Barry Hinckley co-founded Bullhorn, a company that makes recruiting software and CRM. In 2012, Bullhorn was acquired by private equity for $135 million. After a failed run for Senate in Rhode Island, Hinckley, a scion of the famed custom yacht-making family, is off doing something a little less conventional: a tech company that's calling itself the Airbnb of private house parties.
Stay with me.
Let's say you're planning to have a holiday party at your house for 50 guests. You could invite 50 people you know--or, here's an idea: you could invite 25 people you know, and fill out the guest list with 25 you don't know yet. They're not exactly random: once you've listed a party, you get to say yea or nay over whoever asks for an invite. Of course there's a rating system for guests and hosts. It's like a college house party, with control over the guest list.
"We go to bars to randomly meet people," Hinckley told me in an interview. "I'm trying to totally change the way people go out on the weekends. When you walk into a bar you have no idea who's there."
Sounds crazy, but if you told me five years ago I'd be getting into a random person's car for a late-night ride back to crash in a random person's spare bedroom, well, I don't know what I would've said.
Yotme, Hinckley told me, is a sharing-economy update to online dating sites like Tinder and Match.com that will "own the pre-dating space" and "completely disintermediate the global bar scene." (They're also going after Paperless Post, Punchbowl and evite.)
With that pitch, or something like it, Hinckley is raising a $1 million seed round of startup funding, beginning with a $400,000 AngelList round under the BOSS Syndicate, led by his former CEO and co-founder at Bullhorn, Art Papas. (We told you about that in the BostInno Beat a couple of weeks ago.)
So far, he said, they've done about 20 events in a beta test in Newport, R.I., including a 130-person party at Hinckley's own home. "60 of them I hadn't met before," he said. "They were totally well-behaved. They brought wine." "The events we’ve had in Newport have been oversubscribed and they’ve been sticky," Hinckley said. "People who downloaded the app to come to the party have come to other events and have even hosted parties." A pilot in Scottsdale, Ariz., is under way. Nantucket and Boston pilots are coming this month, he said.
Here's a video in which Hinckley explains Yotme.
"Yotme," by the way, isn't a play on "yacht." "Yot," he said, is an English word meaning "to unite closely." (The Oxford English Dictionary has "yote," a verb in some dialects of Old English meaning to cast in metal or to fasten with lead. So, "yoting," "yoter," etc. A metal soundtrack would be appropriate at a Yotme party, then.
With some friends-and-family financing, Hinckley paid an outside developer to build the Yotme apps for Android and iOS. Version 2.0 is coming out in January, but right now most of the four-person company's cash burn goes to marketing. Each beta starts with an "ambassador" who signs up to host house parties, he said.
What hasn't worked is sponsored events or VIP rooms in public spaces. Yotme handled invites for an after-party at New York Fashion Week, for example. They were "oversubscribed," Hinckley said, but not "sticky."
"There’s something different about opening up your home," he said. "And there’s something exciting about going into someone’s home."
Editor's Note: This story originally had our "First Look" tag, but we took it off after a helpful reader pointed out Providence Business News had a story on Yotme back in September.
