Kyle
The past year has been a big one for discovery apps. We all know about the hype surrounding Highlight, Glancee, and countless other social discovery apps at south by southwest this year. Discovery apps are great for discovering people around you.
Most of the discovery apps are using Facebook and Foursquare as their backbone. This is great for finding people with like minded interests or in the same place but sometimes you want more out of a discovery app. Take conventions for instance. Big conventions like South By Southwest and CES have hundreds of thousands of people around. With everyone checking in somewhere or another it can be kind of noisy.
Hereon.biz solves the noise problem for people that are looking to meet people in their same profession or field. In most cases you’re paying hundreds if not thousands of dollars to participate in a work or professional conference. You don’t need to meet the barista from Starbucks that happens to be a block away jamming with friends.
Hereon.biz uses LinkedIn API’s to connect people in like minded professions. Ultimately events like conferences and conventions or being in major hubs on business are the ideal place where Hereon.biz really comes in handy, but you may be surprised at the people that are around you at home, in your same profession.
I know that when I signed up for Google+ and discovered the nearby feature it showed a lot more Google+ users in my hometown than I thought. However, after perusing their streams and profiles most of them really didn’t have much in common with me, outside the fact that they used Google+.
More after the break
Glancee was the closest thing to actually cutting some noise down for me in social discovery. The problem I found early on with Glancee was that at some point I had liked Mark Zuckerberg’s dog Beast, so now without editing my likes, I found a lot of people on Glancee that liked Zuckerberg’s dog Beast. Same thing happened when liking Instagram.
We are still about a week away from Hereon.biz official launch, but on our nationwide sneaker strapped startup road trip we are sure that Hereon.biz is going to help us find like minded startup founders, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and others in our “field” and can’t wait to start using it.
Even though they are in a mad rush to put the finishing touches on Hereon.biz, co-founder Nick Smoot spend some time with Nibletz.com to tell us all about Hereon.biz and what we have to look forward to.
What is Hereon.biz?
Here On Biz is an iPhone app by the same name that is focused on empowering business professionals to discover other professionals around them, make connections, chat, and meet up in realtime. Turning lonely nights at the hotel bars into productive associations and new opportunities.
Essentially, we are making LinkedIn realtime, location-aware, and fun.
Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?
Allen Hartwig and Nick Smoot.Allen has 12+ years of experience of proven digital product development, he continues to shape and drive the vision of world class mobile offerings for fortune 500 companies.Nick has 10+ years of experience in business development, strategic planning, and brand mangaement. He continues to forge partnerships with global companies that produce meaningful results.Nick and Allen’s first project together, Toor.me, was founded in Sep. 2010 and acquired in March 2011.
After traveling extensively on business, they both realized a need in the world of the business professional; a location aware platform with chat completely focused on business networking. So they built it.
Here On Biz is a platform solely for business networking. The others have a split focus of, could be dating, could be a new friend, could be a new business partner, could be a….. For us, we saw the major need for purity in the business world. Current apps are like trying to network with random prople at the bar or a Starbucks. Here On Biz is the business mixer. Everyone is there to network and nothing else. Another point of differentiation is the fact that we lead with design, creating an intuitive, beautiful user experience that goes beyond brilliant functionality.
Are you using LinkedIN API’s if not what are you using?
Yes, we use linkedins API as most all professionals have a profile on the LinkedIn network, populated exactly how they want to be represented in professional setting.
Your website makes it sound like it’s destination conference based, is it conference or event based or anytime?
It is anytime, but there is a great use case for conventions or while traveling on business. When you are checked into an event a new category of nearby professionals is created within the app allowing the user to easily discover other attendees.
What’s in your secret sauce setting you a part from the bajillion other social discovery apps either on the market today or just about to launch?
Hereon.biz brings the pleasure and ease of consumer social networking to the business professional. User friendly, beautifully executed user interface meets world class tools for meet the right people, turning dull moments in valuable networking opportunities.
We are entrepreneurs on the go and have been in 40+ states on business in less than a year. We haven’t just built something we think is a need. We have built this based on our personal needs doing what millions of business men and women do every year — jetset across the world, crushing it. When you aren’t traveling the user can discovery those visiting his town and they can discover him
What are some of the challenges you’ve faced preparing to launch hereon.biz?
The biggest challenge has been getting chat to respond as quickly as we like. We now have it dialed to where the experience is real time, invitations, chat, etc. If one of your business associates who uses LinkedIn joins, immediately you are notified through a push notification.
Are you bootstapped or funded?
We invited one of our long time friends to join us on this one for a small investment and some special marketing collateral.
What’s next for hereon.biz?
Become the must-have mobile app for every business professional.
Linkage:
Sign up for here Hereon.biz private beta, the service opens to the public May 7th
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