David Beazley spent four years in the early 90s catching passes for the Northwestern Wildcats. Now, he's trying to help shoppers catch deals with the launch of his social network shopping startup.
This week Beazley, who played wide receiver for the Wildcats during the team's trip to the Rose Bowl in 1995, launched Strongbark, a private social network for friends to recommend daily deals to one another. People can see what deals their friends are using, they can recommend deals to all their friends at once or 1-on-1, and there are "gamification" elements to compete against other users, which result in free grifts through Strongbark's digital marketplace.
The company has partnered with 6,000 retailers to offer upwards of 100,000 daily deals on Strongbark, Beazley said.
"The deal space was a space that was getting more cluttered, more convoluted, it was getting more chaotic and more spammy as companies like Groupon and RetailMeNot and Brad's Deals were all trying to capture that same user’s attention," Beazley said. "What we started to see develop was this movement towards a more quiet, private environment, with just your trusted friends, curating content together."
That quiet environment is where Beazley, the company's CEO, sees Strongbark separating itself from the competition. Getting shopping advice online should be similar to how you get shopping advice in person: from the people you trust. And he's betting it will be more effective that companies that use data to find you the right deal.
"Friends know the likes and preferences of their friends better than anybody else does," he said. "Certainly better than any data-driven model."
Along with perusing your friends' favorite discounts, Strongbark allows you to compete with friends and followers by ranking you against all of the users who are active on our platform. It works by issuing users a Barkscore, which is the total number of offers that you’ve recommended that have been accepted by friends. It also calculates your "influence ratio," which takes tour Barkscore, along with your conversion rate, how many times you’ve shared an offer, and how often you add a message or comment on a specific offer. The influence ratio is calculated once a month to issue internal loyalty points it calls "bones." Bones can then be traded in Strongbark's digital marketplace for music, e-books, games and other things, Beazley said.
So far the company has quietly raised around $750,000 from friends and family, it it expects to begin raising a round from investors now that the site has launched.
The inspiration for Strongbark came from the success of Instagram and Snap Chat, Beazley said. These services used simple, elegant image sharing and were taking eyes away from Facebook, which can at times feel noisy, he noted.
"You got away from some of that chaos and clutter from the Facebook experience, and you have this nice quiet place to share pictures with your friends," he said. "We though that was a great implementation and a good basis for us to start thinking about our solution to the social shopping experience."
Screengrab via Strongbark
