UK dotcoms: Two success stories
How is the venture capital scene for dotcom start-ups in Britain?
Hopeless, is what many a young entrepreneur will tell you, as they struggle to keep their businesses afloat without support from investors.
But two new businesses in the UK have proved in recent days that you can get funding if you have the right idea.
The online fashion site today announced that it had won £6m of funding, in a round .
My Wardrobe was started just four years ago by Sarah Curran, who once worked as a sub-editor on Times Online and then set up a real world fashion boutique in North London.
The UK has two other prominent online fashion retailers, and , but My Wardrobe has grown rapidly and its founder believes there is plenty of room in the market for all three.
"They're all targeting different audiences," she told me. "ASOS is very much late teens to late 20s, My Wardrobe is late 20s to 40 plus, and Net-A-Porter is 30 plus, high disposable income."
Unsurprisingly, Sarah Curran is far more positive about the venture capital scene in Europe than many entrepreneurs, but she says you have to be at the top of your game when you seek funding: "if you are passionate about your brand, you know your space, you know your product you know your business inside out, then people are far more receptive."
She admits that when she visited venture capital firms a couple of years ago, she did not find it easy to get a positive hearing. "A lot of the time I was still having to defend online shopping. I think now it's far more accepted."
The sale earlier this year of Net-a-Porter to a luxury goods group in a deal estimated to be worth £350m has helped investors see the value of online retailers.
The My Wardrobe founder says you also have to be at the right stage of your development when you approach VC firms - her business had its first month of profitability last November.
That's a lesson repeated by another UK success story. "You need to be aiming for a large exit and be addressing a big market," says , fresh from a fruitful encounter with .
He and some fellow Oxford students started a business called three years ago, which helps anyone with a club or a society organise its activities online.
It now has thousands of customers, ranging from sports clubs to churches, with more than half a million members between them.
What's more, unlike most online businesses, it's not entirely dependent on advertising - groups have to pay for the service once they have more than 250 members and GroupSpaces also earns revenue from handling payments.
Last week and a consortium of angel investors.
So David Langer too is optimistic about the UK venture capital scene, though he admits that it's still harder to get funding here than in Silicon Valley: "You need to prove certain things before you're in a position to raise money in the UK, which may be different to Silicon Valley where you may need fewer proof points."
Location still matters - Silicon Valley venture capital firms, with far more capital to dish out than their European counterparts, are unlikely to look very closely at firms which do not have at least an office in California.
But every time a My Wardrobe or a GroupSpaces gets funded, the outlook for other UK web firms gets just a little brighter.
I'm 
Comment number 1.
At 5th Jul 2010, Herm wrote:UK dotcoms? Surely you mean "dotcodotuks"? Well, admittedly that doesn't roll off the tongue.
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Comment number 2.
At 5th Jul 2010, Gwyn ap Harri wrote:...or don't get any VC, and do it yourself, like we did.
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Comment number 3.
At 5th Jul 2010, alexvan wrote:"Surely you mean "dotcodotuks"?"
I don't think so.
All of the sites discussed above are .com
All are UK businesses.
Therefore, they are all UK dotcoms.
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Comment number 4.
At 5th Jul 2010, Feedback wrote:To be honest, it's always been silly how we have .co.uk for UK domains. America has .com which doesn't make sense either, but pretty much every other country in the world that has a country suffix simply uses two letters.
France - .fr, Germany - .de, China - .cn, Tiawan - .tw, Italy .it, Russia - .ru, etc. So why isn't the UK domain simply .uk? What purpose does the .co serve? Maybe we should change all the .co.uk domains to .uk to prove we can evolve and we don't just stick with a bad idea simply because it's always been that way (and that's not even mentioning why some websites still require the www. prefix!)
bbc.uk - there, simple, easy, informational, no www. or .co needed and yet it still works. It's quicker to type, quicker to say and makes more sense. The Internet has evolved, lets us do it too.
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Comment number 5.
At 5th Jul 2010, James Rigby wrote:@#4
We have other domains like .org.uk .nhs.uk, etc, so the .co one serves a purpose as it distinguishes companies from other organisations.
As for .com, this was designed as the suffix for international companies. There is a .co.us for purely US companies - but no US company I've ever heard of uses it.
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Comment number 6.
At 5th Jul 2010, Lloyd wrote:Another UK startup with VC funding: . Plenty out there...
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Comment number 7.
At 6th Jul 2010, Kevin Campbell wrote:"To be honest, it's always been silly how we have .co.uk for UK domains."
You're right, it's very silly. Particularly as UK is the ISO code for the Ukraine. We should give it back to them immediately and start using GB instead.
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Comment number 8.
At 6th Jul 2010, Simon Hill wrote:Just as a wild tangent...... the .com domain was intended not as "US Company" but as "Commercial" - that's what it stands for. The fact that in the early days of the internet the vast majority of companies that had a web presence were US based has made it look like it is a US only domain.
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Comment number 9.
At 6th Jul 2010, johnw wrote:#8 Indeed, the internet was originally not intended to be split into national chunks, that was a later idea forced by various national telcos, many of which were still monopolies (and proud of it) at the time.
And we aren't just .co.uk; you've surely noticed .gov.uk, .ac.uk (academic institutions), and so on?
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Comment number 10.
At 6th Jul 2010, jamesingham wrote:@4, bbc.uk does not exist as you can not have just .uk as a top level domain.
@7, Ukraine have .ua for their TLD and .GB was supposed to take over .UK but never did.
And finally, .com does not necessarily mean it's a company based in the US, it stands for COMmercial!
Does any of this even matter?
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Comment number 11.
At 6th Jul 2010, DibbySpot wrote:In truth neither the banks or VC companies have much interest in any company other than its ability to pay back a very hansome reward for a little risk as possible.
The real success stories are those that do not rely upon VC at all. Love him or loath him Alan Sugar is not a VC darling just a guy who knows how to sell stuff people want to buy.
He is they type of person to put the great back in Britain.
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Comment number 12.
At 6th Jul 2010, Nick wrote:This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.
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Comment number 13.
At 7th Jul 2010, DT1984 wrote:"(and that's not even mentioning why some websites still require the www. prefix!)"
www. means your using http to access the site.
If you did away with that how would you distinguish been http - https - ftp??
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Comment number 14.
At 7th Jul 2010, Simon Tomlinson wrote:@13 - www. doesn't mean you're accessing a http site; that would be the ".
www. traditionally distinguishes between sub-domains on the webserver.
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Comment number 15.
At 8th Jul 2010, sagat4 wrote:You guys are funny. Why not comment on the story rather than obsessing with domain names?
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Comment number 16.
At 12th Jul 2010, marcdraco wrote:Venture Capital - other people's money that we're prepared to waste on your idea and we make a mint regardless if it succeeds or fails.
A politician in a different suit.
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Comment number 17.
At 7th Sep 2010, thinapesor wrote:This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.
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Comment number 18.
At 3rd Oct 2010, Gaz wrote:All this user's posts have been removed.Why?
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Comment number 19.
At 29th Jan 2011, U14767691 wrote:All this user's posts have been removed.Why?
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