Ambush Interview #128 ShellyCrash

Fitty Ambush Interviews

LOL two pages and only on question #3... Shelley has quite a few fans!!

(I'm one of them)

Jon rules because he was my Resraurant City buddy and was very tollerant of gift requests .

I finally gave up on it, kept increasing the hoops you had to jump through Hate that. If I gotta spam my friends to play a game it stops being fun.

These ones are kind of tied together so I'm going to hit them at the same time:

When I was little I was scouted by an ad agency. Not like barbazon crapola- if anyone wants your kid to do modeling and asks YOU to pay money its a scam. But yeah, growing up in FL we're close to Buena Vista which because of disney channel, universal, and all that is like a breeding ground for child actors.

I did a few ad campaigns but nothing super huge, like those inflatable "ralistic" dinosaurs they sold in the 80. The biggest acting job I landed was for a kids show. It was a Public Television show called "Space Age Noah's Ark". I tried to find some pics for you guys but no luck. When it was in production I think the biggest claim to fame was there was a huge mural painted of us in Downtown Orlando, FL.

When I was a teenager the show was bought out and turned into a cartoon that was nationally broadcast in the US on the PAX network. The live action show was was about conservation. They changed the name for the cartoon version and added some religious overtones. They didn't use my voice, I really had little to nothing to do with it, but they did use my likeness. Only cool moment was at one point I got to see myself as a Wendy's Kids Meal toy.

Seeing the kids meal toys was how I found out about the cartoon on PAX, so it was a real surreal experience as a teenager.

You two were literally within minutes of each other at one of the cabanas. Had I have known that you were looking for each other, I would have nailed someone's flip flop to the concrete.

Shit. I had to leave when I did because I was due to meet someone inside at their suite, and I had to give myself ample time to navigate the pool area in my tall shoes. I dunno if you saw them but they added two inches over the ones I wore for the "Wine Down w/ the Ladies" Fubar / Netbilling / Dating Gold event

I stopped playing it for the same reason. Only game I play on there now is world domination mostly because I forget about it for a week at a time and check back on it and I have like 6 trillion dollars LOL. But yes, I rule.

Interesting questions and even more interesting answers... these are a great way to learn about people.

ONE. Ah, the famed "Weekend at Bernie's" flight.



Just a touch of background, I have WICKED bad luck flying. I've been stuck overnight in layover cities more times than I care to remember, but the "Weekend at Bernie's" flight was the worst.

This happened just over a year ago on my way from Tampa to Toronto. I can't remember where my stop was, I think Boston Logan but not sure / not important. It wasn't a full flight so everyone got to stretch out, I was thinking I had caught a lucky break. About an hour and a half into the flight I hear some comotion 2 rows behind me. Then I heard the flight attendant announce over the PA (I shit you not), "Is there a Doctor on the plane?"

Luckily there actually WAS a doctor on the plane, well, a Fireman with EMT training to be exact. There was an elderly person that was having diffuculty breathing and may have also been entering into cardiac arrest. They had oxygen tanks on board and were quick to employ them, but it didn't seem to help much.

The flight made an emergency medical landing, which in and of itself is scary since we had acheived our maximum flight altitude at the time the incident began. By the time we were able to get on the ground the person had already passed on. There were paramedics waiting for the plane at the gate, but the stretcher they had waiting couldn't fit down the cabin aisle so they wound up strapping the person into a wheel chair.

They also didn't let us deboard the plane, so everyone is still on board while all this is taking place. They also thought if they whispered no one would ever figure out what was going on (yeah right). Right before they wheeled the person out the coup de grace came- one of the flight attendants got the bright idea to put sunglasses on the deceased so it "wouldn't be disturbing" to the children on the flight. Real life Weekend at Bernies.

Sometimes I can be pretty shameless, but I have too much respect for the dead to take a picture. I did however snap this one on my phone during the emergency landing of the guy across the way praying:



When the plane started to dive it made that whistling / siren "speedeing bullet" sound you hear in war films when a fighter is dive bombing an enemy.

