SecretLondon's public accounts

Interesting article in TechCrunch Europe about the SecretLondon startup, mainly for its exploration of the economics of getting a local B2C service off the ground (see chart above). The issues started when the Facebook group SecretLondon (a sort of crowdsourcing site for Londoners to find and/or report great bits of the Metropolis eg places for coffee) hit 180,000+ members, it became too hard to find what you wanted on the facebook group - so the need emerged to build a proper website. But as Tiffany Philippou, who has moved from being starter of a Facebook group to starter of a startup in under a month notes, it was community built, over a weekend, and the economics were amazing:

Including the domain names for us and future secretcities, catering and all the other out of pocket costs, our total cost for the entire process have been less than £3,000.

When I went round the room on Sunday night and asked all the contributing designers, developers product managers and editors what motivated them to give up their weekend they said it was the feeling of being part of something amazing. They astonished us with their enthusiasm and talent.

secretlondon has shown the power of the community. The group has always been about engaging its members every step of the way. We ran a logo competition to get a logo design, and then asked members on our blog to vote for their favourite. We sought the opinions of the community on the functionality of the site and tried to incorporate as many of the ideas as possible into the launch site.

I must admit to being a great fan of this sort of grassroots development for B2C sites, as by setting up a facebook page you demonstrate that the concept is good, and clearly being able to leverage the community to give a kickstart to the beta-build gives an amazing economic advantage - that looks like a £30k (minimum) project otherwise. To be fair, this would not have happened if it wasn't deemed a worthy thing to do - but its a different sort of worthy to the pious "charitable" plays - this is worthy because its worthwhile, because it adds real value to the participants and to Londoners (and tourists)

However, the issue for these sorts of sites is not the Build phase, its the Operate - as Tiffany is clearly aware - so one approach is to crowdsource ongoing development:

Since this is an ongoing project, anyone who wants to get involved to take the site to the next level – whether that’s helping Tim maintain the code, or making improvements and widgets – is extremely welcome. We’ll be building an API shortly, so if you’re an iPhone developer and want to work on an app to access the thousands of secrets then we want to hear from you. We also want to cluster data for better recommendations and make recommendations based on places your friends have liked. Get in touch if this is something you can help with.

A fascinating experiment. They will get by, they plan, with a little help from their friends......

I'd suggest one lesson from successful Open Source developments such as Linux here though - someone will need to hold the design authority and configuration management keys as it develops, or all hell will break loose over time. Also, the hard part of systems like these is fielding the support calls at 3am on a Sunday morning. This means staff.

In other words, at some point SecretLondon will need a business model that brings in real money - fortunately a site like this is great for sponsorship and other forms of advertising as it would almost be expected - the trick is just not to make it intrusive.

I also like sites like these because to me they get the "Right to Brand" in the Location Based Services space as they offer a service first and foremost, and Location is an added value - whereas so many of the LBS service startups seem to put Location as the core proposition and then trry and find reasons for it to exist. They are also the most user-benign as they fit into the Top Left quadrant of our LBS matrix (see here).

I am also amused that "food" and "pizza" are different line items in the accounts. That's probably right...