SmokersLife - A Business precis - Seeking for investment and constructive criticism

[Madush Gupta]

SmokersLife is a lifestyle portal for smokers that centres around services that smokers would find invaluable in a world where they are actively discriminated against. This portal will be launched in the UK to serve the 12.6m smokers here and then followed by similar launches into France, Germany and Spain within a year. SmokersLife intends to launch in the United States in August 2007, utilising much of the same content with only white label dating and insurance. The US market is immense totally 40m smokers and a population of 300m. The market for our key products of insurance and dating (both for smokers) is very substantial and untapped in these countries (aprt form the US).

SmokersLife is a content led site that offers humour, bulletin boards and community facilities for smokers online. Areas of interest include beauty and anti aging tips for female smokers, offering good lead ins for products related to smoking. All these areas and many many more will drive traffic to the website, where we capture as much permissioned data as effectively as possible This database has significant commercial value – Experian has suggested the data could be worth between 50p and £1 per record on an annualised basis to Smokers Life. Much of this databse will be created through incentivised surveys of subscribers and friends email referral upon registration. Incentives will include and entertaining monthly newsletter. We will use survey and email segmentation technology from market leader Silverpop to convert and monetise this traffic over time. The initial registration answers given will determine the dynamic contents of an individuals email receipt, such as age, sex, cigarette brand smoked, paper read and even postcode. SmokersLife is currently seeking a sponsor for this piece of its financing jigsaw.

Smokers Life will offer forums for postings on venues / places to go that are most comfortable and suitable for smokers following the ban using Ning. SmokersLife is seeking an industry partner to sponsor the listings such as Carling or Fosters, someone who will be able to put large spend behind the venue listing piece.

SmokersLife will also offer a dating function for smokers (non smokers often prefer not to date smokers and smokers often date each other), this will be sourced through a white label service from match.com, one of the UK’s largest online dating companies. There are currently 350,000 smokers listed on the UK site of whitelabeldating.com. There will be an agony aunt on the dating piece written by a writer from the erotic review who will use the nom de jour – “the silken slut”. SmokersLife will sponsor speed dating events etc, in effect sending out the message that it is okay to smoke to this demographic. WhiteLabelDating.com will share all new member revenues driven by SmokersLife 50:50 on an ongoing basis in return for us driving traffic to their site. There will be many such branding opportunities afforded by the site that, if done intelligently, will not fall foul of the Tobacco Advertising Act. We have discussed and retained a legal opinion on this from SJ Berwin LLP, the leading UK media firm of solicitors.

SmokersLife will also sell insurances such as life, medical health, home contents for which the smoker pays a premium due to the associated increase in assessed risks. SmokersLife will offer the most competitve quotes for such insurances using a white labelling solution from www.comparethemarket.com. ComparetheMarket is one of the leading insurance white labellers in the UK, performing full service for organisations such as Sainsbury’s and Marks and Spencer’s. They will pay SmokersLife commission rates of 40% on all business written through our white label introduction and offer full support as well as taking care of all regulatory issues.

We will also offer smoking / dark humour and videos sourced from places like youtube. SmokersLife is also discussing licencing content from www.forestonline.org.uk, through both RSS (non SEO worthy) and article driven content. SmokersLife’s remit is somewhat different from Forestonline and they sit very well together as bedfellows, both with similar aims of forwarding the rights and well being of smokers everywhere. SmokersLife will send out a brief monthly email of humour / rants to entertain site subscribers. The purpose of this email is to keep the website in the eyes of subscribers. There are also opportunities for cigarette companies (rather than brands) to sponsor parts of the website etc, and we are currently seeking legal opinion on whether this constitutes promotion within the terms of the Tobacco Advertising Act.

SmokersLife has also had legal opinion that once a person has requested ongoing bulletins from SmokersLife, we are legally permitted to send these subscribers information on all areas of interest to smokers.

SmokersLife will also create a sponsored list of the best venues throughout the UK for smokers following the ban. I believe that the major tobacco companies have created these lists as they supply venues already and naturally are in a position to help populate such a database rapidly.

In short, SmokersLife intends to become the go to place for smokers on the internet, supplying goods and services tailored for a smokers needs.