A Business Card for Your Avatar

By partnering with online communities and building a geek-chic brand, an online printing startup sells business cards to people without businesses

by Kerry Miller

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Moo has carved out a new niche: selling business cards (or, more accurately, calling cards) to people who don't have businesses.

Since launching its service in September, 2006, Moo has shipped more than 30,000 orders to 140 countries.

Rik Panganiban -- or as he's known in Second Life, Rik Riel, ordered a set of Moo minicards to hand out at new-media meetups and conferences he attends.

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Richard Moross is the first to admit that his company, Moo, a London-based online printing service, seems a bit old-fashioned compared to the other Web startups coming out of venture-capital-rich Europe (see BusinessWeek.com, 3/1/07, "Techies Across the Pond"). Printing, as he's fond of saying, is a 500-year-old commodity business.

"It's quite simple to make a business card," says Moross, Moo's 29-year-old founder and CEO, and between veteran online printers, including VistaPrint (see BusinessWeek.com, 7/17/06, "Small Print Jobs for Peanuts"), Cafepress.com, and a whole crop of newer ones, like Qoop, there's certainly no shortage of dot-coms hawking customized business cards, greeting cards, and other paper goods for offline consumption. The challenge, Moross says, is to make those products "seem like more than just ink and paper"—in the same way that Apple's (AAPL) branding alchemy makes a computer seem like more than a machine. In other words: Make business cards cool (or at least geek-chic). And, so far, he's succeeding.

A New Niche

Since launching its service in September, 2006, Moo has shipped more than 30,000 orders to 140 countries. (Moo declined to give revenue estimates, and wouldn't disclose how many of those orders were for free 10-packs as launch promotions.) While that figure represents a tiny fraction of the $19 billion small-biz printing industry—VistaPrint, by comparison, ships an average of 21,000 orders around the world each day, with an average order of around $32—Moo has also carved out a new niche: selling business cards (or, more accurately, calling cards) to people who don't have businesses. Instead, they have blogs, online photo sets, and avatars.

By partnering with some of the Web's most popular online communities—photo-sharing sites Flickr (YHOO) and Fotolog, blogging platforms Vox and LiveJournal, virtual worlds Second Life and Habbo, and the social-networking site Bebo—the company has managed to get its cards in front of all-important early adopters, offering a level of personalization many didn't even know they wanted. At half the height of a standard business card, Moo's "minicards" offer a distinctive canvas, and for about 25¢ each users can put a different image on every single card they order, with a simple drag, drop, zoom, and crop.

Saul Klein, a venture partner at London's Index Ventures "the first investor in Moo" credits Moross for spotting the potential for paper calling cards amid the online social-networking craze and recognizing that "in an increasingly digital world, we still live a very physical existence."

Rebranding Through Partnerships

Even with that insight, the first name Moross came up with for the concept in 2004, Pleasure Cards, was a dud, as was the idea of printing key codes on them that would unlock a personal profile. "Our physical product was great, but our social software sucked," Moross says. "We realized there was no real point in building our own social software when we could plug into the emerging big platforms where people were already building communities."