Friendtrend founders Tony Smith (centre) and John Walker (right) with new recruit Amy Burton

Last month I spoke to Tony Smith and John Walker, founders of a new social network for fashion called Friendtrend. I caught up with them this week to see how the development of the site has progressed.

“We don’t make our interns make the tea and coffee…we do it for them, isn’t that right Amy?”

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John Walker is typically enthusiastic as we discuss the next step for the social media startup Friendtrend. He’s referring to Amy Burton, an advertising and marketing student studying at the University of Central Lancashire who’s just joined the team.

“We needed someone who was business and marketing savvy”, chips in Tony Smith. “Amy comes up with all these ideas that I’d never think of myself, and you do start to realise that you do have to bring in specialised people to help expand the business”

The trio initially met as part of a Flux 500 bid, an enterprise competition that sends a team of students from each UK university to pair up with a business expert. The team are then given an idea for a business and then instructed to flesh out and run the idea over a course of three days as a legitimate business. The winning idea is awarded £500 per team member.

“It’s a bit like the Apprentice vs Dragons Den” says Walker.

“You have to pitch to 500 business leaders, so it can be fairly daunting. I was on the same team as Amy and thought that having someone to handle the Friendtrend was a great idea. Afterwards we got in touch via Twitter and then agreed to come on board”

Friendtrend has also gone live in the early stages of their site, launching a developers blog. The idea of the blog is to let users know what the team are up to as well as posting any upcoming job opportunities for Friendtrend (which are also posted through UCLan’s Northern Lights).

Walker also stresses that they are looking for web developers (particularly those fluent in Facebook Markup Language) to get in touch if they want to be part of the project.

I’ll be talking to Friendtrend again in a couple of weeks to see what’s next for the site before it officially launches. If you’re a small business or startup and would like to be featured, get in touch at joseph(at)blogpreston(dot)co(dot)uk.