Third Thursday - October News close

David Hart
In
17th October 2013
Third Thursday - October News

This month has been hellishly busy. Combined with October's reputation as the season to come down with some sort of lurgy and a couple of holidays, it's meant fewer hands on deck and a few late nights.

The big news was the relaunch of Tepilo.com. For those of you who don't know, we started Tepilo as a Joint Venture with TV's Sarah Beeny and her husband, Graham, about 4 years ago as a 'For Sale By Owner' site. And it did pretty well in terms of attracting properties to the site and letting people sell or rent them without having to pay any fees. We had a plan to monetise the original site via sponsorship, but for a number of reasons, this didn't really happen. In many ways this was a lesson that we've subsequently learnt for other products that we've launched: without a clear (and believable) financial model, just solving a perceived consumer need isn't enough. And in fact, I blather on about this in my blog article this month too.

In terms of the new Tepilo, we spoke to some of our 45,000 registered users who were all saying the same thing "we need to be on Rightmove". So, we got some more partners on board who could provide estate agency services and have relaunched as an online-only estate agent. We think we've got a great chance now: we've got a good brand, a sizeable database and the direct competition is pretty poor. So watch this space.

In other news, we relaunched UR7s, the Rugby Sevens site. Again this is a relaunch of a product we created a few years back. Check it out for yourself here.

And finally..

This month Nick and Mel from our team visited Leyton Sixth form as part of the BIMA D-Day which is a nationwide event linking digital professionals from across the UK's creative & professional sectors with young people.

To find out more about the day and how it went read our blog article. At the end of the day we told the students we would announce our favourite idea from the day on our site and invite them into the office to show them around and to work on their idea more for the afternoon.

So, our winner is..

'Couture You', Congratulations guys! This group came up with a Social / e-commerce mobile and tablet app idea.

This group are our winners not only because they created a great concept but also because they showed great enthusiasm and worked very hard throughout the day. Well done to the team and we look forward to seeing you in the office for an afternoon soon! We will be in touch with your tutor to discuss the details.