Key Idea #7: Keep Your Promises.
This is one of those rules of life that we learn from our Mom and Dad that we know is always the right thing to do, yet as reality hits us everyday, it is very hard to do.

Topic for Discussion: When they felt like they weren't keeping their promises to paying customers, what did Greg suggest they do?

Answer: He suggested that they give all of their customers their money back and close their doors. Early on, they were not able to give people enough matches to find the love of their life.

Greg felt they were not keeping their promise. Rather than quit, they worked harder. They gave up on the idea that others would sell their services and went straight to the singles via radio advertising. The radio spots starting driving hundreds and then thousands of singles to eHarmony everyday.

They were taking the free personality profile advertised in the radio spots!

This meant that eHarmony had to provide mega service with no cash up front. They hired an experienced dot com systems person, Greg Steiner, who marshalled his forces. He has over 20 servers in a co-location facility in San Jose. Some are database and some are application web servers which are used to perform a variety of functions.

This is a demanding intense process.

In part of the interview that didn't make it into the show, Greg (Steiner) revealed, "There are very intense processing needs to actually store the data then perform the matching functions amongst all the other processes that are happening on the site. People are using our service to communicate with individuals after they are matched together."

This is a scale business meaning that you must have a certain amount of infrastructure to deliver the base line, but then the cost to run the business drops per user as users are added. With 3 million paying customers at the time of this writing and the thousands of singles that come new to the site everyday, Greg has to keep ahead of the game.