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Like, Totally Psycho
A young husband-and-wife team create a Web arena for the battle of the sexes: PsychoChick.com
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Business New Haven
10/16/2000
By: Michael C. Bingham
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Company: PsychoChick.com,
2405 Whitney Ave., Suite 406, P.O. Box 185900, Hamden 06518
Site launch: March 2000
Site visitation: 250,000/month
Demographics: Approximately 18-35 years old, 65 percent female, 35 percent male
Employees: 20
CEO and 'PowerDiva': Jill Wagner
President: Todd Wagner
Startup costs: $45,000
How raised: Personal and friends
Profitable?: No
Business description: A Yale-spawned dot.com startup, PsychoChick.com is based on the tried-and-sometimes-true “community-building” concept: If you can build a critical mass of regular visitors to your Web site, you can sell them stuff.
PsychoChick (noun): 1. A wild, uncontrollable woman who does whatever she pleases. 2. A willful, brash female whose unpredictable actions are driven by her emotions. 3. To a guy, a woman to be feared.
The Hamden-based PsychoChick.com didn't begin as a business idea at all. It was simply a tongue-in-cheek Web site to help males plumb “the elusive nature of the female psyche.”
Now, its young principals think the PsychoChick brand has an upside of half a billion dollars.
Is that psycho, or what?
Maybe not. Launching the site in March as a place “for guys to talk about their crazed females,” according to CEO and “PowerDiva” Jill Wagner, 27, PsychoDiva.com somehow attracted 2,000 visitors. Within two months, that number grew to 30,000. By July, 100,000 visitors were showing up on the site.
Funny thing is, they weren't who they were supposed to be. “Hundreds of thousands of proud, totally enthused PsychoChicks took the site over,” Wagner explains. “And I think that really turned the guys on. Now the site is a true hybrid, where psychochicks - and the guys obsessed with them - duke it out in a fun-filled, spirited battle of the sexes.”
Given that unanticipated audience shift - two-thirds of current Web site visitors are female - Wagner and her husband, PsychoChick.com President Todd Wagner (a 2000 Yale School of Management grad who calls his wife “the smartest person I ever met”) decided to “re-launch” PsychoChick in December with a PR campaign they project will attract two million visitors to the site. Already, MTV and Bloomberg TV have discovered the Wagners. Cosmo Girl wrote about the PsychoChick phenomenon.
Now visitors - psychochicks and the stressed-out guys who chase them, sometimes to their regret - will be able to interact with a dozen or so online “PsychoDivas,” participate in online chats, swap stories about the “dark side” of femininity - and, oh yes, buy products branded with the PsychoChick name.
What kinds of products? T-shirts, natch. Panties. Perfume. A sports drink (the Wagners considered beer, before discovering that a large number of visiting psychochicks were under 21). Even a PsychoChick credit card. “Because the brand PsychoChick is an image for an individual instead of a product, all of these categories” - and, potentially, many others - “can successfully carry the PsychoChick brand,” write the Wagners.
That's how the Wagners expect to make money from something that wasn't even supposed to be a business in the first place. The first hint the PsychoChick brand had real legs came when the Wagners began a promotional giveaway of PsychoChick.com T-shirts to visitors who contributed content to the site. The shirts, says Todd Wagner, became instantly and enormously popular.
All licensed products, say the Wagners, will be targeted exclusively to bold/adventurous/outspoken women - total psychochicks! In three separate market research studies, 95 percent of the women who visited PsychoChick.com said they believed wild and bold women would purchase PsychoChick beverages, perfume and panties.
To turn PsychoChick.com into a viable offline brand, Todd Wagner says: “We have two companies wanting to license T-shirts, including Winterland, which is the largest T-shirt licensee in the world, and they may kick in serious cash as well.” They're talking with the Herbal Essence brand managers at Clairol about licensing PsychoChick perfume and hair-care products. “All the products are intended to be synergistic,” he says. “These are the types of things a psychochick would need - hair-care products, hair-color products in colors like pink and orange, a PsychoChick sports drink.” For the latter, the Wagners have a proposal being reviewed by the folks at Pepsico.
According to the Wagners' business plan, potential licensees would pre-pay a fee of $50,000 to $100,000, plus a royalty rate of eight to 12 percent of gross sales.
The Wagners' burn rate is “practically zero” - about $100 per week for advertising, according to Todd Wagner. None of the 20 or so PsychoChick staffers is drawing a salary yet - all are working for equity stakes. If it all comes together, Todd Wagner projects revenues of $500 million in five years. He really means it. And it's not like he's some psychochick or something.
“Please remember that this site is all in good fun and purely for entertainment,” reads the PsychoChick.com disclaimer. “You must believe that everything written on this site is fictional even if the author says it's true. After all, who would believe that women actually behave this way?”
Who, indeed? Up next: PsychoChick - The Movie. BNH
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