I had a chance to speak with Bebo co-founder Michael Birch last weekend at the Founders Brunch event at Loic Le Meur’s house in San Francisco.
It was the first chance I’ve had to congratulate him in person for the $850 million sale of Bebo to AOL earlier this year. Most of our conversation was around the future, and what the Bebo founders will do next.
Birch was recently interviewed by the Telegraph and spoke about the history of Bebo. He was vague on his plans for the future, though, saying “I have thought about what I will do and the conclusion I have come to is that I will get bored quite quickly with day time television. I need to do something that continues to be challenging and interesting. I don’t have any great ambition to go out and make money. But I am still fascinated in starting up businesses and starting it in a way and running in a way that I want to do it.”
But Birch was more specific when we spoke, saying he’s planning on spending time growing Birthday Alarm, a site he founded with his wife Xochi Birch and brother Paul Birch in 2001.
Birthday Alarm is a relatively simply service – users create an account and are then prompted to send an email to all their friends asking them to simply tell the service their birthday. Birthday Alarm then notifies users by email or SMS when a friend’s birthday is coming up.
Lots of people who get those emails end up signing up for the service, too, which has allowed it to spread so virally (Birch says the service had 100 million users at one point). And the business model is pretty straightforward – offer users the ability to send birthday ecards for $14/year.
When the Birch’s started focusing on Bebo, attention to Birthday Alarm naturally waned. The service has since dropped to 50 million active users. But the number of paying users, around 300,000, has remained flat over the years. Those users bring in around $4 million/year in fees, plus additional revenue for advertising.
Birch thinks they can regrow the already profitable service by refining the product and focusing on marketing. This, at least, will keep them busy during the non-compete period they agreed to in the Bebo sale. During that time, he can’t set up any new social media-related business.
Well done Michael (Birch). One of the nicest and most down-to-earth entrepreneurs you could hope to meet.
4mil/year ?
i’m gonna shoot myself right now.
man this guy does brilliant business.
… and when you’ve been alarmed what’s more cool than saying happy birthday with http://www.Happ...hdayDomains.com
Wow, I didn’t know Bebo sold for that much – congratulations!
Re Birthday alarm, It’s amazing how much a simple service like that can make without much effort. We’re looking for an E-card service to integrate into Doorbell (sales software) and Buzzer (personal contact manager) on our SmibsNet. Michael Birch: Give me a shout at twitter.com/peterurban if you’re interested to offer options for integration.
A lot less useless with Facebook around!
I thought these guys where so poor before Bebo that they had to live in their parents house while working on bebo, no we hear that had another business making $4M/year? I don’t get it.
the future will have thousands of open social birthday app widgets that users will be able to use for free. glad the gentleman is still in the game. he and his wife have the financial momentum to become major players in the online world if they strategically place there bets in the right place. experience tells us that they know how to play the game and are Very Very Lucky as well. http://BirthdayLocator.com
LOL…
Mik is right… When I was a child (an orphan one) I was selling matches. That will be my story when I go BIG.
This is of course the way it’s got to be with every entrepreneur. They’re all guys working in their garages.
Delve Networks is still putting the pieces together on some of the functionality publishers have come to expect,
Michael,
I know this is ‘out of context’ here. Check out this ars-technica article about how journalists(bloggers) were threatened by Metallica:
http://arstechn...-our-music.html
A
If they really got 4m a year with the birthdayalarm business, they must have done pretty good marketing job among competitors. I guess, probably charging a fee rather than free service make them more appealing to users. Still hardly believe they earn 4 m a year for that simple and thin service, probably the tax office can tell.
It seems that the birthday alarm web 2.0 thingy is just plain unnecessary….
I mean, seriously, there are like 100 ways to remember someone’s birthday. It seems to me that making another widgety web two point o-eey website for it is a waste of time.
$4 million a year says that it is neccessary.
web 2.0 Rulez
I am a Paid member, but have not been able to pull up their website for the past 3 months or contact anyone at the company due to no listings. It would be great if someone would contact me so that I can use their service again, especially since i paid for a whole year!! Does anyone know the company phone number?