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Day 1 & 2
It’s been a whirlwind of 15 days of Hero Poker which all started on May 1, the day my second son was born. Before we decided to start our real marketing, as a company we decided to do a something for US poker players who just wanted some cash. So we put up 15k in a kind of private freeroll with no withdraw restrictions and tried to get out there to ‘regs’ who simply stopped enjoying or wanted to play poker. So, a player could use the cash for rent or get a ticket to Canada or whatever, we just wanted to get that money out there. Basically the prize payout was just to top 30 and had a good structure and we gave it out via PMs in LP and P5s, the two communities that Hero was active with, but we were finding that we weren’t getting any sign ups for it as players weren’t passing on the details (surprise). So we ended up making 2 threads about in and sent some volunteers to let 2p2ers know about it (which ended up being considered spam and one of our volunteers got banned- totally our fault and stupidity). But the password had to be gained via email me directly, which was totally fine. The issue was that at 3am on May 1st in Korea, my wife went into labour.
Now Korea is about 11 hours difference from the US, so 3am on May 1st was like 4pm in the US, so here I was on my iphone emailing back players with the password and then my iphone died. By about 7 am I had my iphone back and was emailing between my wife’s contractions and finally put down my phone when the contractions got to about 10 minutes apart. At 9:33 am my second son was born healthy and I ended up doing all the registration and stayed with my wife until 10 pm and then drove home and started with the emails and work (btw I have never had a formal office in the last 5 years because of travel and the nature of the 24 hour work day) and by 5am had started the tournament to about 340 runners. By 11am the tournament was over and it was good. We set up that tournament to set the direction of what kind of company we wanted to have, and we wanted to do something that helped in whatever small way. By 12pm I had taken a shower and drove back to the hospital to look after things and host visitors (it’s a Korean thing) as she had a room in the hospital and by about 4pm after 36 hours up I passed out for about 6 hours.
Days 3, 4, 5
This gave me a moment to think of what kind of promotion did we want to kick off and immediately I thought of the 300 Spartans, that I wanted to have our own 300 promotion where we’d pay out the top 300. Now, the reason why it was $100 plus $100 cash bonus was because anything less than $100 was, in my experience, pretty meaningless, in that we wanted players to just try out the site and also if players wanted to just withdraw it, they could. Now for players how wanted to keep playing there was this additional $100 cash bonus that had a play through on it. Now in retrospect, I should have maybe done something other than cash bonus because on Hero, it’s going to take players a long time to clear it, even if they have 3 months (but I had to set the bonus at what the network guideline are due to the pending June 1st deadline for falling in line with network policy). So it was the 30k plus 30k freeroll. I actually discussed with my country marketing managers and they said, it was good this way. I didn’t want to make it 60k cause that would have just been marketing bullshit and that was the thing we were most trying to avoid.
Thing is, when I looked at the competitive space, I realized that promoting via PR or bonuses was useless, simply that player had lost so much confidence that this wasn’t the time to come in with some type of marketing message, rather, just being as up front as possible. So in many respects, yes, we branded this promotion, but most of all, we just wanted to say, ‘hey we don’t need your deposit or aren’t going to promise you the world here, but if you’re free on a Sunday, why not give us a shot.’ And with the top 300 getting paid out the $100 plus $100, it was a pretty no risk thing for players to look into. But it really helped that Stars had started to give out the payout to US players and had announced it late April. It gave us confidence to proceed as it was just a really difficult situation to be in to really promote a relatively new site (having launched at the Aussie Millions in Feb 2011)..
When I was doing my Masters in business, my strategy professor, who had his Phd from Harvard Business School was this really nice pudgy harmless looking guy, but when he spoke about business, it was always, ‘you have to corner the competition, crush em into the grown, cut their legs, make a beach head here or destroy them…’ and I’ve always approach the competition that way as well, I see the imagery, but when I looked at the market, all I saw was darkness. There weren’t actually any competitors, but there was really nothing, and I was like, ‘gee, I was not trained for this’ and the only thing that I could think of was to just be as out there as possible. No senior executive would ever post on these forums for their life of their career or jobs, it’s just plain suicide cause if you just tow the party line, they you’re a dead duck and will be ridiculed to no end, but if you show who is behind the curtains, you might be shooting yourself in the foot. But in this case, anything less than me as the CEO going out simply just being as forthright as possible was just a waste of time for everyone. And there were two places I knew that if I was going to get people to take Hero as a real option, it would be there: TwoplusTwo and DonkDown. But in no circumstance would I have ever thought to engage these two communities after only a few months after launching, but I was committed at that point.
Day 6 & 7 Twoplustwo
I had actually gotten the go head to post by twoplustwo and donkdown a couple of days earlier, but honestly I was nervous and so I ended up posting the promotion up on LP and P5s first because I was already known there. But on day 6, I took about three hours to compose my first post and went for it, just being a forthright as possible. But within just 4 posts, I had been called out on the fact that we had spammed week before (and again it wasn’t right, so I had apologized and it was graciously accepted) and I got hit with the questions that no senior executive in this industry would ever answer or could…and it was the moment of truth.
