Event based social network Going.com has taken an additional $5 million in funding, in a round led by the sites original investors General Catalyst Partners and Highland Capital Partners.
Going.com recently passed 500,000 users, up from 200,000 users in early June and an impressive feat considering the service currently only operates in four cities: New York, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco.
George Bell and Bob Davis from General Catalyst and Highland Capital respectively will remain on the Going.com board of directors.
Going.com competes with Minglenow, Socialzr and LateNightShots. Going.com was previously known as HeyLetsGo.
Chicago would be the 4th city.
cool! i’ve been using Going in Boston for several months now, and I must say, i was missing out on a lot of cool things going on in the city until i started using this site
Good news. I am in Boston and use it almost everyday (more than Yelp).
I do not consider socializr and LateNightShots to be in the same league as Going.com. For one, anyone including an anonymous user can browse through going.com.
That site is clean and easy to use, but it isn’t clear how they intend to make$. There are zero ads which is real nice, but impractical without premium acct. or per event listing costs.
From the looks of their site going.com,the have a lot going on for them.
It appears that they are building their membership first and then will implement ads. Users are tired of ad centered site;we want user centered sites. Going.com appears to be user centered at this point.
I am a huge fan of going.com! As a newbie to NYC, I definitely relied on Going to give me the inside scoop of happenings around the city. The collaboration that they have with other event-throwing entities will surely help them in the future.
I’m with Evan, in saying that I use the site more than I use Yelp — who sends annoying emails daily; with Going, I only receive intermittent emails.
boring play.
Okay site. I’m not sure why you would use this over Facebook? The reason evite works is you don’t have to be a member. Having to become a member is kind of lame.
Those other sites listed are cheesy as hell. i have been following most of these guys for a year now and going is one of the few that has made marked improvements in their content and features.
@Ok… because facebook doesn’t have events outside of your buddy’s keg party… if you’re only looking to Going for events and do not care about the social networking aspects, there is no need or pressure to sign up
Congrats to Going.com! Great site, great people. We have them to thank for the engineer we just hired (Thanks Geoff).
a complete analysis of the space would include SF startup involver. check it out at involver.com.
Going.com sucks. The buyyourfriend a drink idea is stupid – who’s really going to buy someone a drink online – very social – they need to think to the general population not in their skewed little world. Most of the events posted on going.com are random events no ones even interested in – they are two widespread – come watch me hang a painting and eat pizza event…get serious here. 500K users – thats the biggest joke ever – maybe 500K visitors but get with the program and quit believing all this over hyped bs.
I agree with mike, they buy users by paying promoters to invite them through the site, I heard $5 per 1 RSVP… that’s explained how they’ve burned $3.5 millions in less than 10 months. I have more appreciation for those real sites such as: minglenow.com, wannago.com, involver.com and others that build up satisfied users base with no marketing $$$
Going.com is certainly a more relevant and better domain name than their old name. Wonder how much they paid for it?
The site has nothing special. This article is published because techcrunch is advertised in this web.
the name going.com s-u-c-k-s compared to HeyLetsGo…
what were they thinking???? and they launched at Demo under the latter (quite nicely, I might add — I was there)
hello — why launch, then change? let me guess: could a VC possibly be involved here? how sad for the inexperienced founders…
note to entrepreneurs: VCs do money, not branding
Sure 500,000 users would be impressive — that would be about 3% of the population of those cities?
There must be a lot of yahoo (in the old sense) onlookers.
(BTW, Quantcast and Compete don’t seem to support the 500k number.)
Does anyone know when Going (or HeyLetsGo, rather) was founded?
Going? Hey Let’s Go? Come on they are “going” to make their money with the incredible amount of data these so called social networking sites gather from the droves of cattle provided by area promoters. Going – well at least in Boston has become the “it tool” for our cities promoters to utilize. Going provides friendly photo galleries for the likes of media favorite club kings 6One7 Productions and East Coast Clubs. The site claims to be in tune with other socialization sensations centering around culture, events, restaurants etc..The game is afoot and data is the name of the game this guise is ridiculous and the Kool aid spiked snake oil they are peddling will make them all famously rich. Are there really any true social networking sites centered on pure networking or are they all Going to be cleverly disguised to attract the lemmings and are the lemmings really the data that the funding entities seek – we will find out or will we? The number of “active ” users is around 118 K so the 500K seems a bit of a stretch and may be all inclusive and maybe not all “active”! Spread that number across the cities and across the percentages per city- most of the traffic is centered in NY – hedge bets that most of it is photo driven as each promoter has unlimited space for their galleries. Not so great is the way editors arbitrarily push around users who post events – we have conducted several experiments and found that we were tracked adn our event blacklisted in favor of the event being deemed an editors choice…how juvenile a tactic…if your over 25 Don’t bother Going – they seem to be lowerign the bar daily as to what the use to get Going….
A newer site that has a cleaner interface, but is much more focused on Live Entertainment in NYC is http://www.stagebuddy.com
Worth checking out for a way to find lots of hidden shows going on around the NYC area.