The Concept

While for those of us involved it feels like it was years ago, Starting Out London is in fact a very young website. This is the second year we are running and we have evolved a lot since those first few lines of codes that very silently spoke the “Hello World”.

In the beginning…

Starting Out London was in the beginning just a very simple blog, detailing the brave adventures of a young intrepid hero that set out for London hoping to find work, as there were none available after he graduated with honour from University. The small town from where he came had been hit very hard by the recession, so there was no work to be found – what little there was had such fierce competition that the chances were even smaller to secure that job position once it became available.

During the first few months, our hero wrote about the excitement and thrill that you only have as a new member of a big city. Everything was magical, almost like that famous young wizard that dominated the first decade of the British culture. But even magic wears off when a recession is hitting as hard as a this most recent one did. Our hero found himself chasing after pennies everywhere to try and save, or in this case prevent too much money from “bleeding away”. This was when the concept of bringing all the discounts, stores, vouchers and local events together in one single place, so that others did not have to spend their evenings after a long hard day of work, just to be able to find some good deals on food, clothes or even music and concerts and even theatres. What good is there to live in a great cultural city such as London if you are not able to at least every now and then be able to go and see a theatre show?

In the middle…

Now bringing all these features together in one single place was not an easy task. Our main hero is far from a computer wizard so it went slowly in the beginning. What quickly became clear was that he did not want to look like everyone else that offers these things. Yes there are hundreds of them, but almost all of them scream spam at the top of their lungs and most of them just simply look awful. Once you are past that screaming and awfully spammy appearance, you try to find a deal you are looking for, but they do not have that particular item, discount or voucher you are trying to find. Instead you get offered a dozen other “similar” products and suddenly you browse all over their website, distracted from what you needed in the first place.

When the first few and brave merchants began contacting Starting Out London, they were hesitant to say the least. Apparently if they were to give away some form of discount, great deal or promote something Starting Out London had to have lots of visitors. Now that was something we did have. Just 5 short months after the website started, the average daily visits had grown to over 1200 per day. This was something most merchants approved of and the visitors has ever since then increased. There are still a few merchants that thinks that Starting Out London has too few members, so we are not yet allowed to have their bargains here, but that is…

In the future…

Where we have the aim to bring all merchants to this website. Without becoming an obstacle to our users. The main idea is still intact, remain a source of information, entertainment and ideas first – second is to help and offer great deals and savings.

Starting Out London is constantly developing and the community around it grows steadily. New ideas and new concepts are always tried out and (regrettably) slowly implemented. There are many great plans for Starting Out London during 2011, which is the year we aim to bring our subscribers to above 100 000. If you have not already done so, please subscribe to our email list, and please tell your friends and family to join. We are counting on you, the community, to help us stay our course and to become the best of the best. (We are already the best of course).