Sure I had answer these types of questions previously at P5s or LP, but the difference is that we were active on those sites before Black Friday, so the questions came as the situation developed, but here I was facing some brutally tough questions that were easily answered among private industry people, but out on a public forum of poker players..?... So I remember, looking up at the ceiling and thinking, ‘ok Dave, this is time to man up and get at it, you knew this was what you were getting in to,’ and then I continued to stare at the ceiling a bit longer and then went at it and took the plunge. But I’ve been lucky. Thing is, most players, and I don’t care if you’re team pro whatever, they just don’t have the same level of understanding of what is really going on because they view it from a players point of view. But the thing is with twoplustwo, there is just so much knowledge amassed here that members actually have a really good outline of how things really work, even if they don’t know the exact details. So while it has been very difficult, it has been also very productive because I’ve gotten some really focused business questions (which I do enjoy) and they have allowed me to also have this dialogue and further articulate what was on my mind. It’s as though I’m back at PwC in a really hardcore strategy meeting and we’re bouncing comments off of each other and I’ve become better for it on many different levels and for two days I buried myself in twoplustwo….but in the meantime on at DonkDown…
Days, 8, 9, 10 Donkdown
The management at DD, Todd (Dandruff) & Bryan (Micon), had announced their new sponsor as Hero Poker to mixed reviews. They had done this on the 6th, but it wasn’t until the 8th did I actually have a chance to post there and it was a pretty big fail. It was a fail because I was trying to be a bit humorous, but the fact is I’m not one of those humorous guys. Also I don’t completely understand American humour, even though I love America because they liberated my country twice, once from Imperial Japan and part of the UN force during the Korean War against those North Korean fucking commie bastards, and that in my home at least, General MacArthur is consider the perfect man created by God, I just don’t’ get the American humour all the time. But I wanted to fit in with what DonkDown represented.
I had been listening to DonkDown for about a month previously and what I thought about Dandruff and Micon was that they were really spot on with their logic and conclusions and had their ear to the ground. They really were listening and were objective and simply quite sophisticated in their understanding even though they masked with a great deal of profanity, random sexual comments and general eccentricities. They were extremely raw, but no one could deny them of being direct and truthful. The first things they mentioned to me was that even though I was a sponsor and they’d take my money, that they would tell it like it is and not to expect differently. And I was, ‘great, exactly what I am looking for’, and I think they thought, ‘this guy has no idea who he just sponsored does he?’
So by the time I had started my sticky thread on Donkdown, it was already the late on the 8th (nearly a day had gone by) and there were many unanswered posts from the original introduction thread. But at that point I was taking care of 3 forums and had purposely left donkdown to the end. The way I work is pretty systematic, if I touch something I will finished it, so if I start on a particular project or task, I’ll take it as far as it can go, then move on to the next task. I’m not a multi-tasker, I prefer to simply get them all done then move on instead of juggling things where I can’t focus. But the more complex the task, I’ll leave to the end so I can just work uninterrupted on it. I call it my ‘machine mode’ where I don’t’ eat, drink or blink, but just focus and do it and for this donkdown forum I wanted to have the space to reply properly because it was very unfamiliar territory. But I left it for nearly a day as things start to build up on the other sites, and it was uber frustrating to watch as the thread went quite negative due to my lack of response, but again, I’m not the kind of guy that can jump around, so by the time I got the thread, I had a good on page of full on ‘who the fuck is this guy and what the fuck is he doing in our forum? Gtf outta here..’ And it was just as difficult as twoplustwo, but on a different level.
Donkdown’s community is very tight and very protective of one another and I still couldn’t understand the humour or nuances of the community. But they came at things with logic, but also with a lot of passion and we very direct. But of course material wise I knew what I wanted to say, but I have to tell you my professional image is very different on donkdown than anywhere else, but I tell you, I don’t feel like I’m the sponsor there lol.
Day 11 Radio
So I’m up waiting for the radio show and I won’t comment on what was on the show other than I had waited like one and half hours past my appointed time and took the call when I was driving to see my wife at hospital (she was in a post partum recovery clinic with our newborn-normal thing in Korea). But I hadn’t slept for about 24 hours and was wired on 8 cups of coffee because I wanted to be clear headed when I took the call. But I ended up missing about 20 minutes of the show before I went on, so I missed a lot of their inside jokes when then reference it to me during the call and I was like thinking, ‘damn it, I don’t get what they are saying, this American humour is killing me‘, but it was good and I did end off with why I did like DonkDown…’I know you guys have no problem biting the hand that feeds you, but if you guys bite me, I probably deserved it, so for that, I’m happy to be a sponsor with DD’. But we had this freeroll for DD members, and you know what, they were really are just a great community of ‘degenerates’ (I mean that in the best possible way) and I won’t even go into how they used the password to the freeroll for evil purposes lol.
