Q&A with Raved - socializing business discovery

Last month we checked out a social business discovery app called Raved, which takes Facebook likes from friends, and cross references them with local businesses to offer users a categorized list of shops vouched for by those they know. We had a chat with Raved CEO Henry Vogel about making the app and the particular challenges businesses face with location-based marketing.

Hi Henry, thanks for your time.Is business discovery a problem that needs to be solved?

While there are other services focused on local business discovery, we believe no one has yet leveraged one of the best sources of recommendations: your friends. And beyond discovery, storing and easily accessing those recommendations along and key place info on mobile devices where users most often need it, remains quite cumbersome.

Since time immemorial, people have turned to their friends to get trusted referrals. Everyone has various go-to people they turn to in order to learn about great places. It could be finding a great restaurant or hotel when visiting a new location, discovering a new store with great products or special deals, or just being in the know on whats trendy or where to experience something special. Everyone wants to discover those gems in the rough and its usually our trusted friends and tastemakers we know who are the source. But remarkably, those recommendations arent reallystored in one easy place today and accessing/requesting them via existing social networks or review sites is still very difficult. Requests for help in Facebook or Twitter can get quick replies, but those recommendations can just as quickly get lost in the raging river that is the Facebook timeline or Twitter feed. And, users still have to search and fumble around, especially on their mobile devices, to find out the info about those places. Raved makes in infinitely easier to browse, request, store and access friend recommendations for great places on your mobile device.

How do you expect people will use social recommendations as opposed to community-basedones, such as Yelp, or straight-up business listings through Google searches?

We believe our social recommendation platform will augment other sources of information, like thegreat reviews on Yelp, to help consumers discover, save and share great places with their friends. Users are primarily leveraging Raved to solicit, organize and easily get recommendations from friends, but they can just as easily access other useful content and community-based reviews from our business partners to add depth to their decisions. And since users can save all of their favorite places within Raved and access all of this useful information in one app, Raved is quickly becoming the most convenient way for consumers to discover, save and share great places to eat, drink, shop, and get things done when theyre on the go.

Mobile couponing is still very much in its infancy, but Raved has a dedicated tab for it inevery business listing. What are some of the roadblocks for businesses on this front?

No doubt, mobile couponing is still in its infancy. That said, we see the adoption of mobilepromotion growing at a very rapid and accelerating pace. You dont have to look much further thanhow quickly traditional coupons and deals for local establishments newspaper inserts and ads,coupon booklets, direct mailers, yellow page offers, etc. moved online than to project how quicklythe transition to mobile will occur. Moreover, we believe the transition to mobile will happen evenmore quickly as this trend will simply follow the clear and rapid transition of where consumers are
spending most of their time on their mobile devices. We also believe that integrating mobilecoupon discovery and redemption into Raveds personal directory will help accelerate thisadoption. Presenting offers where users go to find their favorite businesses and the great placestheir friends recommend at the time when theyre looking for where to go, adds a tremendousamount of convenience and value. While users can search for coupons online or sift through offersin various emails cluttering up their inbox, its hard to find them when they need them - whentheyre out and about and making that all important driveway decision about where to go.

Were already beginning to see some of this rapid adoption. In addition to the rapid growth of Facebook offers which we integrate seamlessly into Raved, we also aggregate tens of thousandsof offers via partnerships with several great companies including: Local Offer Network, SignPost,Sqoot, restaurants.com and others. With over 4 million Raves for nearly 1.5 million unique placesalready in our network and growing exponentially, theres definitely a lot more deals we need tosecure in order to present relevant deals and offers for all of them. But, were excited about thefuture growth prospects and confident in our ability to deliver ever more valuable information toour users.

Raved leans heavily on Facebook and Foursquare for functionality. What were some of thedriving forces behind this decision, as opposed to building out a business listing and socialnetwork of your own?

The decision to build on top of Facebook goes back to the core of what inspired us to build Raved.Our goal from the start was to help users more easily discover great places based on their friendsrecommendations. There is no social platform better than Facebook with whom to achieve thisgoal.

First, Facebook has the broadest network of users and their friends. Its where the most peopleconnect with their friends. Period. And while many other apps are trying to create their ownsocial networks, we think there are enough out there already and Facebook is the clear winner,at least for now. We also didnt want to add any effort to get started or require users to find andfollow their friends again to begin getting value from Raved. Second and unlike most other
services that rely on user-generated content get activity, input, reviews and recommendations,the Facebook platform is also significantly more powerful. Facebook has broken the typical 80/20 rule where 20% of users (or sometimes even a lot less) contribute 80% or more of the content.

Even Foursquare - with whom weve also integrated and based on the data were seeing - tends tofollow this pattern where a very small minority of users actively check in regularly, write tips andcompete for badges and such for local places. With Facebook, its actually the inverse.

In just the past month since we launched on Apple and then Android just two weeks ago, the Ravednetwork has grown to several thousand users and nearly three hundred and fifty thousand friendsin the network. On average, the initial Raved user is bringing with them over four hundred friendsfrom Facebook. And nearly two thirds of the users and their friends in the network have raved at least one local business. In fact, the average is between 10-15 raves per user. So in a very shortperiod of time, we have provided new and easy access to over four million total Raves for nearlyone and a half million unique local businesses. And, were doubling the growth of this network
almost every two weeks.

How many other social networks are you looking at integrating?

As long as there is incremental value for our users, we are interested in integrating additional socialnetworks. Twitter is one we are definitely planning to integrate. LinkedIn also offers a very robustnetwork of professionals. Were also evaluating Google Plus, Pinterest, Foodspotting and others.

What can we expect next from Raved?

Our product roadmap is teeming with awesome new features and ideas that we want to take from our white boards to users mobile devices. One idea were very excited about because users havebeen trying to use the app for this is a Get Raves Q&A feature. This will allow ravers to ask theirfriends for help dynamically building Raved Lists of great places in response to questions theymight ask like wheres a great sushi bar in San Francisco? or whats a great museum to take thekids for an afternoon in New York? While friends can ask these questions on Facebook or other platforms today, getting access to these recommendations wherever you are and whenever youwant, especially down the road, isnt as easy. And having all of the relevant information about those places right at your fingertips still takes time to search for and accumulate. Its a natural extensionof what were already seeing our users leverage Raved for and furthers our mission to help friendsdiscover, save and share great places together.

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