When you say the words ‘innovative and exciting location based social networking platform’ you can literally see people’s eyes glaze over. It’s like when you’re on a first date and the girl starts talking about the village she grew up in and her family dog – you can’t imagine ever needing to know about this. However, if you’re talking to a recent student and follow it up with ‘we’re the people behind FitFinder’, their mind usually stops wandering and they suddenly get interested.
FitFinder was an app conceived in April 2010 by Rich Martell, a (then) 21-year-old computer science undergraduate studying at University College London (UCL). The site began, as many good things do, as an inside joke. Martell and his friends would text each other when they saw an attractive girl in the library (I know, I know… rugby lads, right?). The concept of telling the world about someone in a location planted the idea in his mind to create a website to allow people to do this more easily, and the first version of the site was put together in one evening. Alcohol was probably involved.
In a later interview, Martell quipped that ‘girls were never meant to find out about the site’. But find out they did, and in the first few hours the site had over 2,000 users and had to be taken down due to overcapacity. Once the site went back up, it had 20,000 visitors in its first weekend… and you thought students didn’t spend any time in the library at weekends. Within a month, the site had over a quarter of a million visitors and there was huge demand for the expansion of FitFinder to more universities across the UK. Ultimately though, Martell had to shut the site down as he was threatened with disciplinary action because the site was, quote, ‘too distracting’. Sigh.
In the second half of 2010, Martell received investment from Dragon’s Den star Doug Richard and Silicon Valley investor Kevin Wall to relaunch the site as Whinge It(a play on the word ‘flocks’, as the site maps where flocks of good looking people are) outside of the UK collegiate scene. The name change was needed due to the fact that some international users thought the site could be used to find local gyms. We know how those meerkats feel.
As we grew up and (dare I say…?) matured, we wanted to ‘graduate’ from posting about fit girls. Hence, Whinge It became less about posting a ‘someone’ in a certain location and more about a ‘something’, and has now become the umbrella name for our location platform. We’re building several new apps which will run off the Whinge It platform, but offer a totally new experience.
