Seeking recommendations on various products and services before making a purchase has become the norm of the day. We all love to have value for our money and hate spending on stuff that doesn’t do justice to its claim. How does one find out the worthiness of something? Well they simple turn to their friends and family for some sound advice or turn to reviews online. However, unfortunately scrambling through reviews that is scattered all across the internet can be a taxing task. Even collecting recommendations from friends and family is no less daunting.
Well to make this task simple, we introduce you to Recommend. Powered by trust, this platform enables you to find the best recommendations from people you know. Not just that; it also gives you the power to become a trusted influencer. All you need to do is save your own relevant experiences and share them with your private network.
Meet The Power Team!
Recommend was ideated and founded by Nicolas Mendiharat along with his fellow founders Christophe Léon and François Cerdan.
Nicolas is a graduate from ESCP Europe. He has been a serial IT entrepreneur since 17 years. He founded and managed 5 companies in the digital space, among which the Travelhorizon Group, which under his lead has become the European leader of online ski vacation bookings with more than 300k customers and has a turnover of 70 M€. Travelhorizon was sold to the Sundio Group in 2012.
Recommend is his latest venture and the most ambitious so far. It is the social network of word-of-mouth driven by trust and selecting all types of recommendations through algorithms in a customized way. It enables to find, retrieve and share advices and reviews from experts and your network thus creating a global recommendation platform between Recommend, media and merchants.
The X-Factor!
Recommendations from experts and people you trust have mostly remained offline and are spread all over the internet. Well Recommend is the first mobile and web network to gather and deliver customized advice the way we do it in our everyday life through natural word-of-mouth. This app enables you to find, save, retrieve and share all relevant experiences about places, products and services in one place.
Powered by algorithms based on trust and profiling, the app promises to save time by helping you to make better choices on everything you do. Recommend is also a natural social influence platform based on social recognition for what you know.
The Problem It Is Solving!
Having a platform where one can find trusted recommendations is surely solving a heck lot of problems. For users, it solves the issue of finding the right recommendations from experts and friends for anything they are looking for. For experts and influencers it is finally giving them a social platform to save and share their expertise. For e-merchants, the app is getting leads from advertising, trust through word-of-mouth and also enabling them to finally socialize with customer’s reviews. Finally for the internet in general, this app is creating a recommendation standard in the middle of the mess all the existing reviews systems have caused.
The Inspiration!
“I was fed up and often disappointed with advice by reading reviews from strangers on sites like Tripadvisor our Yelp for instance. Like most of us, I’m relying on what my friends and some experts say when I choose a hotel, a restaurant, a book or a movie, and the problem is all those recommendations have remained in emails, direct messages and conversations with no way to retrieve them when you need. So I created a global recommendation platform which works with trust and your network first and finally addresses that huge problem”, says the team.
On Challenges Faced & Competitors!
Like most startups, finding the right team and initial funding was the team’s greatest hurdle. Even designing a beautiful and functional app was one of their biggest challenges faced.
As far as competition goes, Recommend has a dozen startup competitors throughout the US and EU with the same diagnosis but a very different execution. Otherwise, the platform is kind of the next step in recommendations versus vertical crowdsourced platforms like Tripadvisor.
On Expansion Plans, Intended Users & More!
“We’ve created a benchmark critical size in France. Next step is the US and a roll out in other major countries”, says the team.
At the moment, Recommend is mainly targeted at 25 to 45 year old discerning consumers that are living in big cities globally. Further, when it comes down to monetizing the app, the team follows a Google type business model with a fantastic premium driven by trust on lead generation.
In short, Recommend is here to drive away your woes when it comes to seeking recommendation on anything you want to buy, decide or avail!
To know more about the app, do visit: re.co
