Interview with Clark Sloan, Founder of Single Christian Network
Friday, November 28th, 2008Q: We know that Single Christian Network is one of the oldest dating sites. Please tell us a bit more about your history.
A: I wish I could say I had the most altruistic motives for starting Single Christian Network (www.singlec.com). In reality it just happened.
I was an out of work computer programmer. My dad published a singles newspaper for Christians. He wanted to create a computer matching program for them and gave me a call. I needed the money. I agreed to write his program.
What happened is that it worked too well. He got overloaded with trying to publish his newspaper and run the matching program at the same time. Instead of paying me for the work, he asked me to take it over. I did. The rest is history. It was called Christian Computer Match back then.
What I did was put ads in singles newspapers all over the country. I posted full pages ads in some of them. The ad was an actual application. A new member would fill out the application and mail it in. I would key that information into the computer and once a month I would mail out matches to all the subscribers. Remember now — this is before the internet. I didn’t even have an email address back then. Everything was postal mail.
Once a month I would run the matching program, print thousands of matching reports and spend the weekend printing, folding, stuffing and licking envelopes. It wasn’t the funnest job in the world. My house was filled with envelopes, paper, stamps and lots of neighbor kids helping fold and stuff.