it during that time?

Rafi: Soaps.com was a 6-8 month project which includes both a super admin section and writer admin so we can hire writers to update their particular soaps every day after it runs. We had 4 people work on it for those 6-8 months (1 project manager, 1 programmer, and 2 designers). As we approached the launch date we hired a whole staff to actually run the site and insert all the content and actor profiles. But during development I would say 4 worked on it pretty much full time.

Frank: Quit a bit of effort - wow. I would imagine that you will be watching the development of the traffic and continue to improve the site. For example, I could imagine that adding RSS feeds could help expanding the site audience.

Rafi: Yeah it was a lot of work but I am very proud of the final product our guys produced. We do plan on adding a lot of new features in the future. This was just phase 1 of the project. We have plans on adding spoilers, rumors and quite a few other things that we didn’t have time to implement in phase 1.

Frank: So are you actively looking to buy additional names at the moment, or will you first focus on developing your current holdings?

The site turned out very nice - and even though I do not consider myself a soap expert, I certainly see a huge potential to build an audience in that market. So are you actively looking to buy additional names at the moment, or will you first focus on developing your current holdings?

Rafi: Yes we are always looking to purchase new domains but as I stated before they must be generic terms. We pay a premium for them and do not base our buys off any X Year valuations.

Frank: Right, for a domainer who is looking to seem you seem to be the perfect customer - someone who is buying the name in order to develop it. Do you also consider partnering with the current owner, or do you only develop domains your company owns?

Rafi: We only develop domains we own. Due to the time commitment and dollars it takes to develop a full site it is not worth the effort unless it is something we own 100%.

Frank: Can you say anything about the financial backers for your venture, or is this information that cannot be shared at this time?

Rafi: We prefer it be information that can not be shared at this time.

Frank: Considering the amount of domains you are planning to build, are you looking at expanding your team?

Rafi: Yes we plan on adding mainly more project managers and programmers. The real problem is finding quality ones to fill those positions. Our experience in the past is those 2 positions really make or break any projects overall success. We were blessed to have hired a very good one from a large Canadian company to manage Soaps.com and the programmer who wrote the whole soaps site is one of the best I have seen in terms of commitment and attention to detail. Only if we can find a few more like those 2, we would be set to expand at a much faster pace :-)

Frank: Good luck with that - we’ll do our best to get the word out.

Rafi, what is your position at First Beat Media and where you a domainer before starting this company?

Rafi: I am the President of the company in charge of overall direction the company goes. I was not a domainer prior to this but 2 of the upper level managers were and have a lot of experience in the domain market.

Frank: So what is your background?

Rafi: My background is finance and accounting…I worked for a public accounting firm for three years before taking over an upper management position for a large internet marketing firm, that is where I learned about domains and the power of the internet.

Frank: And I bet this market got you as excited as most of us when we learned about it :)

Rafi: Yes, it is very exciting to watch a vision grow into something real.

Frank: Developing those prime properties certainly (especially to this level) certainly is a very unique approach in our industry.

Thank you very much for taking the time to talk to me today and sharing some information about your company and projects. I am sure we will be hearing more about First Beat Media in the future.

Rafi: Hopefully we can set a trend for future businesses.