Day 12-15
I basically became a single dad during this period with my mother-in-law helping, I basically fed my 2 year old son, steak, potato chips, candy and TV for the entire 15 days with my mother-in-law feeding him one proper meal a day. During the day, I’d take him out and make him run around for 2 hours until he was so tired I’d have to carry him in, give him a banana and water and he’d pass out. Then in order to make my son sleep I put the baby seat in the front and pulled the front seat as far back as it would go (so not to be close to the air bag-I know still not safe) and I would put down all the windows and we’d cruise in the nighttime and eat MacDonald’s take out (it isn’t that easy to find in Korea) until he would pass out after about 45mins, then I’d take him to bed and get back on the comp. Ok, I’m a pretty traditional Korean guy, and while modernity has caught up with Korea, it’s not like I know what I’m really doing, but some nights, I’d just sleep with him for about 5 hours straight just because he missed his mom so much that he’d wake up crying and missing her so much. So, I’d be sleeping beside him and then he’d cry a bit, go back to sleep and I’d check my iphone for emails, reply as much as I could then pass out again.
So finally the day of the tournament comes, and guess what, it is also the day my wife comes home from the clinic with the newborn, so I’m cleaning up the house, throwing out all the junk food and doing emails in between the time. Now why did I plan it on the same day, well I didn’t but my wife was discharged one day earlier than she expected. Wonderful; so in the last day, we get the majority of sign ups and I’m so paranoid like nuts that someone is going to get the password that shouldn’t and so I’m checking as many IPs as I can etc. And by mistake a player emails me for the password and I recognize the name, and send him the pw, but then I have this bad feeling so I double check and he is one of my non US players. So I politely tell him he can’t play in the freeroll cause it’s for US players, but he doesn’t respond, so I msg him in client, then bribe him with some tournament tickets not to tell anyone or post it anywhere. And for the next hour, look to see if the numbers spike, which thankfully they don’t. I manage to finish the tournament at 300, and then tournament keeps on going! Lol! And so everyone starts going all-in and its crazy just nuts and then what is even nuttier, some players want to play it through! So the tournament lasts another 30 mins or so. And I wish everyone well, answer as many emails/pms as I can, then go pick up my wife and newborn. I have now spend the last 2 days protecting my 2nd son from my 1st son and still giving my 1st son as much love as daddy can, so we went driving today to a late night run on Macdonalds….’
15 days & 40 hours of sleep, totally not sustainable, but I'm on the other side...
Cheers,
Dave
*This blog entry was made for the communities I actively participate in & expect two announcements today regarding Hero Poker.
Cliffs:
-had a hard 15 days, but it was good in launching Hero Poker
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| | Last edit: 17/05/2011 14:54 |
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moonk379 United States. May 17 2011 15:34. Posts 355 | | |
keep up the good work man!! |
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Fujikura United States. May 17 2011 16:21. Posts 1795 | | |
v. nice  |
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| aka SouL)Z(Isadie and SouL)P(Fujikura | |
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Wish I had your work ethic |
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Arirang Canada. May 17 2011 17:04. Posts 1673 | | |
Fun read. Sleep is really important and you should find a way to secure at least 6-7 hours a sleep per day no matter what. It's interesting how you can handle all that stuff in a professional manner with lack of sleep though. I'd be a very sour person if I don't get my sleep. |
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moonk379 United States. May 17 2011 18:06. Posts 355 | | |
hey i was wondering is there a way to change some of the sit and goes hu becuz the blinds seems to start off too high |
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whamm! Albania. May 17 2011 18:38. Posts 11625 | | |
+1000 on sleep being a 95% requirement on making correct decisions, omg I can't count the times I screwed up really important stuff because I had no sleep when faced with making decisions; poker, relationships, money etc -
Good luck man, seems to me you're the type who just won't take failure as an option, I've encountered people like you before and most( if not all ) of them really get to where to they want in life because they have serious work ethic, focus and just aren't fazed by any hurdles they face while trying.
You're blog is almost always very interesting to read, especially when you relate real life with Hero poker stuff. keep it up
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YoMeR United States. May 17 2011 19:31. Posts 12438 | | |
step one complete in the take over of the world.
very impressive life you have hyung~ keep it going. |
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Zep United States. May 17 2011 19:46. Posts 2292 | | | |
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| NeillyJQ: I really wanted to prove to myself I could beat NL200, I did over a small sample, and believe Ill be crushing there in the future. | |
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You are a crazy man David. Props to you for working so hard at the things you love. |
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Hey guys,
thanks, just keeping the 'machine mode' going,
lets see how long I can keep it up for.
Cheers,
David |
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NeillyJQ United States. May 18 2011 04:39. Posts 8947 | | |
time to sleep for 15 hours dave :-) |
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| Just remember you need to be god damn sure about their tendencies. -Artanis11 http://www.pocketfives.com/profiles/neillyaa/ | |
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