It was some pretty wild shit. After the deceased was off the plane we had to wait for the oxygen tanks to be replaced, which took close to two hours. I got into my connecting city roughly 4 hours behind, I got into Toronto just after midnight, missing my dinner meeting and missing a free show (some friends of mine happened to be playing the Phoenix that night and were kind enough to add me to the guest list). My luggage didn't get into town until the following night, forcing me to do some creative early morning shopping before my morning meeting- I felt like a bum changing clothes and putting on makeup in a public restroom.

everybody's waiting on the punk rock question ;)

i'm curious about your chihuahuas, my little chi is sitting right here wondering as well.

Everybody loves the good doctor!



I have 2 dogs, Chavez (AKA Doctor P), a full blooded chihuahua, and Remo, a Daschund / Wiener Chihuahua rescue.



We'll probably never know what Remo really is, besides 100% awesome.



I love my little men. I bring them in the office all the time. Everyone I've ever worked with has met them. Remo's heavy like a bowling ball but they are good when I work. They take turns with lap time. Spoiled rotten little dogs.

nice! doc looks like the chi from ren & stimpy eh.

Punk music has been core to my being since I was 12 or 13. This was also the age I started getting into this thing called the internet with my trusty IBM PS-1 and AOL account

Soon after armed with a scanner, MS Paint and a most basic self taught knowledge of HTML I began to build basic pages for my band and my friends bands. Natrually I built a hub site and began expanding the links and show dates to go past our local region to start to encompass the state, making the first punk music scene resource for the state of florida, and back in 1995 possibly even the first local music resource for the state as well.

As things progressed I built out an online store stocked w/ my friend's merch and with the proceeds we tried to launch a co-op record label ala Factory Records. Run by teenagers and with little concern for things like "profit" needless to say it didn't work out - much like the real Factory label, only we never got as far. We would use the proceeds to pay for studio time and would use them to set up gigs, but we were equally as apt to use it for beer money or ramen noodles.

It was fun while it lasted but long term it didn't work out and broke apart sometime in 1998. By then other sites had started to spring up and local rags like Creative Loafing -
Weekly Planet realized to survive they were going to need to have a web presence too.

If was still a fruitful venture. Through the project I was offered an internship w/ MTV in 1997 & one of my friends / partners involved went on to play guitar in a band some of you may have heard of called Against Me.



Its weird seeing one of your buds on tshirts in the mall, but still not quite as weird as seeing yourself as a kids meal toy in Wendy's

Yeah, he gets that alot. Also because he's so light alot of people ask me why he's bald.





Chavez only weights in at 3.5 lbs. Remo, although head and shoulders isn't much taller, is about 3 times as long and has heavy dense bones. He doesn't look it but he's pushing 20 lbs.

When we got Remo from the rescue they expected him to be 6 to 10 lbs max.



Super tiny puppy man when he was fresh and new to us. He was already 5 and a half months here. Hit a huge growth spurt after we got him.

right on! i'll have to email you a pic or 2 of my chi sometime.

I'm totally down to see that. I love seeing pics of other chis!

Michelle at Swurve.com

email sent!

Something some of you who love dogs might get a kick out of. I found these sending pet pics back and forth to Dyna Mo:

What Remo looked like at 3 months when we applied for his adoption:





I was browsing petfinder and for some reason he melted my heart. He was the funniest looking little thing, with these big flying nun ears! Its amazing he grew into such a normal looking dog.

:

Michelle obviously likes:

- the same music
- GTO
- creepy movies


Even has the same taste in tits (Pam Grier)

That's more then enough

I guess I was also always seriously into that "rebel girl" thing

listened to Hole, Lunachicks, Bikini Kill, L7, 7 Year Bitch and stuff like that

Fantasized about a hot rock chick with brains and attitude, instead I had to deal with boring ass wanna be barbies with no personality that you'd harm if you wouldn't lie to them

Gotta find me my own Michelle

Shelly can get the penis...

i want to see the compass thing now!!!!!!!!!

Would never have expected the puppy pic to grow into such a nice looking dog

Thanks for the kind words, Carlos.

Otto, I would love him just as much had he stayed funny looking, but as luck ould have it he grew into quite the handsome little dog.

Good stuff, I also used to run a small indie label that went down in marvelous flames... I guess it's part of getting unplugged from "The Matrix".

lololol, super cool! i love how chis grow into their ears! thx for the pics.

