Over the past 15 years The Skeleton Crew has built dozens of online projects, earning industry awards and garnering over 40,000,000 pageviews on their owned websites. Here are some of their favorite personal sites (client work not included):
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Love Bomb — the beta platform for this project lived in the blogger space, and gave people the opportunity to literally change or save a life in just 5 minutes of their time. Its 5,000 members across 50 countries directed their collective love toward one struggling person each week, and left each person with dozens of new friends who stayed connected long after the bomb.
Nate rebooted the project in 2023, combining the weekly mission assignments from ItStartsWith.Us (detailed below) and adding a Twitch component to surprise livestreamers with messages of love and inspiration, capturing their reactions in real time.
ItStartsWith.us — a social activation project where members spent 15 minutes a week to make a difference in the lives of others. With over 10,000 participants in 100 countries, it collectively touched millions of lives from 2009-2011. Nate and Jay met at Google headquarters in 2010 when introduced by someone who was on Nate’s ISWU team while being an avid reader of Jay’s blog. Thanks, Jenny!
Giving Cards — a product that creates micro activations for employee engagement and social good, piloted in 2017 and officially launched in 2022. It excels at building community and connectedness in our covid-impacted world by bringing a shared experience to both onsite and remote team members, while providing the client company with dozens of authentic, organic stories to tell.
Love Drop — a year-long philanthropy project that raised over $90,000 through micro-giving to help 12 different families across the country (and filmed à la Extreme Home Makeover). Created in 2011 and composed of 1,0000 members across 10 different countries, it made the act of giving individually meaningful where even a dollar “could change a life.”
Budgets Are Sexy — a popular personal finance blog, created in 2008 and acquired for six figures in 2019. Known for its offbeat style and positivity, it’s won over a dozen awards in the space, including “Most Humorous Blog,” “Best Lifestyle Blog,” “Best Gen X/Y Blog,” and “Blog of The Year.” With over 20,000 subscribers, 50,000 Twitter followers and 30,000,000 views, it’s still going strong after Jay re-acquired it in 2022!
I Met You Today — a tiny personal project that lets Nate and Jay give a little bit back to the interesting and impactful people they meet in their lives. They each carry a card for the site, and whenever they meet someone who makes an impact on them, they leave a card with that person, and then they have 24 hours to update the site with a thoughtful post on why the encounter was meaningful.
Rockstar Finance — a curation site and community platform in the personal finance space, created in 2013 and acquired for six figures in 2017. Dubbed a “go-to website for money advice” by Business Insider, it became a fan favorite, garnering over 5,000,000 views and sparking the creation of the industry’s first searchable financial blog directory. Its members also raised over $20,000 to help others through fun and creative social activations.
