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I've tried 'em all (all = location-based apps) and I'm a BobbyPin fan. Why? It's just so simple.
BobbyPin is a *simple* way to keep track of your favorites places and share them with friends. You can pin places to remember, add notes or tips about them, and easily organize them into collections of lists/maps. Follow and repin your friends' recommendations to your own maps, and share maps with anyone via the web whether they’re a registered user or not.
@avimillman to be honest, I've seen several apps for "saving" places and friend recommendations but I'm skeptical this is that big of a problem. I could be wrong but aren't most people satisfied with their current solutions (e.g. Foursquare, Yelp) and habits (sharing cool places with friends IRL or through social media)?
@rrhoover hey Ryan. Great question. There are a lot of folks playing in this space for sure. I tend to agree with you that the jury is still out regarding the best way to get local recs. But we actually came to the idea for BobbyPin very organically not out of a need we perceived for ourselves. Last year we created a tour-building interface for Stray Boots (an app for self-guided tours) that let users plot locations, add cultural and historic info, and publish a tour to our app. But it turned out that most users wanted to plot a map of their favorite spots and share that with friends really easily. It was as if the google My Maps wasn't simple or shareable enough and very difficult to get back to the maps you create. Same was true of Foursquare and some other tools that let you do that. So we tweaked our tour builder and made it into "stray boots maps" last summer. People liked the simplicity of it as a way to geolocate your favorite locations and share via a URL that anyone could access. That was the basis for the concept. But then we realized that at scale it would be much more convenient to look at maps from friends than to pour over reviews of the maps were available. So i think the question is can you get enough people in the community contributing content to make a social approach work. That's our aim. To make adding pins and creating collections easy and quick so we can have a denser community of contributors and tighter networks. Repinning places easily is one way we want to assist that. And generally simpler interfaces is another. We still have a lot of simplifying to do as some areas need to be more intuitive. But I do think it's interesting that most people I talk to about using yelp don't actually like it and find it frustrating. So I do think something will replace it. Whether that's something social or something more about taste mapping like Foursquare is pioneering is a big question for me.
@avimillman and I meant to add that I think all of us making tools for bookmarking places on maps does show a market need for a simpler tool to do that. And that's what we heard from users when we made a tour-building tool. Whether or not that's a big enough idea on its own rather than just a feature is a good question. I tend to view it as a feature. Ultimately the referencability and searchability of the bookmarked places is critical.
Hey Product Hunters! Thanks for posting BobbyPin @MorganBeller and thanks to the community.
I’m Avi Millman, the CEO and Founder of BobbyPin. Our long term mission is to make it so none of us ever have to read long, conflicting reviews ever again by creating a simpler way to get suggestions from your friends. You’re probably already trading recommendations with your friends by email, text, Facebook, and good old fashioned word of mouth. Now you can store them in one place, easily see them on a map, and reference them anywhere you go on any device.
The iPhone app makes it easy to reference yours and your friends’ spots easily on the go and add nearby spots on the fly (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/...). The desktop interface makes it simple to add lots of spots and notes at once (www.bobbypin.co). While you can’t currently add content via the mobile website, it makes viewing, saving and sharing maps on the go easy.
Here’s an example of a map I made to keep track of different types of good date spots around NYC when I was a bit more active on the Tinder: http://www.bobbypin.co/p/r72kg. Feel free to save it, repin spots, or share your own map in the comments (I’ll be in SF this fall and could use some good spots to eat).
We know we have a long way to go, so we’d love your feedback - the good, the bad, and the ugly. Thanks again for having us. -Avi.
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@avimillman Avi, how is this different than Mapstr? Also, your Facebook login on your iOS app is not working...
@gizboz1 that sounds like the "bad and the ugly" - can you send a screenshot of the error to me. Here's my email: avi@bobbypin.co. Re Mapstr, one major difference is that we have a website, and we think the web is important for a couple reasons. First, our desktop website makes it really easy to add a bunch of places at once given the full keyboard and general ease of use of a desktop interface. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, you can share any map via the web with anyone and it's accessible on any device whether someone is a registered user or not. So we think that lets users share their stuff with non-users very easily no matter what device you're on. Some other subtler differences I'm happy to chat about as well. Love what those guys are doing, though, too, and definitely think we're addressing a similar need.
