Dawdle Blog

Dawdle.com 2008 Year In Review Navel-Gazing Blog Post

Inspired by our Chicago neighbors, I thought it would be fun to do a Year In Review post to go over all the things we've done and the progress we've made at Dawdle.com this year.  We've done a ton of things this past year, and made a lot of changes.  The changes seem to be for the better - sales, users, etc. are all up dramatically.  But, no, we're not going to give you raw numbers.  Sorry.  :)

The Big Change

• We essentially did a 180 on how the site works.  Prior to May, Dawdle essentially was Priceline for video games and gear.  You could name your price, but you couldn't see what prices sellers were willing to sell at.  We did it this way to solve the sniping problem on eBay.  If you can't see what other people's bids are at, you can't outbid them by just a penny at the end.  And, if you know that other people can't see your bids, you could bid whatever you really felt the item was worth to you.  We called this our Intelligent Matching Engine, as we matched buyers and sellers the same way that eHarmony matched men and women.  The idea was that people could come to Dawdle once, name their real price, and then wait for the listing to expire to see if they won or not, saving them the hassle of having to come back over and over again to up their bid by a quarter.

Bye Firefox 2.0!

A few days ago, Mozilla released it's final version of Firefox 2.0.  With that, Dawdle will no longer be officially supporting Firefox 2.0 for use on our site (as you should be using Firefox 3 anyway).  Old video games and video game systems are cool.  Old browsers?  Not so much.

Chicago for Child's Play Post-Mortem Post

This is what the Chicago gaming community looks like:

One thousand dollars raised in one night by one community.

How we got there:

• We sold $900 worth of pre-sale tickets.  Of that $900, $315 went to open bar payments to Plan B and $93.59 went to Eventbrite/PayPal/Google Checkout fees, leaving $491.41 for Child's Play.  Not bad.
• We raised $455 of cash money.  That $455 came from walk in donations, tournament rebuys, and auction proceeds. 
• We sold re-buys into our MK vs. DC tournament as follows: $10 for the first round, $20 for the second round, and $40 for the third round.  The PSP donated by WeSeed was a big help in our raising the additional money.
• Midway donated lots of PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS, and PlayStation 2 games for us to auction off.  So many, many thanks go out to Midway for their generosity.
• That left us at $946.41 raised for Child's Play, which is soclose to four figures.  So we at Dawdle.com decided to chip in the additional $63.59 to get us to a cool thousand dollars.
• Because of our lesson with fees, we'll probably sell the tickets on Dawdle.com next year and we're overnighting the check to Child's Play at Dawdle's expense so that more of the money raised goes to the kids.

Things we learned:

• Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe is one hell of a party game.  No one really knew any of the moves, but there was a ton of "ooohs" and "aaaahs".  There was one match that had FIVE Freefall Kombats as the opponents kept reversing each other on the way down.  (I think they were both ket bashing the circle button during the Freefall Kombat.)  I really wish Ed Boon was there to see a lot of people enjoy his game.  If you haven't played it, you should.  If you haven't bought it, you should.
• Chicago gamers can drink.  We had a $1,000 drink minimum and apparently blew way past that.

So, we were able to raise a thousand dollars without the platform of Kotaku or Offworld like those kids at Funde Razor had (but again, thanks for the inspiration, guys).  I'm pretty impressed with us.  Next year, we're going to be bigger, better, and we're going to raise more money than any of the Funde Razors!  You're on notice, Brian, Joel, and all you other kids.  We're gunning for you.

Here's a collection of pictures taken at the event:

FotoViewr - Create your 3D photo gallery

Join Dawdle and Midway at our Chicago for Child's Play fundraiser on Tuesday!

Dawdle.com and Midway Games are sponsoring the first-ever Child's Play fundraiser in Chicago!  Child's Play provides video games and gear to sick kids in children's hospitals all across the country.   Join us for gaming, booze, and raffle prizes!  The event starts at 7pm and goes until 10pm, or whenever Plan B kicks us out.

You can get in for $10 or get our special open bar ticket for $50.  Each admission also gets you one entry into our raffle and you can buy additional raffle tickets at the event for $10 each.  We'll be raffling off games from Midway, free accounts on Dawdle.com, and gift certificates to SwagDog.com, among other great prizes.

We'll also have a MK vs. DC contest for those that want to get into the competitive fighting spirit.

To learn more, please go to http://www.dawdle.com/childsplay .  To purchase your ticket, please visit to http://childsplay.eventbrite.com/ .

We Kick Ass!

We're very excited to be chosen to be in the Gaming "rack" of Alltop.  Alltop is probably best known for being one of Guy Kawasaki's startups (in addition to Truemors.)  Alltop is an online magazine rack for all sorts of topics - you can discover great blogs that you're not reading in the topics that you're interested in.  We're right at the very bottom (for now), but we'll probably end up getting lost in the middle as they add more gaming blogs.

On a personal note, I gave their team (Neenz, in particular) a lot of feedback on the Alltop Chicago page.  Neenz originally had beer and baseball as other suggested topics.  That's great, but in the offseason, probably not so useful.  So they changed it to architecture and economics for the winter.