When Facebook married Sex and the City, Luluvise was born
From a meet and greet with the prime minister to the fury ofย Floxx founder Rich Martell, Alexandra Chong has received both bouquets and brickbats for launching Luluvise – a female only dotcom where girls can rate menโs ability to have sex.
With its pouting pink lips logo and โGirl time all the timeโ tagline, Chong might have positioned Luluvise as a light-hearted social network, but the site, it seems, makes a serious business case.
Why? Because big shots like Lastminute.com founder Brent Hoberman and Bebo founder Michael Birch have helped Chong raise ยฃ665,000 for her โFacebook meets Sex and the Cityโ venture.
Chong is a law graduate from London School of Economics, a former member of Jamaicaโs Olympic tennis team (she knows Mardy Fish and Andy Roddick personally and hangs out with them when they come to Wimbledon), and has worked in the PR sector for a year.
She doesnโt have an engineering background and website coding is Latin to her, so why on earth did she decide to launch a platform where girls can gossip and rate vital statistics of men? ย
To find out, I have come to White Bear Yard in Clerkenwell which, mind you, homes a snazzy smorgasbord of tech ingenuities like Stylistpick and Technovated.
โIn 2009, I went on a rather interesting Valentineโs date and I wanted to share all the gossip with my gal pals, many of whom are scattered all over the world,โ says the 30-year-old half Jamaican half Canadian blonde dressed in a chic blue jeans, blue shirt, black boots and Ray Ban glasses.
โWhy didnโt you post your date details on Facebook?โ I ask her.
โOf course, I couldnโt post it on Facebook – thatโs where everyone from your mum to your boss can trawl your wall!โ she tells me with a giggle.
โAfter dishing out juicy details over three telephone calls, two Skype calls and a bunch of Blackberry messages and texts to my other girlfriends, I called my best friend Alison Schwartz in New York. I told her that we needed a place where girl talk is private, fun and all in one place.โ
ย How Luluvise works:
1. You have to be a registered Facebook user to log on to Luluvise but none of your Facebook friends get to know that you have connected.(Thatโs how they keep boys at bay.)
2. You then create an โinner cirleโ- a private place for you and your handpicked best girlfriends
3. Girls can send four types of โscoopsโ or messages on Luluvise namely photo scoops, text scoops, polls and wikidates.
4. Wikidate is the naughty one. Luluvisers can rate men theyโve dated according to various factors including looks, manners and performance in bed. None of these scores are visible outside the site.
After her eureka moment, Chong looked to digital agency Glow Labs to build a prototype for Luluvise. She would then send half of her monthly salary from her job at mobile marketing company Upstream to Glow Labs, and after a year and three versions later, Luluvise was on the launch pad.
Perhaps the most controversial part of Luluvise is the ban on boys. This is so the ladies can give their gal pals the inside โscoopโ on whether the sex with their last date falls into the โIs he into girls?โ category or โI had no idea that was physically possible!?โ category.
And when boys try to break in to get a sneak peak of this girl-o-sphere,ย โDude, youโre a dude, nice try though!โ is the error message they are greeted with.
Ask her how a niche platform like Luluvise will make money and Chong enumerates interesting stats.
She points out that women generate more than 70 per cent of the messaging activity on Facebook, spend more than 35 per cent more time on social networks than men, and drive 80 per cent of all consumer spending.
โWeโre tapping into the largest online demographic, women. Surely, that will make Luluvise a profit-making venture?
โThe numbers proved to me that a concept like Luluvise will be a hit with 18-35 year old girls and I havenโt looked back since,โ she says.
No doubt every girl has SOS, LOL and OMG needs, but will that make a strong business case that will have investors laughing all the way to the bank?
Chong is confident that it will.ย โThe day I put in my papers at Upstream, my boss Alexios Vratskides, the chief executive of the company asked me about my future plans and I told him about Luluvise. He really liked the idea and invested some cash to get Luluvise off the ground,โ explains Chong with a glint in her eye.
