A year on from Google Zeitgeist I was certain that Karl’s friendship with Peter Gabriel would pay dividends when we met him to talk about We7 and the possibility that he might invest in Fridaycities. Sadly, it was not to be. While Gabriel’s ‘people’ were enthusiastic about the idea of meeting to discuss a partnership or investment in Fridaycities, we would have to wait for a couple of months as he was getting ready to go on tour. ‘But do keep in touch, ‘ they said. ‘Come down and see us when Peter has finished touring… we’ll definitely have a meeting.’

With Ricky also busy with his other projects, Nic and Espirit not in a position to consider investing until we were at a later stage and Henry Fysom at Creative Capital not able to invest until someone else did (and our mobile phone guy an idiot), our fundraising truck had basically stalled.

But Angus ’s contact book had one possibility left: Max and Duncan Jennings, two brothers from Newcastle who had made a ton of money from their online marketing business and had spent some of it developing a local reviews site called WeLoveLocal.com. WeLoveLocal was similar in many ways to Fridaycities in that both sites dealt with local people, talking about local things. Angus had heard on the grapevine that the company had some spare money that they were keen to invest in interesting new projects.

Ordinarily the decision to call them would have been a no-brainer – they had money, we needed money – but there was a catch. The brothers were also potential competitors, so if we told them our plans and then they decided not to invest, we’d have basically given away all our secrets for nothing. Frankly, though, at this stage we weren’t exactly drowning in investment options so Angus agreed to get in touch with the brothers and set up a meeting.

While Angus went back to the phones, Savannah, Karl and I went back to our whiteboard to examine what we’d learned in the nearly eight months that Fridaycities had been in test mode. In that time, nearly twenty thousand people had signed up to the test site and we’d learned a lot about what they liked about the site and what they didn’t; what worked and what didn’t. Some users loved almost everything while others hated it all in equal measure. But there was one thing that everyone agreed on: the name ‘Fridaycities’. It was awful.

Every single person we spoke to – users, potential investors, friends, family – asked the same question: ‘Why the hell did you call the site Fridaycities – what does it mean?’ People who didn’t know the site assumed it was some kind of bar review site for people going out on the piss at the weekend in cities. Which, judging by the questions that had been posted over the preceding months, was about 50 per cent true.

As we were still in test mode there was time to revise the name before we launched properly to the public. But not much; so if we were going to think of something new, it was essential that we get it right. I decided we needed some more outside advice; this time from someone who knew a lot about branding. Someone, in fact, who had been the first person to tell me – months earlier – that Fridaycities was a crap name. I decided to phone Richard, hoping he was in the country.

10.1

Richard Moross is thirty years old, and a taller, better dressed man you will struggle to meet. There’s a scene in the film Men in Black where Will Smith is being indoctrinated into the MIB agency. He’s taken to a completely white locker room and Rip Torn’s character (Chief Zed, the head of the agency) gives him ‘the last suit you’ll ever wear’: black jacket and trousers, white shirt, black shoes.

Now, imagine that look but replace the white shirt with a black one. That’s Richard. I’ve known Richard for nearly three years – been to parties with him, had lunch with him, gone to the pub with him, visited his office, travelled on long-haul flights with him, even been bowling – and I swear I’ve never seen him dressed in any other outfit. His flat, meanwhile – a bachelor pad in west-central London that he uses on the rare occasions he’s in town – is stark white and achingly cool, exactly like the MIB headquarters. I’m assuming it’s just a coincidence but if I discovered that the flat once belonged to the film’s production designer I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

Richard is the polar opposite of me not just in height and dress sense but also in terms of his work ethic. A designer by upbringing, he founded a company called Pleasure Cards in 2004 with cash from venture capitalists The Accelerator Group, the same people who backed Agent Provocateur and also Michael Smith’s Mind Candy. The concept was simple (sort of ): Pleasure Cards (the second most porny company name in the world, after Cyberbritain) would be the hip alternative to boring business cards, for creative and design types. Supplied in packs of one hundred, the front of your Pleasure Card would carry the usual business card information – name, phone number, email address and the like – but on the reverse you could let your imagination run wild. Professional designers were invited to upload designs and images for the cards to Pleasurecards.com, where they could choose the ones they wanted to appear on the back of their personalised cards. Every time a designer’s work was used on the back of a customer’s card, he or she received a small royalty and the rest of the price of the card would go to Pleasure Cards. As an additional gimmick, each customer would also have their own ‘PEP’((I have no idea.)) number, printed on their cards, which was linked to a personalised page on the Pleasure Cards site where they could add additional information about themselves: updated contact details, favourite music, photos – that kind of stuff.

