CONTROVERSIAL FLIRTING WEBSITE RELAUNCHES WITH HEAVYWEIGHT INVESTOR

Floxx.com allows users to post flirty messages and declarations of lust. Users can now share the ‘hot spot’ where they have located a ‘fitty’ using a new mapping function, sparking the potential for an offline connection.

The dramatic start to Floxx’s journey caught the attention of high-profile investors including founding Dragons’ Den panelist Doug Richard and Kevin Wall, Emmy award-winning producer and angel investor in four early stage tech companies that have since moved through the public markets and successfully gone stratospheric.

Doug: How did you hear about FitFinder and its successor Floxx? Actually, I found out about Rich when I read an article about UCL closing the site down; I was really impressed by the level of interest that the website was generating – as far as I was concerned it was the best idea I’d heard of in a long time. I used Twitter to send a message requesting to contact

Rich; it was a very twenty-first century investment because I managed to get in touch with Rich througfh Twitter, we chatted on the phone and I liked what I was hearing, so I ended up spending quite a lot of money that evening!

What attracted you to the idea of investing in Floxx when the press was still full of news that the founder had just been threatened with disciplinary action by his University for founding it? Does the controversy around the site concern you? I just saw the opportunity; the negative press was always going to blow over – I didn’t see it as a negative, I just couldn’t believe my luck that no-one else had seen the huge opportunity that it presented! I was reading about this entrepreneurial kid and he had created something that was so exciting, yet it had hit a brick wall when his university made him shut it down. I thought it was a great idea, and when I saw the visitor numbers I thought it was a great investment! I mean, Rich had come up with a unique idea, but it was a known quantity for me as an investor because he had already proved that there was market demand – that’s very rare for an investment opportunity and I wasn’t going to let that get away. I don’t forsee a future problem with Floxx – we have plenty of safety mechanisms in place and to be honest critics of Floxx are probably the people who haven’t used it. What makes Floxx different from other social networking sites like Twitter? Floxx gives students a new way of interacting with eachother; they spend so much time checking each other out in the library – Rich’s site just gives them a new way of doing it; it’s different because it gives them a fun way to flirt anonymously. When I was 21 I didn’t need a website to want to spend my time firting with girls – students have always devoted a great deal of time to flirting - Floxx just makes it easier!

Why do you think you were the first to realize the investment potential in Floxx? If Rich had started FitFinder in Silicon Valley I can guarantee that he would have had investors snapping at his heels from the start, so it was lucky for me that he’s based in the UK! What do you have planned for the site? I’m very ambitious; Rich has already showed that there is a huge market for the site, and with the new iPhone app and the new internationally friendly name, between the USA and Western Europe there are so many people that we can potentially reach with this.

Why do you think that Floxx is such a great investment opportunity? When I got involved with Floxx when they had no site, no business and no employees. But they had a great idea. When I’m choosing an investment I look for two things: a market for the service and what it’s going to take to make the investment. What made Floxx special is that it delivered a third thing: proof. Rich had proved market demand before the business even started. That’s why Floxx is different – it’s not your typical social networking model but it’s still a known quantity.

Rich: We hear that a mystery blonde in the library provided you with the impetus to start up FitFinder.com – what really happened? People seem to have really tagged on to that one! It really seemed to catch the attention of the press… I can’t think why!

Exactly what is the idea behind FitFinder and the current site, Floxx? It was a really boring Thursday, and I was just in the library mucking around with some friends – and we all started texting each other about this girl, and it was while we were just messing around that I realised that quite a lot of people did the same kind of thing – texting each other in the library about where the hot girls were before finding a place to sit! It gave me an idea that if we put it all on one place and had somewhere to consolidate all these little notes and comments, then that would be really cool. So one night when I was fed up with revision I decided to create a website that my friends could post this kind of stuff on; it was really only supposed to be a bit of fun for my friends. By the end of the first day over 2,000 people had been on the site and in the weeks after that other universities started getting in touch and it all took off from there.

Setting up the website at the same time as studying for your undergraduate degree must have been difficult – did you ever struggle with time management? Not so much at University; my degree was in Computer Sciences so in a way setting up a website was actually quite relevant to my degree.

There were a few nights of three hours sleep in the first few weeks after FitFinder launched... You took down FitFinder when your University threatened to withhold your degree, but were you always planning to start up again after graduation? UCL initially quizzed me quite a bit about the site in the first week or so after I started it, and I explained the steps I had been taking to regulate the site but I guess after all the media attention the university started feeling more pressured into doing something about the site because they felt that I was bringing the university into disrepute and now it was all over the press, so it was becoming an issue for them. They slapped me with a £300 fine and threatened disciplinary action, so I decided to take the site down as I didn’t want to risk my degree with just a couple of weeks to go before exams were done.

Were you shocked when Doug Richard approached you with an investment proposal? To be honest, the whole media response took me completely by surprise – one minute I was mucking around in the library with my friends and the next I was being invited to talk about it on Sky News! Then for Doug to contact me… that was crazy; I never expected that!

Why did you change the site’s name? Well, if we were going to go international then “fit” doesn’t mean the same thing outside of the UK, so it would be a little confusing for foreign users… [Doug points out that in the States “fit” just means athletic, so the meaning would literally get lost in translation] so I settled on “Floxx” because people flock… Also, when I came up with FitFinder I wasn’t thinking in terms of marketing, or registering a domain name – it was just a joke for my friends! We were actually incredibly lucky that Floxx (the first alternative I decided on) hadn’t been taken up by anyone else, and we could get a dot com web address with it [Doug interjects again to remark that Floxx is also a great international name because it doesn’t translate as anything offensive in any other languages – definitely a bonus!] Where do you want Floxx to be in five years time? I want to make it easier for people to use from their Smartphones – that’s where the future is [Rich points to the table to illustrate his point – he’s right: we have a BlackBerry and two iPhones between the three of us] and we have a Did you ever find out who the blonde in the library was? No – I never found out! [At this point, Doug interjects that it could be a great PR stunt to run a campaign looking for the girl which elicits quite a bit of laughter from Doug and a rather more reluctant looking Rich!]