Kyle
Citibuddies is a new startup that just relocated from Europe to Latin America, and they’re now happy to call Buenos Aires home. As you may be able to tell from the headline, Citibuddies wants to be your buddy in whatever city youre in.
It’s much like Poynt but a little more social. Citibuddies connects people with places and events in cities. They’re hoping to become the go to app that can tell you what to do, where to go and who to meet. Citibuddies uses a robust algorithm and collects data from your social network so you don’t have to input a bunch of information into your profile. From there it starts it’s magic by finding like minded people, events and places.
While they don’t do a badge system in Citibuddies they do have Citi Champions who are well versed in the local city and can help out the other users. CitiBuddies hope to make it easier for people visiting a city to connect as if they were locals.
We got a chance to interview Darja Gutnick one of Citibuddies founders below.
What is citibuddies?
Citibuddies connects people and events in cities. We want to be the No.1 source for “What to do? Where to go? And who to meet?” in your city or any other city that you travel to, according to your tastes and likes.
We are passionate about urban life, technology, traveling, connection and sharing authentic experiences. We think that in the future, all these elements need to come together. With citibuddies we are creating a platform that offers the possibilities to explore every city through the eyes of a local and at the same time brings the city closer to its citizens. With this project we want to connect the visitors of cities to locals, create shared and authentic experiences, maximize the experiential potential of cities, and at the same time reduce the costs related to exploring of cities. Citibuddies wants to be the door to our cities. For locals, visitors, local business partners, legal authorities. In every city. Worldwide.
We build citibuddies to be very smart, so that it is easy to use and up-to-date without bothering our users to feed in information (interest profile created through social network crawling). Instead, we learn about them and display information accordingly.
We do it together with our users. We stay connected to our users from different cities of the world by providing updates of the project via newsletters/engaging them in the development by letting them decide upon key elements such as our logo design, requesting new ideas and additional features for the product by running surveys and building up social network presence (facebook, twitter & linkedin). We constantly share our development steps by blogging about our activities on our site www.blog.citibuddies.com. At the same time we build up a network of citi champions (local citibuddies supporters) that help us to gain access to local communities in their cities.
Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?
We are both very international and after living abroad and travelling for many years we developed good networks in different places all over the world. We love social media (who doesn’t) but we enjoy it specifically to connect the real and the virtual world. Our passion for entrepreneurship and exprience with social media technology will help us to make this dream come true.
Visiting and seeing many cities showed us that in all of them there are hidden beauties (places and things to do invisible for the inexperienced eye).Things that are only known and seen by the very few experts (often times locals). We want to take those things out of the ‘dark city shelves’ and make them visible and accessible. We want the people to feel comfortable with the cities they live in & visit and have an emotional bond with them.
We’ve got quite different professional backgrounds. Aidan finished his Masters in International Economics and Business and has solid experience in Marketing & Sales, as well as PR and communications. He is passionate about networking (on- and offline), travel and innovation. Darja is finishing her PhD in management with focus on “creativity under pressure” and is an organizational psychologist with experience in consulting companies in the design, media and automotive industries. She has a strong focus on creativity/innovation & future research and worked for companies, such as BMW Group, EPLUS (KPN Germany), Otto Group (online and mailorder giant) and OC&C Strategy Consultants. She is passionate about urban life, travel and every technology that connects people.
We both are fully devoted and courageous to develop something that in the beginning only existed in our minds and people tend to see as an interesting, “sexy”, but high-risk project.
We decided. We will make citibuddies happen. And we discovered along the way that more and more people started to believe in our idea and that is one of the best feelings ever.
Where are you based?
We are very excited to call our ‘home’ the vibrant city of Buenos Aires, Argentina.
We want to provide people living in and visiting cities with up-to-date information about these cities that are most relevant to them. Instead of accessing static information available on – and offline (blogs, touristic offices etc.), we connect people to experts in their interest areas and thus give them the possibility to get recommendations, hints and meet with like-minded people in real-time.We love cities and believe that connecting people in cities based on their activities and their local knowledge will make our cities more personal, livable, exciting and human. The platform fosters more human and approachable cities. It helps to connect people across language, economical and geographical barriers. Citibuddies provides personally relevant info and gives you the “right” contacts in the cities of destination, thus making travel & exploration of cities more efficient and less time consuming.
We managed to built up highly international and reliable networks by living in several different countries. We noticed that good experiences are always shared and that most relevant information doesn’t come from Google, but rather from personal contacts we have. Most of the times we made new friends and useful acquaintances by being recommended through other friends. The only way to build up sustainable relationships that are crucial not only for satisfying travel experiences, but for everyday life in highly complex urban environment is sharing. Sharing ideas, interests, information, experiences. We provide the platform for that.
We understand each other, balance each other, share the same passion and trust & rely on each other. Besides of our highly flexible and rich skill set, we’re both fast learners, always stay curious and never give up. And after each reached milestone we take a moment to breath, enjoy the success and give each other a high-five. That’s very important to us.
As presumably all our entrepreneural peers, we face challenges everyday, but we love them. With mastering each of them we develop more confidence, belief and see our product and company building up to something that in the beginning purely existed in our heads. That is a very exciting & satisfying process. One of the biggest challenges probably was to find the first early stage investor to believe in our idea. “Who gives money for social networks nowadays?” we were asked. And we thought, if there is one person that would, then we’ll find that person and convince them. And we did. By staying persistent and passionate about what we do.
Very soon we will introduce our product demonstration video. We can’t wait to show it to you! We’ve got a lot of support from different sides in the production of it and very thankful for that and curious, how our future users will perceive it. Stay up to date and check our page www.citibuddies.comregularly :)Besides of that we’re in the middle of the beta development and prepare our launch in October 2012. We’re are constantly providing new information about our project and everything around cities on our blog www.blog.citibuddies.com. For instance we’re constantly building the network of local citibuddies supporters “citi champions” in order to promote the idea and vision of a more transparent, authentic and exciting cities in cities around the globe. If you’re interested in becoming our citi champion for your city, please write us at wewillrespond@citibuddies.com.And of course we’re developing new ideas for features and ways of using citibuddies almost on a daily basis. We can’t wait to go live and receive the feedback from our users.