The really cool thing about the cards was how good they looked. These were really, really nice cards. About the same width of normal business cards, but half the height, they were also identifiable even at a distance as being Pleasure Cards rather than humdrum old business cards. Really, they were stunning
There was just one problem.

No one wanted to buy them.

While the designs were great and the cards were beautiful, the problem lay with the Pleasure Cards website: it was beyond difficult to navigate, and the PEP numbers were a step of complexity too far for the time-poor, cash-rich hipsters the company was aiming for.

As Richard admitted to the Guardian a year or so later, ‘it sucked’.

Mightily.

So Richard went back to the drawing board. Over the next few months he raised some more money (a lot more money) from two more large VCs – Index Ventures (home of Danny Rimer) and Atlas Venture – and began completely to reinvent the business.

The first realisation he had was also the most ground-breaking: users didn’t care about choosing thousands of pre-submitted designs from top designers. Someone’s business – or pleasure – card is the ultimate statement of who they are, and customers wanted the backs of their cards to reflect that. So Pleasure Cards dumped the designers and instead created an ingenious system where customers could upload their own pictures from photo-sharing sites like Flickr or social network sites like Bebo.

The PEP number? Gone. The complex order process? Pared down to an almost Zen-like experience. The cards still looked the same, and they were still as gorgeous as a pre-rehab starlet, but that one change of gimmick – allowing customers to express their personality on the back of the card as well as the front – was all it took to make business explode.

In a little over a month the relaunched site had received orders for over a million cards, each printed on the company’s spanking new state-of-the-art printing machines and packaged by hand in their spanking new warehouse conversion offices.

But along with the shift in business model came another, perhaps equally significant, change.

10.2

Shortly before Richard ’s grand relaunch, I met up with him in New York for the US branch of Michael and Judith’s Second Chance Tuesday. It was a ridiculously hot summer’s day and, with a few hours to kill before the event, we went for cocktails on the roof of the Hotel Gansevoort, overlooking Soho House. I felt like a fish out of water, but Richard, with his air of James Bond cool and his Men in Black dress code, took the opulent surroundings in his stride, even managing not to gawp at the stunning supermodels parading around the hotel’s rooftop pool. He ordered us Perfect Manhattans (the one with both sweet and dry Vermouth – not to be confused with the Dry Manhattan or any of the other million variations on the theme) and I asked him how the relaunch was going.

‘ It’s going really well. We’ve got the investment in, the new site’s almost ready for testing. It’s all great, but I wanted to ask you something… what do you think of the name “Moo”?’

‘ Moo? Like a cow says?’

‘Yes. Moo.com.’

‘Is it available? Surely someone already owns Moo.com? Are< there really no dairy farmers on the Internet?'

'Yes, someone else has it. But we're going to try to buy it. I reckon if we make the offer in the right way, we can get it for ---.' 'Fucking hell.' The amount was enough to cover Fridaycities' costs so far several times over. This was the difference between a company with venture capital funding and one still hunting for angel investment.

'Yeah - it's a lot of cash, but I think it's worth it.'

'Moo. Mooooooooo. Mooooo dot commmmm. I like it.' 'Good. So do I.'

Of course, Richard had already decided that he was going to buy Moo and no doubt he'd already made an offer. He was just testing the name out on everyone he knew to see whether anyone totally hated it. But I've always admired people who have confidence in their own decisions but can still make others believe, genuinely, that their opinion matters a damn.

'Okay, my turn - what do you think of Fridaycities for the site we're about to launch?'

'Honestly?'

'No, I'd like you to lie to me. That's why I asked.'

'Well, I mean, it's crap, isn't it? Really bad. It doesn't say anything. Why do you insist on using Friday for everything?'

'Because - you know - there's The Friday Thing and The Friday Project, and now this. Like Virgin Trains and Virgin Atlantic and...'

'So now you're going to be Richard Branson?'

'I might be.'

'Yes. Okay. You might. But you're not. And even if you were it's still a crap name. You need a name that instantly "positions" the site with the people you're trying to reach. It's just common sense. Fridaycities is separate from the things you've done in the past - it's a new thing - so you need a new brand.'

