Dustin Rowe, a St. Petersburg entrepreneur, knows it can be challenging to discover new activities and events, especially in a busy place like Tampa Bay.
That's why Rowe and his co-founders have founded What's Good, an online tool for uncovering local hangouts. Dustin, his sister, Megan Rowe, and friend Mahmud Ahsan built and invested in the community aggregator platform. After founding the platform in late 2023, the startup received $100,000 in pre-seed funding in January.
"Our friends and close connections have this same problem," Dustin said. "That really validated that for us to say, 'OK, let's go and see if we can build this; let's do this full time.'"
The platform first launched in St. Petersburg and Wilmington, North Carolina. The founders identified the test markets because they have seen the two budding hubs firsthand, he said.
The new capital comes from unnamed angel investors in Wilmington and the founders' own budget. One of the unnamed investors from Wilmington previously developed a software company, Dustin said.
Dustin is currently working out of a coworking space in St. Pete. He is pitching to investors and looking to join a regional accelerator or incubator. He also hopes to raise $250,000 in the coming months and grow to other Florida cities, he said.
The Rowe siblings are originally from Hershey, Pennsylvania. Dustin graduated from Pennsylvania State University, and Megan graduated from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Dustin moved to St. Pete in 2020, while working remotely for a company called Veeva Systems. Ahsan is a software developer and works remotely in Malaysia.
In 2019, Ahsan and Dustin founded a startup called Mefluence, but it fizzled under competition, Dustin said.
"It was tough for a small team of three to go about it, but it was a really good learning experience," Dustin said.
It also struggled partly because the founders didn't give it their full-time attention. To ensure growth, they're working full-time on What's Good.
"The idea is we build one consistent platform that's very scalable," Dustin said. "Everything we're doing basically is trying to build playbooks of how do we take it from two relatively small cities to much bigger cities."