I got a few chances to talk to Frank Kozik in 1998. He was still running the Man's Ruin label at the time. I perceived it to be what I would have considered a successful business venture but he confided in me that he was losing his ass. Money was coming in hand over fist with his art, but his record label was becoming a giant money pit.

I doubt he even remembers, but those convos came at just the right time to allow me to let go.

Remind me to ASK if you're on a plane before I ever board another one.

... I meant unplugged from "The Matrix" of the whole indie label idealism, Kozik was indeed your "Morpheus".

I've got advice from people that were actually making a living (specially from one great guy working at Vagrant Records) and still decided to go out in flames... guess I'm more into radical "desubjectivation" processes .

Primarily I wrote scripts.

I first got into adult in 1999 doing guerilla marketing for a phone sex company in Olympia, Washington. I worked insane hours but I was making on average a little over $700 a week, which was really great money for a 18 / 19 year old.

When I moved back to FL for some reason it didn't occur to me that I could do this on my own for other companies. Everything I had done in Washington I had done for an inhouse employer, I was still young and hadn't heard of affiliate programs yet.

To be honest it was a lucky break since I didn't have a degree, just a handful of writing accolades, but that's what I did for my first year plus back in the sunshine state. I wrote telesales and customer service scripts for worldcom agents on the cell phone end of the business.

Will do

Oh, and if anyone reading this hasn't checked out http://returnmyjedi.com/ you guys totally fucking should




Indeed Kozik was. Would have been nice if it had came before I tattooed the logo on my arm though, lol! J/k, I actually don't regret it, it reminds me of a special time in my life and it doesn't hurt that it's a bad ass logo regardless. I only have one friend who really taunts me about it. I actually got taunted about it just last night. "How's that record label comin'?"

Thanks for the plug, I'm glad people are liking the content

Anytime

I've lived in order:

Washington Township, NJ
St. Petersburg, FL
Ringwood, NJ
Dunedin, FL
Greensboro, NC
Olympia, WA
New Port Richey, FL
Clearwater, FL

I also frequent / have done extended stays in

Las Vegas, NV
Joliet, IL
Phoenix, AZ
Orlando, FL
Boston, MA

\mm/

Fuck yeh, girl. I watched Against Me! Sunday in TN, just before the Dropkick Murphys set (I was bouncing between Regina Spektor/ Against Me! then the DM/ Ween sets).

I hope to someday meet my Tampa neighbor! Hit a sistah up chicka! (Great interview btw)

Thank ye kind ladies!

Liz- Dropkick are good. All feelings aside, I'd watch Dropkick over Against Me anyday, but then again I don't get into Dropkick shows for free so they are much more a treat for me. ;)

Entering the dating market you're not just setting out to slay giants, but I would say at this point you're up against titans. There was a time a few years ago where I would have asked anyone looking to break out a new brand the same thing, it seemed if you didn't have a database with a few million members strong you were sunk, but right now I feel the timing couldn't be better.

The market is shifting and there is HUGE opportunity emerging, to sum it up to one word I would say "oversaturation". The proof is all around, if you look you can see it happening in recent break off / spin off sites and re-branding efforts.


I feel Swurve's strength lies in what makes it different, Swurve is not a white label, spin off or feeder site of any other dating property. To be frank I even hesitate at calling it "adult dating". The aim of Swurve is to not only grow as a company but to expand the market and make casual dating more socially acceptable. Changing social perception is an ambitious goal and not something I expect to happen overnight, but I believe by following the course we are on and catering to creating a satisfactory user experience focused on both sexes, we may be able to get there.

Surfers are getting smarter, you can't keep feeding them more of the same. I strongly believe that the quality of the community is where the focus is going to need to be moving forward. Putting it straight if you increase the number of active females using your service you increase the quality of the user experience for your male population, you need to make adjustments to your UI to attract and retain straight women. That's what we've done with Swurve.

