The Official UpNext Blog

You’re a busy New Yorker, it is ridiculously hot and humid and your patience is hanging by a thread. You don’t have time to wait in lines for your food.

Now you can skip the line by ordering ahead with GoMoBo on UpNext.

How does it work? The easiest way is to use the GoMoBo feed located under the UpNext Feed (bottom right button)

This will highlight all participating GoMoBo restaurant around you.

Once you figure out where you want to eat, tap the venue name. (If your favorite lunchtime spot pops up, smack yourself in the forehead and wonder why you ever waited in that long line for your food.)

Tap on the GoMoBo link, which will open up the restaurant’s GoMoBo ordering page within the UpNext app.

Simply place your order, then head over to the venue at the indicated time, to skip the line and pick up your food. While not encouraged, feel free to walk out with a smug smile on your face as you go past those still waiting in line.

Thanks to our friends at GoMoBo for making this possible.

There has been a lot of chatter lately about Foursquare and its emergence as a new model for local. We are also following their development because 1) we are in the local space and 2) Foursquare is an NYC company and we love to see good things come out of NYC. Also having met the founders, Dennis and Naveen, makes it all the more interesting to see where they are going with their company.

One of the best posts about Foursquare and its potential comes from Charlie O’Donnell, Why Yelp (… and every single retail establishment) Should Support Foursquare. While the business opportunities he presents are interesting, the better part of the post is his description of how we got sucked into the service.

The game mechanics built into Foursquare build the community and push individual users to contribute. The subsequent growth of the service and its “buzz” has led to some local merchants to reward Foursquare users with offers and discounts. There have been a number of follow on commentaries since Charlie’s post, below are some of the more interesting ones.

Fred Wilson - Playing Foursquare
Techcrunch - Foursquare Shows The Business Potential of Location-Based Services
Greg Sterling - Foursquare and the LBS Biz Model

It is interesting to note that the least enthusiastic post is by Greg Sterling, a local search and lbs analyst. He sees Foursquare as a niche play rather than a new paradigm for local merchant/customer interaction.

Another aspect that is overlooked is the Foursquare API. We have been taking a look at the API and are impressed with how open the Foursquare team is with their data. This will be another driver for adoption and innovation.

I think that Foursquare has some serious potential to change the local landscape. A lot of that stems from the approach that Dennis and Naveen take towards local businesses. Unlike Yelp, which states that local business interests come behind the interests of the Yelp community, Foursquare embraces and promotes local businesses. It gives them a way to identify and reward their most loyal customers, who in turn are their best marketing tools.

Companies that work with local businesses and offer them ways to connect better with their customers will lead the next local revolution. It is the reason why we spend our days creating intricate 3D maps of NYC. We want people to explore neighborhoods and discover great local businesses. Our aim it to provide an easy way to find businesses around a location and to help them draw customers into their stores through specials, deals or coupons.

There are many opportunities left in the local space and it is good to see companies like Foursquare continuing to innovate for consumers and local businesses.

In the previous post, I wrote about the step we took in our launch and the mistakes we made at each of those steps. So how did we get past that and move forward?

1) Move Past The Launch Pitch

So we got very little coverage for our new product launch. But we still had a cool product. Focus on what problem your product solves and find ways to get that message across.

The act of launching a product is a one time occurrence. But what your product or company does is a story that can be told over and over again. So focus on that.

2) Pitch Them When They Want

Two of our PR leads came from simply following writers on popular social media platforms. In both cases, the bloggers actively requested company pitches.

Adam Ostrow of Mashable sent out a tweet saying they were looking for startups to feature on the Mashable Spark of Genius series. We filled out the online form and within the hour got an email from a Mashable writer with follow up questions.

Robert Scoble posted on FriendFeed that he was coming to New York City and was looking for interesting NYC based companies to meet. He also created a “pitchscoble” feed. When we added our name into the ring, there were actually only a few replies on the list. As a result, when Robert Scoble came to NYC, he met with our own Raj Advani and shot a video interview of Raj demo’ing UpNext.

It is not that difficult to passively follow these people and identify times when they are actively looking for new pitches.

3) Get Outside of Tech

When you work within an industry, it is always nice to see your company featured on the blogs you read daily. But oftentimes the best conversions or users come from non-tech sources.

Thrillist is a nationwide newsletter targeted to young males. Some call it Daily Candy for Dudes. We submitted UpNext to the NYC edition and received a short write up. Without a doubt, the conversion rate from Thrillist was significantly higher than any other source. It was targeted and actionable, which was great for us.

4) Keep At It
Oftentimes, it won’t happen overnight.
Build Relationships - at the very least, get to a point where if you send an email to someone, they will recognize your name or company name
Keep refining/improving your story - Figure out how you are solving problems for people. Show progress.
Stay Positive - Understand that bloggers/writers are busy (just as busy as you). Don’t burn bridges, don’t pester, maintain a positive relationship. It will pay off eventually.

We hope this was helpful and at the very least mildly entertaining. As always, we are trying to get the word out about UpNext, so if you work at NY Times, NY Mag or any NY publication, drop us a line (dmoon [at] upnext [dot] com). We got a cool product, passionate users and some good stories to tell.