SecretBuilders – a Club Penguin clone without the penguins
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SecretBuilders.com was announced about 10 days ago as a virtual world aiming to connect children, parents and teachers together for fun learning experiences. Since then its getting a lot of traction and press – this has been a pretty hot space since Club Penguin was acquired by Disney for $700M.
The virtual world is pretty much identical to Club Penguin without penguins – the major additions to it is perhaps more structured quests and learning opportunities, and the chance for children to create content using photos, essays and more which then becomes part of the world – no doubt a good viral mechanism to keep interest in the long-term.
This is a venture of Umair Khan, founder of Folio3 and Clickmarks, and has raised US$2.4M from various investors, and currently claim to have about 5000 users…. although traffic details here suggest less than that in regular users. Still, word’s just getting out so I expect the site to have good organic growth.
We were going to write in more detail but you can get more info from Jehan here and here – although I’d take the hyperbole there with grains of salt (e.g. the 5000 users is based on two months of live user testing, not 6 days and doesnt really imply taking the online world by storm just yet… 300,000 users would do that).
1:03 pm
any idea if this was built in PK? venturebeat says bulgaria
4:46 pm
No idea… could have been the folio3 team. I havent seen art-design this good locally though so Bulgaria is believable too
5:24 pm
One of my friend named Shakil Awan(Sr. Producer Visual Content at folio3) worked on this project, nearly 80% of artwork was designed by him.
6:13 pm
Very nice
1:00 am
Hi Osama. Many thanks for the review. It has been truly gratifying and humbling to see the positive response from parents, teachers and children worldwide. As you have pointed out, it is just a small step in a long journey but an important one and the response shows we are headed in the right direction.
We did in fact go, in 6 days, from being ranked in the 3 millions pre launch (our closed beta was across a very limited user base), to a top 200,000 site (per Alexa’s weekly average in “traffic details”).
But our success is in the grass root support and not in the traffic stats. What is amazing is to see a teacher blogging about us in Italy, and a 10 year old girl voluntarily presenting Secretbuilders at her school in Glasgow Scotland.
With support from all of you, the grass root momentum, we hope, will continue to grow.