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- The Guardian,
- Monday June 11, 2001
When people ask what I do (and I try to make it palatable for the majority who would rather not know the whys and wherefores of SMS, Wap and 3G), I tell them that Rabbit-on is a one-stop shop for pop culture gossip, ranting and spoof humour aimed at the young British female (hence the tag line "light relief for ladies") which you can get on the web and your mobile. I tell them it's "just a bit of fun".
Which of course is totally misleading. Fun is not the right word to encapsulate the experience of trying to launch a content-based technology project, let alone in the middle of a dot.com recession. Fun as in being made to jog 15 times around a Territorial Army assault course and then, just as you're settling into your breakfast, being told to do it all over again; or, as in running the London Marathon in a giant rhinoceros suit on a sweltering hot day in May. Rabbit-on has been 15 months in the making. We chose to do it but it ain't a bundle of laughs.
It is exhilarating (excruciating), edifying (terrifying) and at times, OK, fun. Standing up in front of a room of half-asleep venture capitalists and socking to them by far the most entertaining pitch they are going to hear all day is something I never thought I would get a kick out of. The feverish anticipation of being about to get funded, when you have been given "the nod" and are waiting to negotiate terms (which has happened no less than three times). The total nightmare when it falls through.
And that's before you go into production. When you are trying to chase and edit copy, coordinate a marketing campaign in the middle of a postal strike, organise a launch party, and talk in two types of techie tongue because your back-end development isn't synching with your front-end design just a week before launch - that's when the fun starts.
The learning curve has been precipitous to say the least. Ironically, though, Rabbit-on has emerged with a better chance of making it now than when we started. If we had been funded back in January 2000 by that publisher, it would have been too content-heavy. If we had got that sizeable chunk last May from that internet incubator (which, as it happens, was one of the first victims of the Nasdaq crash) for a Wap-focused service, by now we would be seeking second-round funding with no revenue to show for it.
The technology funding drought in the summer forced us (that is, me and my then new business partner, Melanie Shufflebotham, who left a great job at 3Com to come on board) to refocus the business model around text messaging which was easy to implement, had tangible revenue streams and nine billion users per month in Europe, whereas Wap was emerging as a damp squib.
The reconstruction paid off. After some deliberate solicitation, we got picked up by a Fleet Street new media consultancy which wanted to develop Rabbit-on as a showcase mobile-internet service in what they recognised as a hot market: young women gossiping and fiddling on phones. After three months of fantastically proficient exercises in "user experience modelling" and "brand focus", the cold reality of the market kicked in: sadly, our hosts themselves were forced to shut up shop.
Somewhere at the end of March, we found ourselves on our uppers in offices in Whitechapel, with no accelerator deal and not even a basic site, but we still had our seed funding and a loyal team of advisers, including Chris Smith, former chief executive of Vodafone Multimedia, as our chairman. And the great thing about tight budgets, as any first-time film director knows, is that you don't have to kow-tow to investors who might cramp your style and you have no choice but to be creative.
Our pre-launch campaign, Fantasy Election Romps 2001, a spoof sex line featuring the voices of "Toni and Dominat-Cherix, William and Fflufflebum, Anne Will-she-combe" (no guesses here) and "Peter and [the mysterious] Mr Tilly" (a send-up of a gay chat line), which was advertised with delightfully sleazy hooker-card street advertising and viral marketing, would never have passed a corporate branding session. The phone lines are tinkling away nicely, however.
Phase one "Just get out there and do it" Rabbit-on has three daily channels, on top of which members get a free On-the-Hop service, gossip and gags via SMS, which you can pass on to your friends. The idea is to build up a network so that eventually our users are nominating, voting and betting on their phones, like a members club on the move. Eventually, between 30 and 50% of the content could be generated by the users themselves.
People do ask, "Why launch now?" but actually it's a great time: summer texting fever is in full swing (76% of 18-24-year-olds use text, according to a recent Guardian ICM poll); the competition has shrunk (we were able to acquire the Rumour's database of 14-27-year-old women after it went into liquidation). What else? Ah yes, bunny ears, the signature of our mascot girl, are everywhere since Stella McCartney revived the Playboy logo. The only problem is she's still in a woolly jumper and it's 70 degrees out there.
Meanwhile, Wap is crawling back from near death by over-hype, penetrating the high street by default. We made the decision not to launch with a Wap service (despite having neat cross-platform content management) but will be launching one as a matter of course this summer. Our gaze is focused, however, on the next stage, fast-download GPRS (general packet radio service) and the intro duction of subscription services and micro-payments.
How do we make money? Well it's a complicated old business. Rabbit-on will depend on mobile commerce rather than advertising and sponsorship. Initially, we are using proven revenue models such as premium-rate numbers and reverse SMS. For example, you can hire a "Virtual Text Flirt" for a friend by dialling a number and choosing from the delectable Office Pest, Mr Perfect, Typical Bloke and Sex Maniac, and there are more trivia games in the offing. In the future, M-commerce will provide more lucrative opportunities: it is predicted to be worth around £40bn in western Europe by 2004 with entertainment - "killing time" applications as opposed to time-saving ones - accounting for 36% of that revenue.
Another 18 months down the line, Rabbit-on will be a very different proposition. We might be subscription-based, we will almost certainly rely more on strategic partnerships for distribution, commerce, advertising and product development. As long as the operators continue to push data services and people are prepared to pay for them, we are banking on the fact that there will always be a demand for fresh content.
In the words of John Updike, author of the Rabbit trilogy, the rabbit is characterised by being "lean, dodgy and fleet of foot". Being lean (a team of six at launch), mean (at least not fluffy) and necessarily highly adaptable, we probably stand a better chance of making it in the dot.com desert than a company with massive overheads. And, after all, isn't this what publishing used to be like back in the good old days?
• Rabbit-on.com was launched last week. Imogen O'Rorke is editorial director and co-founder