'Hmmmm. Maybe you're right.'

Of course he wasn't right. Fridaycities was a bloody brilliant name. And, anyway, what did a company name really matter? Take a random example off the high street: The Carphone Warehouse. Wasn't that the most inaccurate brand name in the world? They didn't have warehouses, they had tiny kiosks. And carphones? What the hell is a carphone these days? You're not even allowed to use your phone while driving. They should be called The Streetphone Kiosk. But their weird brand didn't matter because, once a company has been around for a while, customers stop analysing the actual words and they just start recognising the brand. Who actually hears Virgin Megastore now and thinks of a hypermarket full of chaste girls? Who hears Google and thinks just how ridiculous it sounds? It's a typo for God's sake. After a while, people would forget that Fridaycities was a stupid name and they'd just start using it without thinking.

If I'd stopped being so arrogant for one tiny second, I'd have realised that Richard was right and it was me who wasn't thinking. The Carphone Warehouse grew quickly because in the first few years of its existence the name reflected exactly what it offered - a vast warehouse full of carphones; the kiosks and phone driving ban came much later - and Virgin got the attention it got in the early days precisely because its name was a bit controversial; a bit sexy. And how many people heard the word Google and forgot it in a hurry? Richard had realised that Pleasure Cards - with its slightly porny connotations - wasn't right for what he was offering. Moo Cards, on the other hand, was perfect. It was quirky, it was cute, it was easy to remember: just like the cards themselves. And he was right about Fridaycities - it was a crap name, one that confused people at exactly the time we most needed them to love and remember it.

10.3

It wasn ‘t going to be easy to go back to Richard, months after our cocktails in New York, and admit that user feedback had proved him right, but I swallowed my pride and sent him a text: ‘Are you in London?’ When he replied that he was, but was off to San Francisco in a couple of days, I asked whether he fancied a quick beer in a little pub off Charlotte Street later that evening.

Before Richard even had a chance to sit down and take off his (black) jacket, I cut him off.

‘Don’t say I told you so.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it, ‘ he replied, taking a sip of his beer. ‘About what?’

‘We’re going to change the name of Fridaycities. Everyone thinks it’s crap’

‘I tol-’

‘Don’t.’

‘Okay, but I’m pretty sure I did tell you so, months ago.’

‘You may well have done. And, okay, you were right. It is a crap name. But I’ve got a new one.’

One of the things that had caught us by surprise during the test phase of the site was how popular our reward points system had become. Called ‘Kudos’ points, users earned them by responding to questions posted by other users, or by inviting their friends to join, or by submitting questions that made it into our weekly newsletter. The more they contributed to the site, the more points they earned. There was a leader board that showed the users with the most Kudos points every week and competition to move up the board had become fierce. The popularity of the points was made even more bizarre by the fact that they were basically worthless. You couldn’t use them for anything; couldn’t spend them on anything. They just were.
But the users had started to assign Kudos points with their own value – giving them away to others on the site who answered their questions and even offering actual physical items for sale in exchange for Kudos. Without meaning to, we’d created a currency based entirely on knowledge and we’d decided that the new site would be entirely built around the points.

Richard listened intently while I explained the new focus of the site, and when I was finished he smiled broadly: ‘I really like that. It sounds cool.’ Which was a huge relief as the designers had been working on the new functionality of the site for weeks.

Then came the big question: ‘What do you think of the name “Kudocities”?’ I asked. ‘Karl came up with it – sticking with the cities idea, but focusing on the Kudos points – I think it really works.’

Richard looked thoughtful. ‘So, that’s Kudocities to rhyme with atrocities rather than Kudo Cities to rhyme with judo cities?’

‘Yeah, Kudocities.’

‘Yes. I really like that. That’s good.’

‘You really think so?’

‘Yeah, I really do. And anyway, anything would be better than Fridaycities.’

‘Cool, thank you.’ Of course, I pretended that his was just one of many opinions I was soliciting; that really we’d already decided to go ahead with Kudocities. In truth, a wave of relief was sweeping over me. I really valued Richard’s opinion and if he’d hated the new name I think I’d have gone straight back to the office and started all over again. Or thrown myself under a bus. Either or.

But he liked it.

Kudocities.com it was.

Chapter Eleven: ‘MySpace or yours?’…