Allegran Advertising Limited was spun out of Allegran Limited in February 2005. The new company was designed to explore non-core business and one of the first concepts to emerge from this development was HomeHunter, soon rechristened QpHomes. Adrian was always rather keep on the HomeHunter concept and created most of the database architecture and programming logic, allowing users to self-describe their property for sale, adding rooms, measurements and photographs as they went.
QpHomes amassed over 12,000 property listings between April 2004 and March 2006, when the operating company name was changed to Vivid Medianet Limited. However, despite interest from some major companies (including Tesco) in this space, the legal position of self-listed property advertisements was always somewhat unclear. Listings sites could have been treated as estate agents, necessitating the checking of all user-generated content for accuracy.
Clearly, this was not feasible and not until 2012 did government propose to allow private sale ads by amending the Estate Agents Act and repealing the Property Misdescriptions Act. All this, of course, came too late for QpHomes which closed its doors in 2006. Tesco abandoned its Property Market in 2008 and sold the business to Spicerhaart.
Vivid Medianet Limited was renamed GoCarbonFree Limited in March 2007 and focused on the new GoCarbonFree website, a B2C points collection site which aimed to buy and ‘retire’ carbon credits through commissions on user’s shopping interactions.
Unfortunately, like QpHomes, this concept would also eventually be filed under the What might have been category.
Co-founded with Tony Sellen and Ryley Best on 30th January 2002, Allegran Limited developed Business to Consumer (‘B2C’) websites, including a daily ‘Win £1 million’ lottery (Loopylotto.co.uk was the 5th most popular ‘Gambling’ site in 2003) and a series of fast-growing and highly profitable, geo-enabled, online dating sites.
In retrospect, online dating was a peculiar sector to enter, having moved from a professional GIS services company into professional web development. However, a friend returning from a visit to the United States remarked upon the incredible growth in online dating the ‘other side of the pond’ so we decided to give it a go. Our first website, Loopylove.com, was developed within a month or two, ahead of a launch on 14th February 2003. Initial marketing came from free advertising on our lottery site, from which we gained around 50,000 geographically dispersed registrations across the UK.
In the early 2000s there were few dating websites and the biggest, Match.com, did not have a great understanding of the UK’s geography. There was a significant ‘Newport problem‘ where a search for a prospective partner in or around ‘Newport’ might bring in results from any of the UK’s 17 different Newports, spread as far apart as Cornwell and Caithness.
Using our knowledge of the UK’s postcode system, gleaned at our previous company Business Geographics Limited, we registered users with their postcodes – rather than their town names – and used coordinates from Postzon to provide localised searches within arbitrarily sized bounding boxes.
While this technique was not perfect, a search around an estuary might add extra miles to a meeting if there were no suitable bridges, it was much better than the extant situation. Consequently, along with some inspired Google Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing by Ryley, a pinch of luck here or there and a lot of effort as the company doubled in size every six months, we ended up gaining the largest share of the online dating market in the UK (~25%) within four years of our incorporation.
According to an old press release found on the WayBackMachine:
The Allegran network of sites Launched on Valentines Day 2003 with Loopy Love, offering consumers free registration and unique features, Loopy Love was an instant success.
In order to segment the market further and target an ever growing number of online daters Girls Date For Free and Pocado launched in December 2004. Girls Date for Free was targeted at those looking for fun and flirting whilst Pocado was targeted at the more sophisticated market. Dreams Discovered took the search for a serious relationship to a new level with the innovative feature of psychometric profiling in August 2005. Dating for Parents soon followed successfully capturing the single parents market in February 2006. Quick Flirt is the most recent addition to the impressive portfolio, providing daters with a photo rich experience and the ability to upload videos of themselves. It was launched December 2006.
In 2007 Real Business voted Allegran in the top 5 fastest growing companies in the UK. Now the market leader in on-line dating with a reach of 23% of the UK’s online dating audience with Girls Date For Free, the number one dating website in the UK, Loopy Love is 4th, Dating for Parents 3rd, Pocado 9th, Quickflirt 10th, and Dreams Discovered is the 14th most popular site in the UK. Source: Hitwise May 07.
Allegran continues to evolve and expand delivering new and innovative dating solutions to people looking to make connections throughout the UK.
By 2006 the company had revenues exceeding £14 million/year with exceptional profitability. It was sold in that year to Daily Mail General Holdings Limited (owners of the newspaper publisher DMGT) as the print media increasingly sought to add online titles and destination websites (dating, motors, houses etc.) to their stables.
The founding Directors exited the business in 2007. Allegran Limited, and the dating websites, continued under DMGH/DMGT ownership for several years before being transferred or sold to Antheia Services Limited, a company registered in Cyprus.
The sale of Allegran Limited de-risked the founders, enabling Adrian to return to academia and the others to pursue their own ambitions.
While the company glowed very brightly in just four short years it has been something of a relief to dispose of it. Doing so in 2006/2007 we avoided the Great Financial Crash of 2008, avoided the alternative of seeking an IPO and avoided having to learn how to programme mobile phone based applications!
