Ivan nodded and kept his cool as he ran the concept through his head. He realized that San Diego was a multicultural city, but what audience did he want to attract? Two white college guys pushing his website could very easily lead him to the wrong demographic of people. And although their energy, intentions, and theory were all sound, Ivan had to make sure his new business had a core group to start with. That way he wouldn’t end up courting whomever with no particular focus. He summed up all of his own ideas before he responded to them.

“What do you think?” Jeff asked him. He and his partner both looked anxious.

Ivan looked at them both and joked, “If I wanted to sell you this company name for five hundred dollars, would you buy it?”

The college undergrads looked at each other and froze. Jeff was the first to speak up.

“Are you serious?”

Ivan started laughing and paused for effect. “Nah, I’m not serious,” he told them. “I’m just tripping off of how you two came up with all those ideas in one night.”

“Hey, that’s what we do, man,” Jeff told him. “Ideas are priceless.”

Ivan said, “Okay, well…your ideas sound good for later on down the road, once I see where I can go with it. But for right now I wanna build my core audience with the African-American professional crowd, twenty-five and up. And I know it’s not a lot of us here, but that becomes my advantage to make sure I hit ’em and I hit ’em hard to get them behind me.”

Jeff and Paul listened to where Ivan wanted to go with his website, and it looked as if all of the energy had been sucked out of them.

Jeff was first to speak up. “Well, it’s your site, man, we’ll do what you want us to do with it, but you can always market and promote to whoever you want. I wouldn’t limit who you invite to your site, though. Why would you want to do that?”

To explain himself more clearly, Ivan said, “Okay, let’s take your idea for a minute. Now, let’s say that we end up spotlighting a blond-haired white girl, who is twenty-two years old, and she likes rock music and skydiving.”

He looked them both in the eyes to make his point. “You see where I’m going with this? How in the world am I gonna benefit from that when I know I’m not promoting rock parties and skydiving?”

Paul said, “You never know. But you mainly want to let the site create its own audience. Then you find out where your strongest support is. That’s what we did with our site.”