GoodRec, a startup that launched at TC 50, is a recommendation engine that serves you recommendation from your friends and the general public about consumer products, destinations and such things. The recommendations are displayed on the map to depict the location of the offering – for example a pharmacy.
Users could add photos of the restaurants, hotels and items and add recommendations to them on the go. Although Yelp is doing all this for a while now and has a lot of success in it too, GoodRec’s usability far exceeds that of Yelp. Recommendations could be added with a breeze and becomes available instantly.
GoodRec currently lacks data, which is obvious since its a new service but in case it manages to gather data it might just become a GoodRec to be recommended to people for finding good locations. But this would be the Achilles heal of the startup, since many startups before it have tried and failed to generate enough buzz and hence data for the users at large to come in hordes and use the service.
UGC (user generated content) based services have always had the egg and hen problem, i.e users will come once you will have enough data and data will come once the users will come. This is a classic problem, however the startups that managed to solve this problem went on to become the Youtubes, and Wikipedia of our times.
It is yet to be seen, if GoodRec could succeed where others before it have failed, generating content in the recommendation space. GoodRec is based in San Francisco, California and has raised $1.1 million in funding to date. Snapshot below shows bars and nightlife category in Stuttgart to be totally empty and recommends me to try a different thing.
You can watch their TC 50 launch video below:
Achilles heal should be Achilles heel, copyeditor.
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