About Calum Brannan

Brannan

Hello and welcome, my name is Calum Brannan. I’m a young entrepreneur and social media expert. My days in social media started from my bedroom when I was just 15.

I’m available for consultancy, business opportunities, speaking, drinks and writing. Feel free to read more about me below, or drop me a line here.

Background & Experience

PPLParty.com – 2005
I created www.PPLparty.com at the age of 15. PPLparty was a niche social networking website for party people. PPLparty experienced massive growth and popularity amongst the Gen-Y kids of the early 00′s. Using friend-get-friend principles and loads of hard work I managed to grow the user base on a marketing budget of £0 to way over 400,000 users. Realising I was on to a winner, I later dropped out of college and started to pursue the next steps of my career, which took me to London.
Trutap – 2006
In the early stages of the first decade a splurge of investor funded startups had started to emerge. This is when I was invited to take on my first professional role working alongside industry leaders and legends. PPLparty was running in the background and I had managed to outsource development and customer services to India, which left me to concentrate on what was next for me.
At Trutap (Started by Doug Richard, famed for his appearances in BBC2′s Dragon’s Den) I was the 2nd team member into the London office after the CTO. I left Trutap on my 18th birthday.
Back to the party – 2007
After my time in London; I made my way back to the midlands. Doug Richard and his team’s passion for technology inspired me to really go for it with PPLparty. When I got to Coventry I purchased my first apartment 5 days after turning 18. I received angel investment and began to formulate a plan which would see me launch my next startup: Youmeo.
Youmeo - late 2007 – 2008
After advertising revenue had hit it’s peak and was beginning to drop, PPLparty became Youmeo, where we set about on an exciting journey to innovate amongst the ever-growing numbers of social networks. We set about creating a service which would allow you to aggregate all of your social networks into one place. We managed to retain a 30% activity rate amongst our thousands of users and set about raising money.
The long year – 2009
Some 12 months after we launched Youmeo, American startup Friendfeed launched and was achieving massive growth doing what we were doing. The worlds a big place and we knew that we wern’t the only ones predicting this is how social networking would become. Friendfeed was setup by ex-Google employees, with it’s growth doing so well we had our innovation validated but we and we failed to raise next round investment we needed and failed to secure a robust revenue model. Our team and investors all walked away with our heads held high, we had pushed for inovation and many ways succeeded – but what an experience it had been.
Present day - 2009 to now.
Aged 20, I’m working on some very exciting ventures collaborating with some of the greatest minds in British business, some are already trading and generating healthy returns:
- Appointment-Toolkit; this service provides text message reminders and marketing to doctors, hairdressers and dentists.
- Social Helium: a social media consultancy business where current and previous clients include house-hold names, ‘AAA’ PLCs, charities and government organisations. We are social networking experts.
- Spendego – a new type of advertising agency for todays social media world.
My teams are regularly involved in roundtable discussions and consultancy with leading CTO’s, marketing directors, CLO’s and CEO’s from a range of companies including Simon & Schuster, Vodafone, Bebo, AGA, Lighterlife, Christian Vision, Yahoo and Glam Media to name but a few.

Recognition and Publicity

Recognition and awards include being named by the IOD’s Director magazine as their youngest ever “Director of the month”. I was lucky enough to be crowned as a trailblazer for Revolution Magazine, for my work with PPLparty.com. My ventures and entrepreneurial spirt have achieved full pages in major publications:

The Gurdian The return of the dotcom kids – but have investors learned their lesson?
The Observer Favour for PPLParty
The Financial Times From a classroom to the boardroom
Revolution Magazine Trailblazer: Club community
Director Magazine Director of the month: Calum Brannan
Management Consultancy http://www.managementconsultancy.co.uk/computeractive/news/2190749/pplparty-launches-clubbing

NMA magazine has also featured me on various occasions in articles such as: Social networks build up brand opportunities, Following the crowd, Mobile Networking and PPLparty gives clubs access to members.