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February 08, 2007
Supersnogging And The Viral Myth: Interview With Flirtomatic CEO
Flirtomatic staffer, alarm:clock reader, and geography whiz Oliver Gyr in the UK put us in touch with Mark Curtis' CEO of the startup that lets singles post anonymized photos on its Web and Wap sites and do the flirting thing. If readers are familiar with "Hot or Not" they will recognize it. The Supersnog mentioned in the title is the Flirtomatic's word for its twist on the popularity contest.
What's interesting about Flirtomatic beyond achieving 250,000 registered users since May of last year on a low budget, is that it seems to have successfully expanded its web application to mobile (via good old bad old WAP). The firm, which is primarily active in the UK market, claims that 40 percent of usage comes over the mobile and that translated into about 13 million WAP page views per month in January. Since WAP ads pay a premium compared to web ads, this is a desirable medium to develop. (We believe its ads are served AdMob).
We asked Curtis about the business, the finances, and he gave us straightforward myth-busting answers, something you have to like in a founder.
Do you have any tips on viral marketing or how to promote a new service on a low budget?
Viral is, in my view, largely mythologised. A very few have managed it – YouTube because video clips on the web are just so desirable, Bebo because teenagers love projecting themselves and then want to tell others. It’s well documented that Myspace used mass e-mail marketing, not viral, to achieve lift off.
We have a very steady flow of “viral customers” - sometimes 50% of the day (but of course that ratio depends how much we are spending elsewhere).
In mobile viral is largely unproven, though recently we’ve seen new customers phone us, asking how they can get on. When we ask how they heard of us, they say “oh my mate has you on his phone and I want it too”. I always hoped that would happen, and the best way to get it is to have a good sticky service.
Also a lot of people believe that viral marketing is about creating a killer piece of viral content that gets circulated. True...but two key points: a) it’s almost always an accident and b) they rearely lead to registration because the punters just watch the material, and then do something else. We’re starting to try and attack the latter point with our video activity FlirtQuest....
Lastly, it’s trial, error, science, sweat. The beauty of digital is that you do know the 50% of your marketing that does not work. We started out at £20 cpr, and by the middle of last year it was about £4. The board challenged me to get it down to £1 by December. I have to say I was not sure it was possible. But we got it to 89p.
When was the service launched?
In beta late 2005, full scale late May 2006
What make's it so compelling or addictive as some users have written in their blogs?
A mix of features but essentially what I call “incoming” - people love to get messages (we call them flirtograms). In our case they come from people you don’t know but who are effectively up for being flirty. In fact, most people are just straight up chatty. We’re social beasts and we like to talk. Flirtomatic provides a great branded environment for doing so. And on top of that are some of the features like rating, supersnogs (a sort of big kiss which you can only send once a day) and videos which add to the stickiness.
How did you finance the development?
Seed finance from Avi Azulai (ex Global MD of iTouch), plus first round investment from Doughty Hanson [Technology Ventures], the VC.
Will you raise capital, or are you already making enough money to keep the business afloat while expanding?
We’ve been looking at second round funding. Strong growth over Christmas and January (see the release attached) have encouraged us to think again about our investment approach and we are reviewing our needs right now.
Posted on February 8, 2007 07:16 PM | Posted to Web 2.0 | Permalink
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