Fridaycities Limited moved out of its offices a few days before Christmas 2007. Savannah was the last to leave, locking the door behind her and carrying a plastic box containing the last of the company’s files. Karl had already left the company to follow his writer’s life, away from the bullshit-ridden realities of business.

The site remained live, but the only new questions posted during December were from long-time users wondering why everything was so quiet, and why there had been so little news about the much-anticipated relaunch. Things were so quiet in fact that one user even created a sweepstake for when Fridaycities.com would vanish for good.

On 27 December 2007, he got his answer. At the stroke of 10.00 p.m. Fridaycities vanished from the Internet forever.

18.1

At 10.01 p.m. anyone typing in the Fridaycities.com web address would be greeted with a ‘page not found’ error message.

18.2

At 10.05 p.m. on 27 December 2007, a brand new site called Kudocities was launched on an unsuspecting world.

With its new bright red logo and bold new design, it was almost unrecognisable from the Fridaycities site it replaced. Even more unrecognisable, though, was the business behind it. Forced to decide between office rent and paying the development team, Fridaycities Ltd had moved out of its offices and taken up new premises in Savannah’s living room.

Using a small amount of additional investment from Angus, it had been Savannah who for most of December had been liaising with the developers to get Kudocities ready for launch; Savannah who had ensured that she had followed up with all the advertisers who had expressed an interest in advertising on Kudocities ahead of the launch. And it had been Savannah who a few moments earlier had been sitting next to the lead developer when he pressed the button to make the site live.

I remained a shareholder in the company – with shares held in trust for my uncle and my parents in exchange for their original seed funding – and Angus remained non-executive chairman. But the new head of the company – the CEO – was Savannah; the one person who hadn’t gone into the business to become famous and wealthy; the person who didn’t mind swallowing the business bullshit if it got the right result, but who wouldn’t suffer fools gladly. The person who just wanted to help city dwellers share information about their city.

Against all odds, Kudocities was alive. Within hours feedback would start coming in from users. It would be, by and large, excellent. A few days later, the first revenues would start to come in and, all being well, the site would soon secure the angel investment it needed to expand globally. If anyone could make it happen, Savannah could.

Epilogue…