Elevator Pitch: Erepublik offers a real second life

If online fantasy games are just too ethereal for you, and social networks too social - Erepublik could be the answer. It's an online representation of the real world, in which you participate as a soldier, politician or worker and have 30 days holiday a year.

In the real world, Erepublik was founded exactly a year ago in Madrid, with its research and admin team in Bucharest, Romania and employs ten full-timers. Next month they begin their first funding round, and co-founder Alexis Bonte tells us more.

Erepublik.com co-founder and chief executive Alexis Bonte

Explain your business to my Mum.
"Erepublik.com is a massive online multiplayer social strategy game a mix between a social network and a strategy game set in virtual version of the real world. Yes, I know - my Mum doesn't get it either but my little brothers totally do."

How do you make money?
"Erepublik's business model is based mainly on virtual goods sold to users; internal advertising from users and external advertising to brands."

What's your background?
"My co-founder Georges Lemnaru and I have a strong internet experience. I was part of the lastminute.com adventure for six years - from IPO to $1bn sale - in various roles, the last one being managing director for the Italian market.

"George is a real eastern European entrepreneur, launching the first and now largest health web store in Romania from his grandparents' bedroom while he was studying economics."

"After three months of private invites for the beta version, there are now more than 12,000 citizens from 43 countries using Erepublik daily. They spend about 14 minutes everyday on Erepublik (about 5.5 million monthly page views) which is an excellent ratio. We have more than 5,000 people on our waiting list and are aiming for 140,000 citizens by the end of the year after we open up the site in May or June."

What's your biggest challenge?
"Getting new functionality on the site according to our release plan and responding to our community's wishes. At the moment there are 10 people in the team but in reality its 12,000 citizens that are building the Erepublik world every day. That's amazing in such a short period but also kind of scary."

Who is your competition?
"Erepublik is a new concept, so there is nothing like it out there that we know of at the moment. But you could say we compete with all other forms of entertainment for our users' time and attention and in particular classical strategy games, browser games and virtual worlds."

What's the weirdest business experience you've had so far?
"Just one week after our successful launch (3000 users in one week), we had to deal with hacker attack and we got help from one regular user called 'Pokemon JoJo'! We solved the problem quickly thanks to him, so you could call that social network rescue."

"If I really had no choice then I would probably invest on the internet video market. I really think Youtube is just the beginning kind of, like the first version of Yahoo search."

Where do you want the company to be in five years?
"Our aim is to be one of the top three online games in the world with a larger population than Portugal living daily in the Erepublik world. And why not get United Nations recognition? That would be nice..."

Are you the next big thing?
"Well I'm over 6.3ft and George is also quite tall so I'd say yes...

"Erepublik aims to be to online strategy games what World of Warcraft is to online role playing games. I'd say that's big."



What do you think? Potential for greatness?