Getmii, a new social app based at Harvard’s Launch Lab, is adding a modern spin to an age-old custom. The startup’s founders - Max Meyer, Darryl Lau and Matthias Juergens - are bringing bartering for help back.
“We’re taking it back to basics, to what people have done for millennia: Negotiate with their neighbors,” Meyer explained.
It all started across the world in Thailand. Meyer joked that the desire for warm weather and the love of coconuts brought him and the Getmii team to Bangkok.
“My co-founders and I were sitting in Bangkok trying to work on another venture,” he said. “None of us spoke Thai, none of us were from there and we had a long list of things we needed. We wanted to find an assistant, to buy chicken, to do a number of things for lunch and none of us had any clue what to do… We all thought, ‘It would be really helpful if we could just ask somebody who’s from around here to help us.'”
"We’re taking it back to basics, to what people have done for millennia."
They got to thinking about how the concept of being to request help from people around you would make a cool app. And from there, Getmii was born.
Basically, Getmii is a broadcast tool where users can post whatever they need - whether it be someone who can fix their sink, a cup of sugar, life advice or doctor recommendations - and people in their area can respond to step up and help. No prices are set on the app, so users can chat amongst themselves to work out an exchange or perform tasks for one another purely of goodwill.
“It’s about depending on the kindness of your neighbors...We bucked the trend,” Meyer shared. “There are so many startups focused on premium services. They’re the ‘Uber for X’ and can deliver something to you for an exorbitant amount of money. It works for people like us in places like Boston or New York. But it’s prohibitively inaccessible to other people. ”
The new app, though, would be accessible to people everywhere in the world, allowing users to tap into their own local network of good samaritans. Users can also post what they need anonymously, which Meyer said is meant for people feeling vulnerable or asking about a sensitive issue. And, so far, he hasn’t seen any abuse of anonymity.
Getmii has just come out of stealth mode, having launched a couple of weeks ago. But they were caught off guard with some unsolicited testing a couple of months ago during the walkout staged by Boston Public School students.
“Our app suddenly crashed... I guess the public school students had found it and were using it anonymously to coordinate the walkout,” Meyer shared. “We had to say, ‘Hey guys, thanks for crashing our app. How did you even find out about us?’”
Getmii has received an undisclosed amount of funding from a private investor to launch their app in the U.S. The team doesn’t have a definite revenue model in place yet, but it’s heavily considering gaining capital through data and analytics from the app’s need feed.
Images via Getmii.
