Fusion101 Christian Friends †

Fusin101 Christian Friendship & matching Service -
About Fusion101 - Free Christian Dating Service
The history or Timeline of Fusion101 service for single Christian is as follows. Fusion101 think it important that all who work and use Fusion 101 know a bit about how and why this site started:

Fusion101 - Original Vision - mid 1999
This was to help church singles as I felt the secular scene always got a better deal - not just in respect to meeting people. This is no surprise as there's more money in secular markets which gives you the ability to create bigger and better services. I had no Internet experience or cash to put into Fusion so I wasn't sure how I was going to do it.

Fusion 101 Designed - sept 1999
I designed Fusion101 in a graphics program. You may wonder why the designs were black?.. well there waere a few reasons for this. 1st, in 99 there was a big stigma attached to singles and every site I looked at then was either pink or covered in hearts and flowers - so I wanted something a bit more stylish. I agonised for weeks over using black since Christians might associate it with a non-Christian image but in the end just went ahead as I knew my intentions were to help not to hinder. The other reason I chose black was becuase I had no money to advertise Fusion. I thought if whilst trying to find one to join people came across our site which was free amongst the many others that were not, it might stick in the memory.

Fusion101 Teamed with TheWay.co.uk - sept 99
A new Christian portal called www.theway.co.uk heard about the singles service I'd designed and offered to take my front end and build the database and market it for over 50% ownership. At the time I had little choice but to go with them.

Fusion 101 Started - dec 99
TheWay.co.uk built the back end and understandably wanted to charge members very early on (£20 pm) as they had invested in programing. I had quite a few disagreements saying their marketing wouldn't work - even for their own site and sure enough it didn't. TheWay shortly after was wound up (although the site is still online and now a Charity). I then bought their part of the company back for 5K. I was now sole owner again.

Fusion - remarketed - 2000
Once I got the site back I kept Fusion free and began to do my own online marketing using somewhat hit and miss tactics but learning a lot about search engines along the way and actually getting good rankings for fusion.

Fusion - new partners - 2000
Fusion began to grow and had about 300 joiners per week (without a chat room) from various countries mainly UK. At this point I was having trouble dealing with some of the technical server stuff and needed someone to take some of the load with accounts etc. Two friends offered to sort out these issues for 20% ownership of the company each - making it a 60 / 20 / 20 split. A year into the partnership it was clear these guys were hoping for a easier ride and although they helped I decided to buy them out as one took on a job which left no time for Fusion, and the other didn't have as much experience of the web as was really needed.

Fusion101 - 2002
Fusion101 Christian friends and dating service works! - by this time we've had loads of marriages and great friendships formed. Running Fusion 101 is however beginning to take its toll as I have been doing a full time day job and working on fusion often till 2am for the previous 3 years which meant I was often knackered during the day. I managed to keep it all going but later on ended up in hospital!:)!

Fusion101 - 2002
By now Fusion101 had become so busy (about 300 people joining a week and 1000 logins per day) that the whole thing began to slow up. Searches on the database could take 15 seconds or more to execute and in many cases locking up completely. Also hosting fees were going up and up. The host company wanted 3K to keep fusion going - It turns out they were fleecing me - charging 5-6 times over the amount I needed to pay! Another problem was that the database had been written badly and was slow full stop.

Fusion101 Closes
2) I closed it down and posted the costs they wanted on the front page of the site.

Donations to Fusion101!
In 3 weeks members sent me donations of around 2K!! This was greatly encouraging and made me realise that people were actually getting a lot out of Fusion - gave me the will to live at this point as I had no idea how I would carry on. I was in fact preparing to get the 3K loan to carry on. Several people offered to buy fusion from me, sevral programmers offered help rehosting and Christian Connection offered to 'see if they could find ways to continue offering a service to our members" - never been sure what that meant!!:)

Tau Joins Fusion
Tau appeared and notified me that the host company were ripping me off and offered to rewrite and rehost the site for a much more reasonable fee. I used the donations to pay for the previous fees that I owed and pay for the site re-write.

Chat added to fusion 101
Tau adds chat room to Fusion. In 1 year Tau and moderators create a bustling chat room that's now appearing high on search engines when searching for 'christian chat' - an indication that the chat is not an average chat room.

Fusion101 Christian Singles raplidly increases in membership and usage
Since tau rewrote the site (in php - a free language) and database the site is much much faster and can cope with increased membership. As a result of this, many hours tweaking the site and more free marketing the membership is rising exponentially and we now have around 950 new joiners per week.

To be continued...
So to date, we've spent five years and a lot of money building Fusion 101 and thankfully it works - lots of marriages and relationships. Havnt had time to list the marriages but will get round to it. Doing a full time job and working on fusion often till 2am for 4 years meant I was often knackered during my day job but I managed to keep it all going at some cost to my health unfortuately.


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Fusion 101 Free Christian Dating Service @ christian advice.net 2006