Yesterday at the Mesh conference in Toronto I met Noah Godfrey, one of the founders of GigPark. A social recommendation Website that launched last February, the site recently pushed out a major redesign. It’s like Yelp, but only with recommendations from people you know.
The point of GigPark is to collect and share recommendations of local services with your friends. You import your contact list from Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Outlook, or Hotmail. Or add it as a Facebook application. Then you can start asking questions. Does anyone know a good doctor, lawyer, plumber? What’s the best Thai restaurant in town? And you can start giving your own recommendations. All of these questions and answers appears as a consolidated feed from you, your friends, and the friends of your friends.
It only works with friends who have joined GigPark or added the Facebook app, but you can make your page public to share it with friends who are not members. Here’s Godfrey’s public page.
The site also lets you search for specific services, like restaurants or dog walker. And you can see who recommended what.
For each recommendation there is a page with the original recommendation and contact information. Comments can be made on any recommendation, and they can be added to your favorites as well. Most of the features work within Facebook as well. I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather get recommendations from people I know or who I can ask about than from anonymous strangers.
GigPark has been bootsrapped so far with $200,000 from Godfrey and his co-founder Pema Hegan. It competes with Trusted Opinion, which has raised $3.6 million.
Do they have a monetization strategy?
Thanks for the post, Erick. We’re only a few months out of the gate and we’ve got lots planned for the next few months. Would love to hear what everyone thinks – feedback@gigpark.com.
And like you say, our Facebook app is a great way to use GigPark with your friends right away. http://apps.facebook.com/gigpark
Noah
Co-Founder, GigPark
I’ve seen this site…didn’t understand it…If I want recommendations from my friiends I’ll call them up…Why would I get my friends to join then write a posting, when I can just call them, fb them, or msn them? Good luck to the Gigpark guys though. Putting up your own money means they really believe in the idea. Best of luck!
Noah, I like your website idea. I was curious, how are you guys planning to sustain your company, money-wise?
@Ryan — calling your friends up works if you have like… 3 friends. If you have 10 friends, and each of them have 10 friends, that’s 100 phonecalls you’ve got to make. Ouch.
@ep We think there’s a great business here.
We get emails and calls every day from service people who have been hired through the site and see it as a way to get lots more business. They’re looking for premium features – everything from extended profiles to alerts to updating contact details when they change.
Right now, we’re focused on growing our membership and creating a fantastic environment to get recommendations from friends. When the time is right, we’ll flick the switch on a whole range of premium features.
I believe we are entering an era of absolute redundant silliness on the web. Friend recommendation websites just seem unnecessary. Why not just publish a note on Facebook? “Anyone know of any fun stuff to do in Buffalo?” for example. I’m not trying to be a prick about it, I just don’t understand how ideas like GigPark evolve out of the idea stage and into $200 000 startups. Like ep, I’d also like to know the monetization strategy.
It amazes me the amount of “me also” web 2.0 companies there are. This may be a great service, but I have grown very weary of creating a new account anywhere. So I think integrating with FB is key, since that allows you to leverage the social graph which is already build. I don’t think you can anymore reasonably expect people to build networks. Yelp, Going, Craiglist, GigPark, and countless other things all solve the same problem.
Oh Canada! Good job on the site. There are a lot of competitors. Good Luck.
Thanks Mogilny!
The Mesh conference has just finished here in Toronto. Lots of great Canadian startups spreading the word like… http://www.conceptshare.com/ http://www.freshbooks.com/ http://www.aiderss.com/ and http://www.ourfaves.com/.
Go Canada
Their logo kind of looks like a moth or butterfly…could also be a bow on top… I’m also seeing a snarky cat staring at me. Regardless it doesn’t make any sense to me.
by focusing only on recommendations from “friends”, this site moves even further away from solving the “cold start” problem of recommendation system. how do you seed it? drop the “friend” requirement, its a pointless artificial barrier to entry into the network, it only serves to limit utility while doing nothing to improve quality. look at sites like amazon who do anonymous peer grading of reviews. amazon gives me great reviews from people i don’t know.
I guess this is what you call a lukewarm reception . Anyway stick with what you believe in and listen to feedback and adjust .
