Redbrick Labs have formula for Youmeo social media success

Jun 23 2009 by Anna Blackaby, Birmingham Post

One of the men behind a leading social media company told Creative Industries Editor Anna Blackaby about why it took more than the odd brick wall to stop him and his business partner.

When social media company Youmeo hit a brick wall in securing the funding needed to get it off the ground last year, commercial director James Leavesley and founder Calum Brannan didn’t just give up and wait for the worst of the credit crunch to subside.

Instead, the Coventry-based entrepreneurs decided to take matters into their own hands and do a spot of DIY capital raising. Thus Redbrick Labs was born.

Redbrick Labs, which helps businesses to harness social media and social media platforms, was set up using the staff and resources of Youmeo with the intention of generating the money needed to get the first company off the ground.

Mr Leavesley said: “Youmeo is a social networking aggregator. Basically if you have more than one social network on sites like YouTube and Flickr, you can operate them all from one space.

“For example, if you would like to send an update on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, you would write it just once and it gives you the ability to update it across any or all of your other social spaces.”

“We said we have got to embrace sites like Facebook rather than take them on. So by being an aggregator and sitting on top of these networks,

“it means we are partnering with these businesses rather than competing with them.”

But despite possessing this promising technology, Youmeo found it difficult convincing investors to part with their cash as the credit crunch started to make itself felt.

“We had developed the technology for the Youmeo site but we were a pre-revenue business and we were looking at raising investment at a time when banks were shutting up shop,” said Mr Leavesley.

“Valuations were based on historic deals in the sector, so being pre-revenue with a high valuation made it virtually impossible to raise money.

“What we did was to see how we could use the technology and the team we had got to generate revenue in the short term.”

So six months ago, they set up Redbrick Labs – a firm which builds community networking platforms for public, social or commercial organisations.

“We began to focus on organisations that required their own online communities, be they customer-focused or business-focused,” said Mr Leavesley.

“We provide a series of social tools, such as rating tools, the ability to engage in forums or the ability to upload user-generated content.

“What we have found is that the market is no longer about marketing at customers but about engaging with them.