The enormous popularity and big ticket valuations of (first) MySpace, and more recently Facebook, has spawned countless other social networks – most fail (or at least fail to attract any serious interest) but some actually go on to become both popular and profitable.
qmpeople.com falls into the latter category – boasting hundreds of thousands of users and localised versions for English, Italian and French markets.
Although online since 2004, the site only officially launched in 2008 after a prolonged, self-funded development process. On first inspection however, the site doesn’t look like anything particularly special – and probably more like a dating site than anything else.
So what gives? Why does this site work where others don’t and what can we take away from what they’ve done?
Suitably intrigued, I decided to put a few questions to the CEO, Marina Cianfarani (note: I’ve made a few changes for clarity – in brackets – as Marina’s first language isn’t English):
How would you describe qmpeople?
A world of friends
Can you give us an overview of the business behind qmpeople?
qmpeople ltd was founded on 2008 even if qmpeople.com was developed some time before to permit testing and progressive improvements. We fully built qmpeople network based on our personal funds [without any outside investment], there are four of us at the moment so we are a small startup.
Our most important markets are USA, Italy and France thanks to respective qmpeople localized versions. qmpeople is going to be translated into German, Spanish, Polish, Dutch, Russian and Ukrainian too.
We are profitable, mainly because we outsource most [technical] activities to different parts of the world to drammatically reduce costs. For example, our web and dns hosting are in the USA, SMS provider is in South Africa, SEO expert in Spain, translation & text copywriting in various countries.
We are making money through advertising: google adsense program, ppc campaigns, newsletter advertising and other typical advertising formats.
There are a lot of social networks out there – what makes yours different?
Yes we know… Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and so on.. we studied all their aspects before and during qmpeople development. We are sure in the future we can take the best from these social networks and add our ideas to become very popular. The most important aspect of qmpeople is that we tend to consider friendship as a serious social aspect and not only a mechanism to share personal informations.
For example no one’s [given consideration before] to how friends help each other when they’re in trouble. Instead, thanks to “helpme”, qmpeople offer a place to help their friends by donating money. qmpeople is global so anyone can help people from any part of the world. It is not important why a user decides to ask help. Our editors verify only the authenticity of the request and then the users decide who to help!
Take a look at http://www.qmpeople.com/helpme/17tfhta098mj or at the Italian version http://www.qmpeople.it/helpme/e647hhndgert. The first depicts a user who asked [for] help to buy a part to restore their motorbike; the second [is] a young girl who asked to buy new shoes to be more fashionable for her boyfriend …
After donations, as you can see, those users sent in pictures to thank qmpeople for helping them.
New services and partnerships. First of all we are investing time and resources into the launch of really innovative services for the social networking [arena]. … at the same time we are evaluating some important partnership to reduce some burdens (by outsourcing some technical activities) and speeding-up our core business [alongside some] important companies operating in sectors like social gaming.
Social networking tends to be underestimated in terms of initial investment, required skills … it is not so simple as you might think. Our advice before starting would be: ask yourself the reason why a user should choose your service, stay away from solutions already done by others and be innovative, pay attention to legal implications, find good partnerships and, of course, work hard.
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