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And when you've got a successful magazine formula, someone will try to duplicate it on the Web. By late 1999, someone did. All this brings us to TheMan.com, a classically perfect elucidation of the 1999 e-commerce textbook -- the same one that has since devolved into a rash of dot-com layoffs and executive defections. The idea of online e-tail was that the perfect site chose a theme and then served up content, commerce, and community. There were tons of variations on the theme, from Garden.com to, at the successful end, Yahoo! Finance. And TheMan.com manages the Three C's formula pretty well, or at least does it by the numbers. That helped the site get fairly big-name venture capital: $15 million from a group led by Highland Capital, with a board seat awarded to Highland partner Keith Benjamin, formerly a high-profile analyst at Robertson Stephens. So why doesn't it work better? YUCKS AND BUCKS. TheMan.com is amusing enough, but it's hard to argue that it does anything you actually need. It's not quite as breasts-and-beer-oriented as Maxim magazine or its online companion, MaximMag.com. No, where it stands is somewhere between Maxim and a Web version of Esquire or GQ, just extra-lite. Its homepage is divided into a few main features and regular departments dubbed "TheMan's Toolbox." The current features are about surviving your partner's pregnancy, better sex, and the all-important rankings of the perfect commuter coffee mug. Needless to say, the winner is for sale, at $34.99. The rest of the content is divided into departments on clothes, sports and outdoorsmanship, entertaining, relationships, and drinking. While it's not written for Einsteins, it's not bad. The section on barbecuing, for example, is pretty reasonable and comes with recipes simple enough for TheMan in all of us to understand. The feature on "shirts women like" had both man-in-the-street reporting (they showed shirts to a panel of women) and advice from ex-New York Times fashion writer Woody Hochswender. And they have tons of surveys on relationships and ethics that, as Homer Simpson once said, can only be conceived by the finest scientific minds in the magazine business. You could do a lot worse. And the way the commerce is stitched into the content is actually more clever, and less overtly commercial, than at most e-commerce sites. The site sells everything from cigars to gifts for women -- even if the mind reels at the thought of buying an engagement ring online from TheMan.com. While some items require a separate trip to the store section, featured items are highlighted right next to the content -- like some of the shirts the women panelists liked, or the mini-grill set that was merchandised next to a feature on tailgate parties. Someone with a brain put this site together, even if it's designed to appeal to people who at least pretend not to have one. TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE. But alas, TheMan.com looks like a Miniver Cheevy of the online business -- as in Edwin Arlington Robinson's poem "Miniver Cheevy, born too late." Its monthly traffic of 200,000 to 300,000 users is well behind Maxim's 629,000, let alone Playboy.com's 1.6 million. Thin selections in most of the store sections are especially obvious. If you're going to have a clothing section, you've really got to offer more than six styles of pants. If you've got a wine store, you need to have actual wine -- not the wine accessories and gift baskets TheMan.com sells. TheMan could have been fun, at least the kind of fun that would let you waste part of a Friday at the office planning the weekend ahead. In some ways, it still is. I had a laugh, and if I'd seriously wanted ideas for entertaining or fun, well, I could have used some of what I found here. If I'd used some others, my wife and I would have had a chat. But I happened to look at TheMan.com the day after one of Silicon Valley's top VCs cut short our conversation to help finalize a CEO's departure from a Web company that got, and squandered, chances TheMan never had. It's hard to be optimistic about underdogs when even many of the Web's most favored overdogs seem to be near their last hand of poker. Mullaney covers e-business for Business Week from New York |
