Bizzy, a personalized local business recommendation engine, announced yesterday that it hit 100,000 favorites in just 10 weeks since its relaunch — that is, its members have supplied 100,000 recommendations on their favorite places to eat, shop and play.
Bizzy is a service, accessible via its website and iPhone app, that recommends local businesses based on a user’s favorites, as identified by answering questions about their favorite local spots, such as restaurants, nightclubs and shops.
While 100,000 favorites doesn’t initially seem like a big deal, it’s important to note the speed with which this data has accrued, especially as compared to the early stages of other recommendation engines for local businesses, such as Yelp.
Founded in 2004, Yelp has become top-of-mind for users looking for local business reviews, having been brainstormed as “the yellow pages for the 21st century.” By the summer of 2006, Yelp reached 100,000 reviews, the key data point for its system. Today, it’s clearly a success, with 15 million reviews and 41 million monthly pageviews (as of December 2010), but it took 18 months to gather 100,000 reviews.
Much has changed since 2004, and startups like Bizzy are benefiting from the many developments, both technologically and socially, that have taken place. In an interview with Bizzy’s Founder, President and GM,Gadi Shamia, and VP of Marketing, Ryan Kuder, we explored the key factors behind Bizzy’s growth in hopes of uncovering a few pointers for other startups looking to make a splash. Here are five distinct lessons we took away from that chat.
1. Asking Less of Users Yields Higher Participation
For Bizzy’s algorithm to make recommendations to individuals, those new users need to answer questions about their favorite places. Other users in their location also have to do the same, though, because the app matches up data from similar users to predict which places they would prefer. In essence, the app can only function if enough people in one place are participating. That’s why Bizzy is focusing on making it as easy as possible to participate.
Instead of asking users to write reviews, submit pictures or rate locations on certain areas, Bizzy simply asks them to identify their favorite places.
Shamia told us that Bizzy’s app is about changing the ask from users. “Users can, in two or three minutes, create 18 or 20 data points that we can use to give them recommendations,” he said. “This is a big difference than trying to write reviews over time and contribute that way.”
Bizzy has about 4,000 contributing members, those who have created an account and shared at least 10 favorites. Kuder commented on measuring engagement and the importance of having an active community, regardless of size:
“Total user count isn’t a key performance indicator for us. Typically, those numbers are over-inflated and don’t represent the true number of people using the site. It doesn’t take a lot to get someone to create an account (especially early adopters), so our focus has been more on engagement and making sure that we’re doing a good job making it easy for people to contribute. If you do the math on the 4,000 contributing members, you can see that we’ve got about 25 favorites from each on average.”
2. A 100% Participation Rate Generates More Data
Not only does Bizzy make it easy to participate, it also makes it mandatory. In order to sign up and get recommendations, users must answer at least a few questions about their favorite places.
As a result, no one gets in without helping improve the data set, which increases the quality of recommendations that it spits out to users. Great business model, right?
“You don’t have this 1% or 0.5% of users creating reviews and 99.5% that just read reviews. You have everybody on the site contributing something, and they get something back in return — and the contribution is very small. Imagine if Yelp was a community in which you could only read reviews if you wrote reviews — it would be a very small community. The only way for us to make recommendations for everybody was to make it as easy as humanly possible, which was [to have them choose] ‘favorites,’ not even one to five stars.”
Shamia also noted that while “Web 2.0″ is all about enabling everyone to participate and be an “author of the web,” not everyone wants to be an author — most people are consumers of information on the web, not creators.
Because of that sentiment, Shamia believes, “The key to personalizing the web is making it super easy for people to do stuff.” Nicely put.
3. Leveraging Social Increases Word of Mouth
Bizzy’s top three identifiable sources of traffic are Google, Facebook, and Twitter — the startup puts a lot of effort into encouraging users to share their lists of favorite places on social platforms that they are already using.
Ryan Kuder, VP of marketing, explained that the importance that social media plays in today’s world is an advantage that burgeoning startups can leverage when growing their user bases and working on increasing engagement:
“There are several platforms that never existed back when some of these other sites were getting going. There wasn’t an iPhone, there wasn’t Facebook, there wasn’t Twitter. The spread of information from person to person happened a lot more slowly. One of the key things right now, when anybody is working on a startup, is recognizing how information spreads and leveraging the tools that already exist in order to add value to the user experience.”
4. Developing for Different Mobile & Web Use Cases Means Better UX
While Bizzy develops its website and iPhone app in tandem to ensure similar experiences across both, it makes sure to optimize each platform for how people use them. Shamia explained:
“Every time we think of a feature, we think of it separately. ‘Is it a mobile use case? Is it a web use case?’ They may not be the same — we don’t have to create a replica. Instead of making the mobile app as a small version of the web app, we try to ask ourselves, ‘What would the user want to do in the context of using mobile in the business or when they’re about to decide [on a place to go]? What would a user want to do when they have a little more time and they’re sitting in front of a computer?’ Very different use cases.”
About 25% of Bizzy’s registered users have the iPhone app, making mobile a big focus for the startup.
5. Bizzy Is Capitalizing on the Age of the Profile
Social profiles started to make a mainstream entrance to society about a decade ago. Until the likes of Friendster, LinkedIn and Facebook, much of the web experience was anonymous. Of course, there were early adopters who began blogging before that, but much of the world operated with cute, topical handles like “brightstar123.”
A decade ago, we expressed ourselves with our clothes, music and other possessions — we still do that, but just more publicly than ever. Today, people are more than happy to share just about anything about themselves — name, age, location, gender, interests, religion, relationship status, what they’re doing at this very moment.
The openness to which people approach the Internet today is a perfect platform for startups hoping to integrate social components. Shamia explained that Bizzy is one way that users can present their ‘commercial me’: The places they like to visit to eat, shop and so on. Likewise, he sees Facebook as a user’s ‘social me’ and LinkedIn as a user’s ‘professional me.’
Conclusion
Hitting 100,000 favorites is a milestone for Bizzy — and while it may not alter the entire geography of the web, it’s worth gleaning the important lessons and strategies that have enabled the startup to get this far.
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