Kate’s Goodness is an Instagram-style, curated stream of travel recommendations from in-the-know locals.
Looking for useful travel tips in an unknown city, both online and off, can often feel like searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack. The idea of travel, for some, has become an event with such high expectations, so thoroughly researched and well planned, that on one side, the joy of serendipity and of ‘getting lost’ has almost completely vanished with GPS technology. On the other hand, users are more able to get exactly what they want, satisfying their personal, unique consumer needs.
Helping travellers do just that is Kate’s Goodness, an app that curates an evolving stream of ‘goodness’ – places recommended by locals who know and love them – and creating a marketplace where local information is currency.
With an Instagram-esque layout, the app is an evolving stream of each city’s ‘goodness’ – up-to-date recommendations by locals, who counter the excess of Internet noise by presenting their favourites in the form of a single picture, a short, intimate description and a location map.
After a visit, travellers can vote ‘goodness’ or ‘not quite’ depending on their experience, and writers earn or lose points – known as Goodness gold – accordingly. A place can only be written about once – at which point it ‘belongs’ to that writer. The founders say, ‘Our long-term goal is to build a global community of people who share and appreciate Goodness, enabling anyone and everyone with a mobile phone to have rewarding, quality experiences across the world and in their home town.’
Places move up and down the ranks depending on users’ votes. Visitors also earn Goodness gold by writing posts, voting and sharing. This way, the app maintains a diplomatic and up-to-date catalogue of tips. By crowdsourcing the votes from visitors to each destination, the recommendations become more reliable as more users sign up to the app.
An interesting aspect of the app is the Goodness currency. The app’s stock exchange element sees users acquiring and selling articles to enhance their portfolio and in-app status, trading Goodness gold between users (because one business or local spot can be ‘acquired’ only by one user).
The company has now officially launched in the App Store, doubled its user base within one month, and increased the library of posts by nearly 20 per cent. The community of contributors also expanded, adding hundreds of locals, and email subscribers grew threefold.
‘There is no tool in the App Store today that helps people discover Goodness in an intuitive way, using short curated friend-like recommendations,’ one of the co-founders says. ‘[For the team], when someone has a great travel/human experience, it makes it all worthwhile.’
The start-up is now planning to build a more streamlined connection between posts in the app and bloggers’ content, and create a culture of Goodness gold, awarding contributors titles such as ‘The most influential theatre expert in Berlin’ or ‘The leading global authority on coffee shops’.
Other ways travel locals are linking up with interested travellers include Austrian company Nectar & Pulse, a travel site that creates personal city guides by helping visitors zero in on the tips and suggestions of locals with similar personalities and preferences; and Scouted, which allows anyone to create a guide for their city, picking their favourite places to go or following a particular theme.
__TAKEAWAYS
Website: www.katesgoodness.com
Contact: www.katesgoodness.com/contact
Innovation name: Kate’s Goodness
Country: United States
Industries: Entertainment & culture / Tourism & travel