Smirking young faces with pierced eyebrows, dyed hair and goatees fill the offices of a booming Internet start-up company called Loquesea.com. It is a zany crew that puts out the hippest, sassiest Web site in Latin America for young people.
It is a dot-com company for the Latin MTV crowd, and it is growing so fast that its founders marvel at the wild ride.
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“Every week, it amazes me. Every month I look back at what I thought a month ago and I realize how small my vision was,” said Carlos Lizarralde, the company’s chief executive.
The pan-regional Internet company is one of the first to focus on Latin American youth ages 15 to 29, a coveted demographic. The company’s portals, which get a million hits a day, dish out unabashed talk about sex, drugs, music and fashion in irreverent, streetwise language. Images of scantily clad women abound, and articles are so graphic that they make older people blush.
“If you are over 30, we are not interested in you,” Lizarralde acknowledged.
The company has nurtured a defiant, cutting-edge attitude that is reflected in its name, which translates from Spanish as “whatever.com.”
Its owners are shooting for the stars in seeking a young Latin audience. The start-up now has five distinct Web portals. Two Spanish-language regional portals target youth in Argentina and Mexico, while a third aims at the rest of Latin America. A Portuguese-language portal recently opened in Brazil, and a “Spanglish” site aims for U.S. Hispanics. On the horizon are sites catering to youth in Colombia and Spain.
“Just as Amazon is to books and CDNow is to CDs, we want Loquesea to be to Spanish-speaking youth,” said Adriana Lozada, 28-year-old co-founder and creative mastermind of the company.
Analysts are watching closely to see if Loquesea.com will hook its young audience into visiting its sites loyally over the long term.
“It has an `on the edge’ type of content. I wouldn’t be surprised if they find a certain degree of success,” said Annika Alford, a program manager at IDC Latin America, an Internet research company. The “shock value” of its Web sites may draw new visitors, she said, but that alone will not make money.
“The bigger issues for me are how much advertising space they can sell, what plans they have for e-commerce and what kind of partnerships they have to drive traffic to their site,” Alford said.
So far, revenue is still in the planning stage, but the company hopes its sites will one day become the biggest virtual shopping mall in Latin America.
Getting teens to spend money through Loquesea.com will be critical to its success, said Erica Eppinger, an analyst at The Yankee Group, an information technology research and consulting firm.
“If I were Loquesea, I’d start to look at alliances with movie cinemas and with CD and department stores. Teens, while it’s a hot market, often don’t have the buying potential that the adult market does. Any site that targets teens is going to have to find an innovative way to sell to them,” Eppinger said.
Some unusual personalities stand behind Loquesea.com.
Lizarralde, 34, is a graduate of Hampshire College who dropped out of a PhD program in comparative literature to return to a business career in his native Venezuela. He started an information service for Venezuelans with assets abroad.
“It was a total failure for a number of reasons. I just didn’t understand enough about sales, marketing and what clients were looking for,” he said.
Later came a monthly newspaper for Venezuela’s Jewish community. That, too, fizzled.
Then Lizarralde met Lozada, who had returned from studying mass media in Canada. In 1996, the two started a weekly tabloid, Urbe, aimed at youth.
“We did it from scratch. We didn’t have any investors or anything. We did it out of a room at my parents’ place, with one computer,” Lozada recalled.
Within two years, Urbe was generating $1 million in revenue, and the two business partners brought it on-line, getting to the Internet faster than some U.S. publications such as The Village Voice.
They soon saw the potential to reach out to youth across the hemisphere.
While hundreds of portals have popped up in the United States trying to capture the youth market, Loquesea’s founders say the region has some cultural advantages. Latin youth tend to live with their parents longer, even while starting their careers.
“There isn’t as much difference between a 15-year-old and a 25-year-old in Latin America as there is in the States,” Lozada said.
“The older siblings don’t go away when they are in university, so the 15-year-old is right there next to the 20-year-old. They have a lot of contact,” Lizarralde added.
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Because their independence comes later in life, Latin youth often search for a sense of identity among like-minded peers more than their State-side counterparts. In a culture where Catholicism is strong, Loquesea.com stretches the boundaries and fosters experimentation.
“There are a lot of taboos in Latin America still. We are taught to take things for granted,” Lozada said.
So the portal’s founders looked for ways to generate a sense of belonging, providing fan clubs for 120 different musical groups, offering platforms to download a gamut of 3,500 free songs, sponsoring sex therapists and psychics as writers, offering 700 clever and often profane e-mail postcards, and hiring two MTV personalities–Jorge Andrade and Arturo Hernandez–to anchor a team of writers pumping out up to 10 fresh columns a day.
“The chat rooms are really the heart of this thing. It’s about community. It’s about interactive elements. You can vote on things,” said Jake Keaveny, the company’s vice president of production.
The company’s corporate headquarters are in New York, and there are offices in Miami and other U.S. cities. But most of its 150 employees–average age, 21–sit before computers in a chaotic office in downtown Caracas. Writers include skateboard fanatics, young fashion queens, sex maniacs, wits, sports buffs, general cut-ups and music hounds.
“They are not trying to figure out the target group. They are the target group,” Keaveny said.