It’s Wednesday at lunchtime and your stomach is rumbling. By this point in the week, you’re sick of ramen. To capitalize on this sudden sense of adventure, you swipe into your arsenal of apps. After checking the same old sources and seeing the same old options, you resign to your neighborhood go-to and order the usual. You finish your meal satisfied, but certainly not blown away. Sound familiar? It’s time to change this mundane behavior and start utilizing triptap.
Like so many successful ventures, founders Ben Thuss and Matt Brodeur met in college. They lived down the hall from each other and first noticed their potential chemistry when working as a team in a entrepreneur class. Soon after, they conceptualized triptap and in May of 2013, they raised $250k in seed funding. They moved to Atlanta at the end of 2013 and are big fans of the city. “There is a real cultural and food renaissance going on here and it has some undeniably amazing places to eat and have fun,” says Thuss. They plan to open a new round of investment in February to continue improving triptap’s offerings in Atlanta and begin scaling the platform to other cities.
Having launched last week on the Apple App Store, triptap wants to be your source for highly curated reviews of restaurants, bars, cafés, boutique hotels, and cool stuff to do. Ben and Matt want to help people discover the best, most unique places in Atlanta. “Our focus is on places that are off the beaten path and that highlight the local flavor and culture,” says Thuss.
The problem that Ben and Matt have identified is that, “In this day in age we are bombarded with so many different choices and options, all claiming to be the best at what they do.” They feel that the current online review system is broken as more often than not people will leave a review only if they have had a bad experience. “This skews a location’s rating and in our opinion is not a great way to establish quality,” asserts Thuss. Moreover, on most sites like Yelp, the places that shoot to the top first generally tend to stay there as they are getting the most exposure. The reality is, according to Ben, “The signal to noise ratio is less than ideal,” Instead, triptap is focused on quality and trust. They want to shed light on Atlanta’s hidden gems and build a list that its residents believe in.
triptap aims to stand out by presenting a selection of places that meet a high standard and that have actually been visited by a member of their team. Their reviews feature top notch photography and include any special details like which nights are best, the parking situation, and when to make a reservation. On triptap, users will find no chains and only positive reviews so they’ll know exactly what to expect when visiting one of its recommendations. Furthermore, with mobile Internet usage now exceeding PC, Thuss and Brodeur are big believers of mobile first. Unlike their competition, “We were not born as a website so our main focus is mobile.”
Most likely, you’re too busy to be that guy who knows all the hip new hot spots in the ATL. Perhaps there’s a hidden gem that’s been in your neighborhood since 1998, but you’ve never heard of it. From now on, when looking for a new place to eat, drink, or have fun, your first stop has to be triptap. Take it from Ben and Matt: “We want people to be able to find the quality within all the quantity they have to choose from.”
Check out their killer promo video here: http://vimeo.com/117647406
Follow triptap on:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/triptap
Twitter: https://twitter.com/triptapusa
Instagram: http://instagram.com/triptapapp/
