BC Business
Co-founder and Chief Business Development Officer
AGE: 29
COMPANY: Vancity Buzz
“Vancity Buzz keeps revenue figures close, but Bahia says they’ve increased threefold since August 2014”
The story: In 2008, Manny Bahia founded Vancity Buzz—a blog with news about the city and its suburbs—with childhood friend Karm Sumal while studying business administration at SFU. The pair—peeved at Vancouver’s “No Fun City” reputation and dismayed by the sparse number of blogs dedicated to “positive news” about Vancouver—launched the site as a side project while Bahia pursued a career as a real estate agent and Sumal worked as a barista and then accountant at Blenz Coffee. Vancity Buzz’s big break came during the 2010 Olympics: with no press passes, no special access and no training as journalists, the two principals hustled to copy and reformat information from the VANOC website onto their own while pumping out highlights over Facebook and Twitter. Last December, the site hit five million monthly page views (by comparison, the Vancouver Sun receives around 22.6 million views per month). Bahia and Sumal have since made Vancity Buzz their full-time gig, with Bahia taking on the sales and admin role—hiring staff, selling ads and marketing partnerships, and launching new products (including the recent restaurant guide).
Markers of success: Vancity Buzz keeps monthly revenue figures close, but Bahia says they’ve increased threefold since August 2014 and are now in the six figures. (“Our revenues are in hockey stick mode right now,” he says.) —Jacob Parry
Meet Manny Bahia and the rest of the 2015 30 Under 30 winners at this year’s celebration event!