It's been about seven months since social-recommendation app Mouthee launched allowing users to 'Rec' favorite restaurants, movies, music, books and hotels or 'Get Recs' from each other. The Doejo-designed and developedMouthee mobile app ties into the APIs of Amazon, iTunes, Yelp, Fandango, Last.fm and OpenTable to make discovering new passions simple, streamlined, and right at your fingertips. And we are proud to announce Mouthee's inclusion in tonight's Technori Pitch.
Co-founder David Pritzker will take the stage to demo the iOS app and introduce the web application component, also launching officially today. We spoke with David ahead of the pitch about Mouthee post-launch, what challenges he's faced as a startup entrepreneur and how he's benefiting from his residency at new startup hub 1871.
What has the feedback been since launching Mouthee?
The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive from users. And other people I've shown the app to they really love the design. From what we can tell from the analytics built in, people are spending a lot of time just on the feed. I think users like to just scroll through and see what other people are up to. It wasn't something we expected, we just thought it'd be a fun little feature; we thought people would use the "Get Rec'd" and search functions.
We're at around the 7,000-range of recommendations so far. This is something we did through zero marketing expense, strictly through word of mouth. The next phase for us is to start trying to get the word out beyond our own circle, do some marketing efforts, some PR, and use Technori as a catalyst for that also with the launch of the web app.
Users have also suggested we add categories, primarily TV shows and then products or shopping. TV shows may be simpler to do and a natural next step for us to explore, but shopping (like stores and boutiques) gets a lot more complicated. It's tougher because we like to make everything on the recommendation side as simple as possible.
You have to take suggestions and feedback and figure out what makes sense; you can't build a product that's completely customized to every single user, that's impossible.
Mouthee's also been a resident of 1871 for a few months, what benefits have you seen in that incubation space?
1871 has been such an incredible experience for me especially as someone who is coming in as a first-time entrepreneur to be able to observe what all these other companies are doing and talking to these people about strategies that are working for them. All the programming that is offered at 1871, they do such an incredible job at putting it together.
I kind of talk about the program there as 'the school for startups.' Everything you could possibly want to learn, there's going to be a course on it or another resident company you can talk to, networking events, or office hours, which are held daily and you can meet with everyone from venture capitalists to attorneys to people in PR and marketing, product and development, you name it. It's such a supportive and encouraging environment too, everyone seems to want to help everyone else out. They want everyone to succeed. The energy and attitude there towards helping these companies grow in anyway they can has been really incredible. That's on top of the fact that you can go into a place and set up shop is huge, access to WiFi, printing. The tough part of 1871 is deciding what not to do.
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