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He’s not even a year out of college, but UMaine alumnus Michael Hussey already owns his own company. One of the up and coming successful dot comers, Hussey, who graduated from the University of Maine with a degree in financial economics in May 2000, along with co-creator Ron Gallagher, a ’98 UMaine grad, owns infiniteMEDIUM, the parent company of a hot new Web site called www.RateMyFace.com.
Hussey hails from Alfred, Maine and is now living just outside Washington D.C. Originally moving to work for CIENA corporation, an up-and-coming fiber optics company, he and his partners of infiniteMEDIUM hope to be working full time soon on their company. They recently hired a new CEO (Richard Coyte) and will be merging with DELL computers; a move Hussey says will make RMF even bigger than it already is.
It’s all fairly simple. You post your picture, write a short bio (preferably something funny) then sit back and let yourself be judged.
Several UMaine students have even posted their pictures on the site to be judged by other users on a scale of 1-10. Tim Simons, a fifth year theater major, is registered on RMF under the name PaleThunder. His rating is currently a 7.5, which Simons jokingly says has made his world that much better.
“I joined ratemyface.com because I have very low self-confidence in my physical appearance and to have people from around the world celebrate my paleness would be an event that would turn my life around … out of this PaleThunder was born,” he said.
Hussey says he came up with the idea during his junior year in school. “I remember going through yearbooks with friends and `rating faces’ for kicks,” said Hussy. He says he doesn’t believe that a Web site such as his that rates looks sends a message of superficiality or degradation. The Web site even has a disclaimer stating that regardless of how others view you, it is not as important as how you view yourself. The site is upfront with critics and states quite plainly, “Remember, no one is forced to join or view the site and the parameters by which they will interact are quite understood. If you don’t like our site pray for our forgiveness and point your browser to Disney.com or something.”
That’s about as philosophical as RMF gets, and people seem to be responding to it as simply a fun and easy way to get to know people. Besides, RMF isn’t all looks and beauty.
On March 1 a new marketing campaign begins, kicking off their merger with DELL, which will introduce many new RateMy(insert item).com sites.
“I saw a huge opportunity to create value on the Web with scaling things. RateMyFace was just the site that would get the most attention early on and the site by which I could make a name for my product,” says Hussey. Coming up soon from infiniteMEDIUM will be sites such as RateMyWheels, RateMyPet and RateMyRecipe. InfiniteMEDIUM owns over 300 RateMy____ domain names.
RateMyFace was slow to begin, but after the second try the creators finally got it going. After Hussey and Gallagher created RMF in the spring of 1999 they realized that what they had was a pretty good idea.
The site was seeing more traffic than was anticipated, so they hired friend and fellow UMaine graduate Lane Gillespie (class of 2000) to do the design work on the site. Gillespie, an art major at UMaine who knew Hussey from their days as freshmen living on the fourth floor of Aroostook Hall, says that RMF is so popular because “people are drawn in by the idea of rating faces, and then stay when they realize the strong community sense that the site has. The site is responsible for spawning thousands of friendships”.
While Gillespie does the design work, Hussey is responsible for marketing and Gallagher does the core programming. Gillespie says of Gallagher “One day Ron spontaneously became an unbelievable programmer. He wrote most of the core system for the back end of the site in about a week and has been adding features ever since. This means more work for me. I am going to need to clone myself several times over soon just to finish the week.”
Soon the guys at infiniteMEDIUM are going to be working even harder. RMF is causing a lot of excitement all over the world with 25,000 current users, a number which expected to expand after the March 1 marketing campaign begins. Still, with all the hype and buildup, Hussey says that basically this whole thing boils down to an idea from two UMaine students; an idea that was based on scaling things from 1-10.
“I just like to see what people think,” said Hussy. Well, people seem to think RMF is a pretty cool site. It continues to see success and is sure to skyrocket in the near future.
