partnermine.com heralds a new era in online personal advertising and dating services

partnermine.com heralds a new era in online personal advertising and dating services. Now recruiting its second thousand members, partnermine.com began service just after Easter 2005 as a joint venture between Bracknell businessman Tim Trent and his German business partner Bernd Heller and is already attracting discerning singles worldwide.

Very much part of the new generation of dotcoms, partnermine.com is a very clearly focussed, targeted business, taking its cues from giants such as eBay. No adverts, no deluges of special offers, just great facilities and simple service. Better than that, members are offered the basic service, including private messaging, totally free. It even boasts a free adult section for the over 18s.

Tim and Bernd (or should that be “Bernd and Tim”?) sound much like Ben and Jerry, of the ice cream fame. Their objective is personal service, attention to detail and plain fun. partnermine.com is aimed at the seriously searching single. Suitable for Senior, Primetimer and Teenager alike, partnermine.com bases its reputation on its search engine which means you even know how far away in the world your potential partner is before you make contact. Better still, if you don’t want to be found by a certain age group there is the ability to prevent (eg) 60 year olds seeing you if you are (eg) 17 – great for online safety. And that’s just for starters.

Notes for Editors:

There is a full backgrounder following this set of notes, with quotes from the founders and other details.

Tim Trent is available on 07710 126618 for queries and interviews

Journalists may create accounts at no charge. We ask that the account name starts “press” to distinguish from regular members, but have no objections if this does not happen. “Press” prefixed accounts will be weeded a week after creation (earlier if the account is unconfirmed) to avoid confusing the membership

partnermine.com is never capitalised, even at the start of sentences

the site is at http://partnermine.com


BACKGROUNDER

Tim Trent and Bernd Heller have never met. They’ve only spoken on the phone for five minutes. So how is it they’ve been able to create and launch partnermine.com from scratch in seven and a half months? They’re poised to take on the giants of the dating industry and win. And all designed and created by email and instant messenger.

Back in June 2004 Tim and Bernd were chatting online through one of the many instant messaging programs. Neither of them remembers what made them both look at a dating site. Neither of them knows which said “We can do that. And we can do it far better!” first. Each of them thinks he thought the other was crazy. What’s even crazier is that Bernd is in a small village in southern Germany, and his first language is German; Tim lives in Bracknell and speaks no German. Any business analyst would have said “You two have no hope!” and would have washed his hands of them But they wisely never consulted one.

Oh, and that five minute phone call? Well that was about something else. It was a business matter for something totally different. The only thing that came out of that call was Tim saying “Bernd speaks as good English as he types in instant messaging. I wish our schools did even a quarter as well with teaching our kids languages.”

They worked fast after June. The basic design was ready by the end of July. But it underwent partial rewrites during the next months until a day in late September when they froze all new functionality and concentrated on excellence of code and excellence of search engine. Secondary to that is the crisp design of the partnermine.com site.

This wasn’t full time effort, either. Bernd is in the final stages of his degree in Computer Sciences at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, and Tim is a senior consultant with Bracknell based Marketing Improvement dealing in the highly specialised world of Data Protection and Direct Marketing.

They speak with one voice. Asked what they’re aiming for the answer is “partnermine.com aims to be the very best global dating and friend-finding site. It will take a while to become the biggest, but that’s secondary to being the best.”

They’re basing this drive on a search engine that is specially designed for the job – one that will even tell you how far away the person you might like to meet is, even if they’re on the other side of the world – and on a simple and old fashioned attitude to customer service. “All our members are individuals,” Tim said. “We take as much care of them online as we would if they were standing in front of us. And our primary objective is to give them great value for money”.

Asked “How did you manage to create something this complex and this easy to use without ever meeting?” Tim said “It wasn’t as if we refused to meet. Some days we had ‘this would be far easier if we were both in the same room’ moments. But we solved it without getting on a plane, without even needing the phone or a voice chat service. We had ideas, discussed them and explained to each other precisely what we meant until we understood it properly. I think we would have been slower if we’d done it with face to face contact. We’d each have assumed instead of asked questions until we understood.”

“It’s a bit like Ben and Jerry’s ice cream business,” Tim said. “We started with an idea and a friendship. We’ve made the idea a reality. Now we’re working steadily towards profit. It’ll take time and it needs a critical mass of subscribers to succeed, just like the telephone did in the beginning. There are more dreadful sites out there than you can shake a stick at. That shows that the market is ready. We know we’ve a great deal yet to do, and we know there’ll be setbacks. But we’re here for the long term.”

Will this be yet another dot com that bites the dust? “No,” said Bernd. “Our research is tight. Our investment is correct. Our overheads are controlled. The dot com boom and bust was mainly over-inflated egos paying themselves over-inflated salaries and building top heavy empires. We prefer to think of ourselves to be standing alongside the solid ‘garage start-ups’ of the ’70s/’80s, like Apple or Microsoft.”