Not working for Google changed my life

ALICIA NAVARRO says the job that changed her life was the job she didn't get at Google.

In 2006, Navarro, who grew up in Australia but had spent four years in the UK, was contracting in Sydney when she came close to breaking the promise she'd made to herself never to work for a big company again. Google had a lot of good people and sounded kind of fun, and so, torn, she went for an interview for a project manager waving her IT degree from the University of Technology Sydney. And a second. And a third, a series that took a whole day. During that day someone asked her to come up with a product idea and talk about how she would market it.

Stumped, she pulled out an idea she'd had some years before, about creating a site to help people make decisions, based on the trouble she had organising a group holiday and finding an apartment to rent with her boyfriend. Both projects required a lot of laborious planning, email consultation, and comparison shopping. Her idea: a site that would let you browse the Web normally but help organise and share all the strands.

She started to explain this and, "It came together, because in the intervening years the user-generated content revolution had happened, and in that second I saw how it could work in today's Web economy. I got increasingly excited, and at the end of the interview I realised I don't want this job, I want to do this. She didn't get the job, "and I couldn't have been happier."

Skimbit is the result. At the beginning she continued working full-time in Australia, giving evenings and weekends to Skimbit. "I got a company in Romania involved in development, which was convenient since I could only work at night, when they were waking up. " All this was self-funded, and given that "Australia is not a hotbed of entrepreneurial activity," she wasn't sure what to do next when a six-week holiday took her to the UK.

"It was life-changing," she says. "All on one day I met my friend, who sits opposite, an experienced entrepreneur who said, why don't you turn this into a white-label service so you can offer it to other Web sites to use." He got her a meeting four days later – she spent the weekend frantically writing a business plan and borrowing a suit – with Wedding TV and some free office space.

"There was the miracle where they said yes, we love the concept." That one " yes" funded the development of the product. She went back to Australia for a month, moved out of her flat, sold her car, and squeezed saying goodbye to family and friends in between writing specifications.

"That was last September." Currently, Navarro is trying to close the first round of "proper funding" so the company can hire more people and "do the things I'm bursting to do".

To make Skimbit a white-label service, "We had to create a site where everything that can be customised is a variable you can set by customisation." For the future, Skimbit wants to connect all the publishing sites so that "If you are a Skimbit.com user you can access your content on any of our other publishing sites with a single sign-on, so your project is syndicated across the network." Also tricky was building a system Skimbit hopes to patent that uses affiliate links from the content users create so that both Skimbit and its partners gain revenues. "The technical sophistication behind that is incredible because we have to make sure the rewriting of the URLs is done correctly."

Skimbit was picked as one of 20 promising social media start-ups to present itself in San Francisco. There, she was asked how her service was socially sustainable or responsible. "I want to be part of the movement to help people trust the Web again," she told them. "There's a real danger that where we're heading is that people become disillusioned because it's so hard to find something." µ