@catch2finish Hey Marc! Thanks for the shout out. How could I forget. I was literally walking you guys through screenshots of designs with arrows. Give it a spin and let us know what you think!
Hey guys! Jason here, we're definitely aware that there's a lot of competition from similar companies in this space as @rrhoover has cited. I'm curious what the ProductHunt community thinks. Are there so many upstarts trying to solve the local business review problem because there's a legitimate shortcoming with the existing paradigm or are we collectively imagining a problem where none exists? or is it that the problem is real but the switching costs are too high? A penny for your thoughts.
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@js0n Think there's a real problem to be solved. But do think that most approaching it aren't as focused on figuring out the distribution strategy/product features/etc that breaks the network effects of something like Yelp
@kevinakwok Totally agree. We actually think the quality of the network is going to be as valuable or more valuable than some aspects of the tech or exactly how the features are executed. Those details are very important, and we spend a lot of time on them, but it is the network effects that ultimately tend to unseat incumbents (e.g. Tinder > Match, LinkedIn > Monster, WhatsApp > Skype). A simpler UX and getting network effects.
We're trying to put the emphasis on getting your friends on board so you can see their recommendations. We hope that creates a virtuous cycle whereby people bring aboard their friends and their experience improves as a result. We don't want you to have to browse the community at large if you can get something from a friend. But that requires a fairly dense network, so you have enough friends. Getting that early momentum and overcoming the initial inertia is certainly a challenge for any upstart social network, which we'd consider BobbyPin to be.
Interesting angle among the location based apps - good job! A very specific question but I'm curious: When founding and developing this app, did you consider Swarm as one of your competitors?
@oscarrundqvist Thanks for the question, Oscar! We've definitely given a lot of thought to both FourSquare and Swarm. In fact, they're both pioneers in terms of what we're trying to accomplish. A lot of people have suggested we should gamify BobbyPin (our parent co Stray Boots is actually gamified), but we thought that part of the challenge of FourSquare going truly mainstream has been its association with gamification. We believe that's ultimately why they split up their apps, so FourSquare could try to appeal to a broader audience like Yelp and TripAdvisor do. We've shied away from overt gamification because we think there should be other ways to engage users and make the value more about sharing local recommendations socially than about playing a game....
We currently think user stats such as how many followers, repins, saved maps, etc you have will likely add a hook (and probably need to be played up within the app and website more than they are today). So perhaps our angle is more along the lines of Instagram or Pinterest, where you get your positive reinforcement from other users liking your stuff, rather than competing to go to the most places. But our ADD PIN feature is in some ways like a check in, in that you can add the spot where you are at. In that regard we're competitive with Swarm. We have to give credit to FourSquare/Swarm (Gowalla too!) for pioneering that idea. But we're not about broadcasting your location at that very moment, or about awarding badges / winning mayorships. So you can use BobbyPin if you are someone worried about sharing your current location or if you aren't into games and still get lots of value.
So we'd probably view the FourSquare app as more competitive now since they've stripped out the game elements, as it is trying to crack the local recommendation nut. But we see that app going more and more in the direction of big data and taste mapping, rather than getting recommendations directly from friends (though that's supported as well). That makes sense for them, since they have a tremendous amount of data and their social network isn't quite dense enough to always serve up a recommendation from a friend. We see it as a bit of a different approach to a similar problem. We're hoping to learn a lot from both apps in terms of what has worked and what hasn't.
@avimillman Thank you for your answer Avi, very interesting to read. I think definitively that there is more potential with location based apps than FourSquare/Swarm has managed to get out of it. Interesting to hear your thoughts on the gamification part - I think it is a very smart move to not include it in BobbyPin! Again; thanks for a good app and interesting thoughts!
@oscarrundqvist Thanks for the thoughts! Appreciate it. If you give BobbyPin a try and have any product feedback for us, we'd love to hear it. We know we haven't nailed it quite yet, so hearing from users is really important at this stage.
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@js0n The Yelps of the world are ultimately advertising platforms that will fail without a constant influx of certain kinds of traffic & reviews. Does a user who creates and shares a map of her favorite places help Yelp out? Not really - so they haven't prioritized that. Your customer is not Yelp's customer. It sounds like you pivoted previously when peeps liked this mapping feature. Now you need to find out if there are more of those peeps (and enough of them) and what is it about the curation of places that is so appealing?
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