Ever wanted to know Islington’s secrets? Where to find its underground restaurants and inviting pubs, independent cinemas or the charity shops with the cheapest finds?
Thanks to Secret London, a start-up based in Clerkenwell, the best of Islington is just a click way.
The brainchild of Tiffany Phillippou, a 21-year-old entrepreneur, Secret London says it’s a website built on “little but love.”
But there’s a lot more to this story than love. When advertising firm Saatchi and Saatchi announced their summer 2010 internship scheme, a “cross between Big Brother and The Apprentice”, Phillippou was eager to join. Step one: create a Facebook group with as many members as possible.
“I had been living in Bristol for a few years, where I went to university, and living there you knew where to go and what to do. But when I got back to London I didn’t really know where to go.
‘’I started the group on January 19, 2010. Within a week it had 70,000 members. I didn’t expect it to grow this big but it really took off. That was an insane week, there was so much going on. But it became clear after about two weeks that we couldn’t manage that much discussion and that amount of people on Facebook, it’s the wrong interface.”
Phillippou decided to build a website in just two days. With £3,000, and 50 volunteers (sourced from the 195,000 users in the Facebook group) she bought the secretcities.com domain, and began to archive and categorise the secrets found on Facebook. She said: ‘’I’m touch with most of the other secret cities groups that have sprang up, and I’m hoping to work with them soon.”
Currently, Phillippou works full time in Clerkenwell, managing the website. “I suppose this is my first job after graduating. A typical day involves contacting a lot of people and connecting with members. It’s a massive community. I talk to people who go to the website, and I spend a lot of time managing the community and talking about what I can improve.”
For the moment, the website is still in development, so Phillipou’s time is divided between the Facebook group (currently with 202,141 members), interacting with the 6,968 followers on Secret London’s Twitter feed and promoting the site.
“It’s quite time consuming,’’ she said. ‘‘We’re getting around 1,000 hits per day so far, we need to engage more people in the website. We need a big push to get them from the Facebook group, but until then we’re keeping the Facebook going.”
But with so much interest being generated in her website, and her ambition to become bigger than Time Out, the real question is: how will Secret London make money? As yet, Phillipou’s still unsure.
“We’re looking into ways of making money, but because it all happened so quickly we haven’t decided yet. We’re looking into a vouchers scheme but I really don’t know what we’re going to go for.”
For now, Secret London is focusing on engaging its community. “Every day is a massive learning opportunity, I’m learning so much, and I’m learning so much more than if I was buried in a big company.”
In addition to learning how to run a flourishing business and a website, Phillipou is also learning about Islington’s gems.
“I do use recommendations from Secret London, that was what it started for. I found out about things like Exmouth market through it, and on Friday I told everyone I wanted to find a pub near Islington to go out for a drink with a friend, and I ended up finding loads of great places to go.”
Image credit – Secret London