I feel Swurve meets a need by offering users a unique connection building platform through which both men and women can embrace their sexuality and explore their desires in a judgment free environment. In developing Swurve we took a back to basics approach, focusing on functionality that fosters one on one connections rather than continuing with the social networking route where users build networks of friends. Swurve is sleek, clean and easy to navigate and I feel it has the mass appeal needed to expand the market and take the game to the next level. Everything we've seen since our launch seems to support that with card swipes coming in from users across all demographics, from the 18 - 24 age group as well as 55+.

bump for moar!

how was swurve funded? did you write the business plan yourself? how were your timeline estimates? how long has swurve been in production?

hope it's ok to ask these, feel free to tell me to fuck off if these are inappropriate questions.

Moar is comin!

No, these questions are totally cool.

Swurve is a partnership, but it is partially funded by myself. I don't want to throw around numbers but I will say that I'm in it in the 6 digits. Besides financial resources the partnership also provides the advantage of sharing resources with other holdings such as legal and accounting staff which helps keep Swurve running lighter and leaner, fitting a start up.

It was one of those opportunity meets planning = good fortune scenarios. I associate with some business owners in luxury markets which were experiencing a downturn due to current economic conditions and wanted to further diversify themselves. Additionally, a large internet marketing company that had holdings in the dating space was shedding (and is still shedding) some amazing personnel. Even though I was approached to start the company, I did write out a business plan. I think its important to always have one.

Did things go according to plan? Absolutely not, lol! Do things ever? I think we're actually about 2 1/2 months behind where I wanted to be at this point in time, the affiliate program wound up getting off the ground a little later than I had hoped due to a last minute decision to change from 3rd party to proprietary, but even though there have been setbacks in the time line from the affiliate program's beta launch to date we have been meeting all our growth targets, and slightly exceeding them at this point.

As we built the site the first traffic we started with was small ad buys that I know from experience to be very safe / profitable sources, small PPC campaigns and such with smaller networks. That was followed by incorporating traffic from trusted partners, really I should say trusting partners because in the very early days they were relying solely on us to report stats back to them. Having to switch gears with the affiliate program was rough, but in the long we have a solution that better fits our business model being a dating property and having different needs than content sites, it also cut a recurring expense and it allowed us additional time to further fine tune the site and traffic funnels so when we launched I knew without question that the product we were presenting to the webmaster community would convert competitively with current offers.

One of the brightest women on this board.

HEHE nice ambush Shelly is a real nice person to talk to over ICQ and from the biz side of things she is fantastic and always keeps to her word.

super, thank you.

I feel cheated, halfpint...

Sorry Captian... I still think of you when I go to bed though and I will always wuv you deep in my heart

I had a mystery GI ailment that lasted a little over 2 years.

In late 2006 I sneezed walking across the house, when I sneezed- even though I wasn't feeling queezy at the time- I vomited, which if you've ever sneeze vomited it sucks in and of itself.

I thought it was just a one off weird event but from that day forward I started to get progressively sicker. I started having more trouble keeping food down, even smells would set me off. It started off as kind of a joke, everyone around me thought I was preggo and had some form of morning sickness, but I wasn't knocked up and it kept getting worse.

Everybody who knows me knows that in my natural state I'm a bit of a chubby panda, but by 08 I was getting too thin-



They tested me for everything under the sun. I had ulcers but I didn't have h. pylori, my gall bladder wasn't functionint correctly but I didn't have gall stones, it was just a disaster. I could't even go to the movies- even if I didn't eat all day someone would inevitably walk in with a hot dog and send me into dry heaves.

At one point they came to the conclusion that I must have a rare form of pancreatic cancer, but instead of running a test and then telling me later, they decided to just tell me this right up front, before they even got insurance approval to run the test. What a fucking nightmare.

Luckily I did NOT have cancer, but there was a period of a few weeks where I didn't know if I was going to live or die. Turned out after all the tests and all the hoops and all the sickness, the reason for everything was antibiotics. I had a massive GI infection caused by overpersciption of antibiotics which killed all the good bacteria in my body and let the bad bacteria flourish.

I'm doing alot better but I may never be 100%. I have friends with Crohns so I know I am really not that bad, but my gall bladder still acts up and I'm probably going to have to be put on thyroid meds soon. More meds , isn't that what got me here in the first place?

that sucks - antibiotics get subscribed far too often nowadays.

i try to avoid them like a plague, the last time i got them i was shitting blood after 2 days.

Methinks she's of the brightest people on the board period.