Springboard Startups: In a sentence, MiniMonos is a ‘Green Moshi Monsters for boys.”

The longer story is that this is a 2D virtual world for kids to have fun in (it’s focused on entertainment with green/sustainability themes, not education). MiniMonos has been going for two years and is led by an experienced team led by of CEO Melissa Clark-Reynolds, but only came out of beta last month. It’s growing at 20% per month and now has about 300,000 registered members. Revenue comes through subscriptions and microtransactions. The target market is 8-12-year-old boys.

Buy a virtual good inside the game and you contribute to a clean water supply for kids in India (14,000+ days to date), as well as adopting orangutans, supporting wild tigers, and other feel-good rewards. There are also in-world rewards for real-world eco-actions.

Why boys? Disney tends to target boys with TV shows as girls will happily watch boys’ shows, but not vice versa. But online, there’s lots of entertainment for girls, but not much for boys. So if you capture the boys online, you bring the girls along with them, thus increasing the value of the company.

Its four main countries are the US, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand; memberships is driven through natural traffic (word of mouth), Google Adwords, the Miniclip games aggregator site, and PR, via primarily kids’ television. The company has just launched TV commercials in the UK and will launch branded prepaid cards in Sainsbury’s in the UK in October.

The startups is shooting for a Series B funding round by the end of December. So why are they in the Springboard programme? A soft landing in the UK, they tell me, where the company is now incorporated.

BTW a “Mono” is a monkey in Spanish.