Chong then tells me how it wasnโt easy to convince Brent Hoberman to part with his money.
โI remember when I was pitching to Brent, he asked me questions like why canโt girls create private Facebook chats and he was slightly terrified by the Wikidate concept.
โBut I proved to him that there was clearly nothing like Luluvise for the ladies to enjoy unadulterated girl time. Therefore, there was a gap in the market we were filling and the project has definite revenue potential,โ she says.
Surely, if bigwig investors like Hoberman and Birch have decided to put their money into the venture, Luluvise has to have a solid business model in place? But sheโs reluctant to talk about it because itโs early days.
โWe wonโt even think of monetising the site till we have more girls flocking to the site to spend girl time. Once weโve achieved that I think Luluvise will start making money through partnerships, affiliate marketing and advertising on our site,โ she tells me.
Chong keeps mum about the number of users as well, but tells me that the siteโs users come from more than 140 countries across the globe.
With 12 employees – six male and six females – Luluvise does have some men running the show, but theyโve started calling each other girlfriends.
โItโs good to have a mix of both sexes in the office but sometimes the boys get fed up. Weโve got our tagline โGirl time all the timeโ scribbled on our white board, but one of the boys changed that to โGirl time, overtimeโ, says Chong.
When Lulu met the PM
One of the only men to get a sneak peek into this girlsโ private club is none other prime minister David Cameron who came to visit Londonโ tech mecca for its yearly progress report.
โThe PMโs visit was a great morale booster for us as and we gave him a little demo before we got the product out of the door. Heโs one of the few lucky men who got an exclusive peek even before Luluvise was launched.
Chong recounts how the team had created a Wikidate review on the PM. You may recall that a Wikidate review rates men on their appearance, sense of humour, first kiss, commitment, manners, ambition and of course performance in bed.
And what were his scores?
โWe gave him top scores in everything,โ chukles Chong.
Does Luluvise cater to wannabe Disney princesses only?
Chong says she always knew that launching a site with features that rate men on their vital statistics would garner its share of hurrahs and boohoos. In a column on the Kernel, Floxx founder Rich Martell slagged off Luluvise as a site for โwannabe Disney princesses?โ I ask her about this, doesnโt Martell make a valid point?
โWhatโs wrong with being a Disney princess?โ she replies.
โHe [Rich Martell] doesnโt know what the girls are talking about in their inner circle. They might be discussing Disney toys or they mi
ght be talking about politics for all he knows. Luluvise has got nothing to do with him, itโs for girls.โ
- Read our profile of Rich Martell: Londonโs Zuckerberg?
Girls can rate men on appearance, sense of humour, first kiss, ambition and of course performance in bed.
Chong is adamant that Luluvise has got a โGirls Just Wanna Have Funโ vibe to it and is a light-hearted place to capture the โgirly guilty pleasuresโ.
โI did a user session with a sorority class of Stanford University in the summer and the girls loved Luluvise and said they connected with it instantly. These are girls who are very bright and ambitious and will no doubt make it big in life. How will Luluvising make these girls any less ambitious or damsels in distress?,โ she asks me.
And what do you have to say to the girls who say that the site โcomes across as a silly, wannabe combo of Sex and the City and High School Musicalโ?
โWell, if weโre not your cup of tea, weโre not your cup of tea, donโt join our platform. We have millions of other girls who would like to luluvise,โ declares Chong introducing a new verb to the English language.
I ask her if sheโd approve of a male version of Luluvise where men rate sexual performance of girls.
She takes a pause and answers, โto each his own but I donโt think men would want to discuss their dates as much as woman.โ
These are busy times for Chong. Sheโs about to launch a Luluvise mobile app for gossip on the go, sheโs doing a demo in Queen Mary University to spread the word and she pens โDiary of a start-upโ – her column in the Sunday Times which documents the progress of the project.
โMy next challenge is to build a strong user base in the UK and US,โ she tells me.
โWe are just a month old but weโre here to prove that Luluvise will take on the world as a billion dollar tech company right here in London.โ
My verdict? You go girl!
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