Teebeedee's Robin Wolaner Is Older, Wiser, & Entrepreneurial

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The 1987 founder of Parenting and former C|Net executive is a pretty persuasive woman, except with herself. Newest chapter in Wolaner's remarkable career started earlier this year when she received one of those premature AARP notices asking her to join the famous group for retirees. Her reaction was That's not for me and That's not for us--meaning her generation of baby boomers who eschew gold watches.

Then Wolaner's light bulb went off: the world needed an online community for the over-40 boomer. But after seeing the "dotcom" world inflate, burst, and then rise up again, she did the only thing a wiser digital doyenne can do--she tried to disabuse herself of the notion. "I spent a good deal of time trying to convince myself not to do this," the TEEBEEDEE.COM founder/ceo says of her new site, that is shorthand for to be determined. "I know how hard start-ups are."

She lost the self-argument. A few weeks into its formal launch, San Francisco-based TeeBeeDee is a fascinating example of marrying magazine design and editorial sense with online community. Here users share their accumulated wisdom, pose questions of one another, maintain profiles and form a range of groups. It is something more than a MySpace "me- too" because it has visual style and a more orderly demeanor. It is not a simple message board, because it has well defined editorial wells for asking questions, even offering people scripts for handling touchy situations. There are profiles of the Facebook sort, but they are linked across all the other content types so you can see how, where and when a friend is interacting with the community.

Coming from the "old media" world, Wolaner and chief product officer David Marcus (a past Parenting editor-in-chief and Yahoo! Health g.m.) understood the power of branding and quality design. "We didn't want a $50 logo designer," she says, and so they got the creator of AMAZON.COM's signature design and aimed to avoid "nostalgic and dreary." Likewise, the site itself is visually as well-ordered as a fine magazine page, with defined pods of content that are differentiated clearly, grab the eye, and quickly explain their function.

And so, this is a low-overhead operation that leverages the power of the crowd to create much of the content. With a handful of freelance experts chiming in on health and sex topics and only three of the 20-person staff actively writing copy, TeeBeeDee creates a frame within which visitors paint the walls. "We start with an amount of content and seed it with our people, and the users took off," she says.

By our rough count, TeeBeeDee already has several thousand members with little active marketing as yet. Self-made groups like Sex Talk and Spirituality have attracted scores of members. There are even a few dozen people exchanging Netflix recommendations.

But for all of its polish and style, TeeBeeDee still is speaking to generation that is not quite ready for the full social-networking experience. At Facebook, college kids and young professionals have to use their real names, but Wolaner & Co. learned from TeeBeeDee's beta that boomers were not quite as secure as Gen-X and Y about putting themselves out there in cyberspace, so there, short-term, are self-chosen usernames. "You have to build to the privacy need of this generation," she says.

Private, maybe. Shy, we're not so sure. "Sex over 40" remains one of the hot topics and ask a question like How many times a week do married couples have sex? and man do these grey boomers have lengthy and detailed answers. Nope, we're not AARP yet.

Editor's note: Wolaner is among min Magazine/2007's "digital elite" who will be honored at min's November 13 New York luncheon.

Steve Smith (POPEYESMITH@COMCAST.NET) is Digital Media editor for min/min's b2b, which includes weekly columns and the biweekly min's Digital Media Report e-letter (complimentary to min subscribers). Smith also writes the Mobile Media Report for Access Intelligence, LLC's biweekly Wireless Business Forecast.

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