How did Tiffany Philippou do it? The story is as follows: A 21 year old just graduated girl -looking for an internship- sets up a Facebook page about London and attracts 200.000 people in a month, and now already thinks about a global publishing empire...(and been approached for an acquisition).

How did you come up with the idea of your start-up? And why starting on Facebook?

I had no idea this was going to become a start up so it is all a series of lucky events! The Facebook group was originally started as part of the recruitment process for Saatchi & Saatchi. For the first round of applications for their summer internship, they challenged applicants to start a Facebook group for the first round.  The challenge was to try and get the most members into your group. The idea of secretlondon came simply from me wanting to find out more about my city, with the challenge in mind! And so on the 19th January I started secretlondon on Facebook and one month later I had turned it into a website as a consequence of the group's popularity and cries from members of the Facebook group for this to happen.

Here are some stats how it happened:

The Facebook group started on 19th Jan 2010, it now has 204,000 members.
195,000 of those in the first few weeks.
Website launched on 16th Feb.

How did you form your team?

I was fortunate enough to reconnect with a former colleague, Demetrios, who had started a company called onefinestay. We decided to work together to build secretlondon.

How did you fund it, with how much money, and what is the business model?

We built the website over one weekend with a some 50 of London volunteers for the small cost of £3K. I detailed the costs in our SecretLondon blog. We’re still working out the details of a business plan. We think there may be some ways to make enough to support the costs of running the site through unobtrusive and relevant advertising, but we will need to do it in a way that doesn’t impinge on people’s experience using the site, and doesn’t get in the way of the community.

What is the magic of getting a huge audience so quickly? What were those people doing before you came by?

Social media is still a bit of a dark art that no one truly understands. In the case of secretlondon, it was clear that through my own desires to find out more about London by simply asking Londoners, I revealed a gap in the market. Platforms such as Facebook have revolutionised methods of communication and information exchange. People want to be in a constant dialogue with each other, and social media creates the tools to let that happen.

I think what happened with secretlondon it picked up on a latent desire from people to find out and exchange the secrets of their city with each other. Editorial is all well and good, but this is a new way to choose where to go out and what to do. The group went further than what's on when. It became a strong community which was about swapping experiences of the city, to where their favourite park bench is, to uploading photos of London people had taken on their way.

What makes you different from other players in your sector? Time out must want to buy you already?

We’ve been approached by several of the large players in the sector. We think secretlondon offers something distinct from what’s available today: it’s about Londoners inspiring each other, not just about reviews or trying to create an ‘objective database’ of what’s available.

What was your biggest challenge during the development process and how can other start-ups learn from that?

The work has only just started! The hard part is not building a website, but to understand that you are working with clay, and good websites are ones that are constantly improved over a period of many months and years. We are just at the very start.

When will you be profitable?

It’s a bit early to say!

Where is the company in 1 year?

We hope the site will go from strength to strength. We would love secretlondon to become the place that Londoners go to inspire and be inspired.

Any secret in London that is not yet on your website?

Probably many, we've set a new challenge to London, as more secrets are revealed, more will appear!