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Founder of RGTonline.com Featured in St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Six years ago, Dianne Meyer was a housewife raising two young children.

Now, the single mom is chief executive of a dot.com company with revenues of $600,000 a year. Fourteen people call her boss.

She works from her home in Des Peres, so she can pick up the kids from school each afternoon.

Meyer is publisher of Rolling Good Times Online, a Web site (www.RGTonline.com) that provides news on gambling. Meyer became an Internet executive almost by accident.

In 1994, she was happy staying home and raising 8-year-old William and 4-year-old Christi while her husband pursued a doctorate in economics.

Then she got a call from a friend from Memphis, George Lapidis. The friend was running a newspaper aimed at gamblers at the riverboat casinos in Tunica, Miss. Casinos were new in Missouri, and he was looking for a partner to expand north.

"This could be big," said Lapidis.

Meyer knew nothing about gambling. She'd never been in a casino. But her father had been a newspaper man, and she liked the idea of a job she could do from home.

She had been bitten by the entrepreneurial bug once before. In the mid-1980s, she and a friend started a physical fitness business in west St. Louis County, but it failed.

So, she took $50,000 of her own money and invested in Rolling Good Times.

Everything went wrong.

Casinos in Tunica let Rolling Good Times place its newspaper on the boats. They went on the theory that the more hoopla about gambling the better.

But Missouri gambling operators banned the paper, because it advertised rival casinos.

Missouri operators also played things close to the vest, which made it harder to find news.

For instance, casinos have to disclose the percentage payout on their slot machines. "Casinos here hate giving that out," said Meyer.

A casino in St. Charles told her the information was publicly posted -- in the men's room. "I had to send somebody in to get it," she said.

Then Lapidis quit to take a job in South Carolina. Her newsprint costs quadrupled. Meyer had trouble getting news distributors to handle the newspaper.

By 1995, the business was in trouble. "I was starting to run out of money," said Meyer.

"One day my creative art director came in and said, "There's this thing called the Internet. Maybe we should get something on it,'" said Meyer.

Meyer knew nothing about it. Her 7-year-old son had taught her how to operate her home computer.

"So, I started to read about the Internet and I thought, maybe I could make a go at this," she said. "The distribution costs were absolutely nothing."

She and four partners took equal shares in a new venture to take Rolling Good Times online.

They formed a sort of business commune in which no one person was in charge. The idea was that each partner would contribute his or her own expertise.

In 1995, the Internet was new, and lots of business people were learning. It was still easy to get to the Net first with a good idea.

The toughest part was figuring out how to make money online. "What would people pay for? They wouldn't pay for information. People were coming to our site, but not enough so that General Motors would come to us and say, 'We'd better put up a banner ad.' "

Then and now, getting noticed was the biggest challenge. The company had no money for advertising and PR firms.

"We had a whole learning curve about search engines," said Meyer. "The most important thing you do is figuring out search engines," she said.

Search engines are where people start when they're looking for information. Dot.com companies want the engines to send people to them.

The engines send probes throughout the Web to find information that fits their categories. The trick is to get those probes -- often called robots or spiders -- to snare your site and put it high on the list when people search for gambling information.

The techniques become company secrets. Since the search engines keep changing their methods, Internet sites keep hunting for the keys. "You always have to stay one step ahead," said Meyer.

When one site succeeds, rival sites launch electronic spying operations to figure out its secrets. That's created a market for anti-espionage software.

The site gathered news and gambling tips from a platoon of stringers and alliances with news and gambling organizations.

While all that was going on, Meyer went through a divorce that left her a single mother. She took a full-time job as an assistant to an attorney, tending the Web site on the side.

Then the communal leadership of part-timers began to fall apart. With no one in charge, the owners broke into squabbling factions. By 1997, Meyer was looking for a way to buy out the other faction.

Meyer had an edge in the hunt for capital -- a friend with lots of money. "Over time, he put in mid-six figures," she said of the investor, whom she wouldn't identify.

Meanwhile, the site was getting attention, and picking up advertisers. A couple of years back, it was getting 200,000 hits per month. A hit happens when a person calls up the site, then clicks on one of the options.

Then competition arrived from other gambling sites, and hits dropped to about 100,000.

That's still enough to attract advertisers, and by last year the company was breaking even.

But advertising won't be enough to build big profits. So, the company is shifting to a strategy of selling gambling news and written content to other sites.

"This is so new that the company developing the technology is learning on our site," said Meyer.

The staff grew from two last year to 14 this year to cope with the strategy switch.

The Internet is global, which expands the possibilities for hiring. With a shortage of technology workers in the U.S., the company set up its technical office in Vancouver, British Columbia, where unemployment is higher. Meyer hired a Russian, two men from India and two Canadians, most just out of college.

All that hiring means taking on considerable risk. But Meyer prefers to think of it as an investment, not a bet.

"I've never gambled. I tell people I know too much to gamble," she said.

Reprinted by permission of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. © 2000 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, postnet.com. The story can be found on http://postnet.com.

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