@9 .. Thats like saying - Why email or text my friends when I can call them .
I’m sorry Godfrey. I don’t think this is a good business idea. Why? Like other people have said, I just don’t think I would use it. It won’t reach critical mass.
I’m a user and admit I was a bit skeptical at first. But what really makes this work is your group of friends wanting to help you and providing really qualified recommendations.
I’ve asked for some pretty esoteric stuff and gotten replies with super helpful leads within a day or two. And thats when I was converted.
I love this site; I’ve got some really good advice through it.
Thanks Anand and Ryan. Very glad to hear you are getting a lot out of GigPark!
We’ve heard stories recently from members doing home renovations, planning weddings or even starting a business who have literally hired every service they need through recommendations from their friends on the site. We’ve got a long way to go but getting these kinds of emails definitely motivates us to come to work everyday and make the site better
Pema
Co-Founder, GigPark
I’ve been using GigPark for a little while and it’s really, really helpful. I almost always get multiple responses to my requests within an hour. It’s pretty much my go-to over Yelp these days.
Good luck, guys!
I think Facebook and Open Social integration is the key here. People are just weary of joining yet another recommendation site and having to ask their friends to come over in order to improve the site’s utility to them. There is a Bangalore based startup http://www.babajobs.com/ which has an interesting spin on this model - they actually compensate people along the referral chain.
@12: Anonymous aggregated reviews are helpful when the sample size is meaningful. For example, I trust product ratings on Amazon only when the number of reviewers is more than 50. Below that threshold, recommendation from friends has more meaning.
Not seeing how someone can say this is their goto app over yelp, which is much, much broader. I guess it depends on how they were using yelp. The problem I see is the time it takes for someone to build up their network, those in their network to build up reviews etc, and so on..
As an example, I recently moved to Chicago and do not know many people here, and I may have died if it weren’t for Yelp. All kidding aside, I am blown away by how incredibly useful Yelp has been to me. The sheer scale of reviews, and information is pretty incredible - from where to eat, my real estate management company and how they potentially may suck, where to get decent quality furniture, gyms, mexican..its really impressive in my opinion.
I still think the gang at gigpark could build something compelling, I mean who thought yelp was going to be anything special a few years back as there where already a few things in the market then?
I read similar article also named o.us poetry, and it was completely different. Personally, I agree with you more, because this article makes a little bit more sense for me
@Abhishek You make some great points! Thanks. We see GigPark less a destination and more as a tool that makes it easy to discover the trusted service people your friends use. So, we plan on offering GigPark wherever friends already communicate – these conversations happen on GigPark.com, Facebook, Open Social, etc.
@robert Moving to a new city is a great example of a circumstance where GigPark has excelled already. I know people who have moved to my town, Toronto, and have found everything they need by connecting on GigPark to the one person in the city they knew … all of sudden, they had access to a whole bunch of recommendations they know they can trust (from that one person they knew and all of their friends).
Noah Godfrey
Co-Founder, GigPark
I’m a long-time user of Gigpark and the reason I think it’s going to work is that I’d be stressed if it stopped. Having just bought a new house, the first site I’m going to go to is Gigpark. I agree with some of the posts that there is a limit to how many sites you’ll sign up for, but the ones you sign up to are the ones that give you something substantive in return. Gigpark does that, so it’s on my list.
I read similar article also named o.us poetry, and it was completely different. Personally, I agree with you more, because this article makes a little bit more sense for me
how many sites you’ll sign up for, but the ones you sign up to are the ones that give you something substantive in return. Gigpark does that, so it’s on my list.
gigpark is completely diffrernt, it does? I don’t place on my list
GigPark v2 really improves on v1. It wasn’t mentioned above that in this new version, you can see not just your friends recommendations but also those from friends of friends.
This means that if you add just one reasonably connected friend (such as being invited by one) , you can get off and running quickly enough. It sounds like a small improvement but it makes a big difference to the initial utility after signup.
Noah & Pema have a good track record and have the smarts to turn on monetization when the time is right.
Noah & Pema have a good track record and have the smarts to turn on monetization when the time is right.