How I turned a simple search for friends into my full-time job
Pippa Moyle can still remember the butterflies in her stomach the day she overheard some girls on the bus talking about the perfect hairdresser they found through one of her online communities — a community she had created out of boredom.
Eight years ago, Moyle, now 31, decided to ease her postgraduate boredom by creating a Facebook group for girls in Brighton.
A simple (and successful) search for friends led Moyle to launch City Girl Network in 2016. This online social network now brings together 18 city communities and 125,000 members across the UK.
Like so many other entrepreneurs, Moyle didn’t set out with a detailed business plan or financial forecasts.
City Girl Network started as a hobby, and its transition into a business seemed to be the product of an organic (and somewhat unplanned) vision.
Numbers began flooding in as members searched for jobs, hobbies and housemates in other cities too.
Moyle says her first ‘meet up’ in Brighton — a community still known as Brighton Girl — was the beginning of a long learning journey, but she never once expected her newfound hobby to turn into what is now her full-time job.
In fact, she didn’t even know how it could end up making her any money at all.
Establishing the business model
“I needed to pay my bills,” Moyle chuckles when asked what drove her to turn City Girl Network from a hobby into a financially viable business.
The young 20-something founder got to thinking – if her members are already finding the “perfect hairdressers” and “friendly car mechanics” through genuine recommendations, why not bring the brands directly into the mix as well?
“We are a force worth advertising with,” she thought as she watched her communities grow bigger and bigger. She just needed to prove it.
She started incorporating in-person events into the mix. It turned out that people wanted more than a few online friends — they wanted personal connections, too.
Moyle says advertising now remains City Girl Network’s main source of revenue – that is of course, if the brands share the same uplifting and empowering values that the communities do.
Giving it your all
Just last July, Moyle put in her notice for her part-time lecturing gig at BIMM Brighton University to focus on City Girl Network full-time.
“I wasn’t 100 per cent into it because I was so scared about getting it wrong,” she says, wondering why it took her so long to take the leap and make it her all.
Once Moyle quit her day job, the results started to show – she has now doubled the revenue and brought on her first full-time employee.
Moyle laughs in hindsight at the thought of how little she knew about business models in the first place.
“It really was like business school 101,” she adds.
But having recently landed herself a front-row seat on the latest list of the UK’s 100 most inspiring female entrepreneurs, she doesn’t seem to be too surprised.
Moyle admits that she has always been what one would call a “business-minded” creative – she just never knew how to push it forward.
She even recalled her early ambitions to start her own magazine — and as a journalist who can relate, it is a pretty big ambition.
For now, City Girl Network seems to be the closest Moyle has ever been (so far) to making her magazine dreams come true.
Her next venture even shines the spotlight on the UK creative industry through a new professional development platform, City Girl Creatives.
“I think I’ve always wanted to create a business in some way,” Moyle says.
“It wasn’t like, I want to work for a business that does x, it was I want to create a business that does x.”
Now, with more (or questionably less) time on her hands, Moyle says 2025 looks to be a year full of surprises – maybe even with the launch of another new ‘tech platform’ on the way, too.