By: Caleb Hellinger

The team behind the new consumer app, uhoo!, is taking a new approach to a problem every New Yorker knows intimately: how to find the right place to go in an overwhelming sea of optionality. The app utilizes background location matching to capture the places a user visits automatically, as opposed to asking the user to manually maintain lists in Google Maps, a notes app, or other manual recommendation apps.

After capturing a visit to a location, uhoo! prompts the user with one simple question delivered via push notification: hit or miss. The idea being to remove as much friction as possible, but still capture the necessary sentiment data in a ‘digital life log’.

Today, most people are simply consumers of ratings and reviews, but uhoo! makes it drop dead simple for users to give their opinion. The combination of visit-frequency plus sentiment data fuels a recommendation platform where places are promoted based on their popularity within a user’s network.

But that’s just the start for uhoo! The next big feature release, expected this month, brings AI to the forefront, enabling users to ask unstructured questions in a chat-gpt format to query their network data for recommendations.

Examples of questions you’ll be able to ask uhoo! :

• Find a sushi spot my friends like in the West Village
• Find a sushi spot that John has been to in the West Village
• Find a sushi spot trending on TikTok, that my friends like, and is good for a date

Ultimately, uhoo! will leverage data from the internet (tiktok, infatuation etc), overlay a user’s friends’ real-world interactions, influenced by their frequency of patronage and their take on hit or miss to find the single match for whatever you’re looking for.

uhoo! Unveiled

uhoo! cuts to the chase. When signing up, you’re asked to turn on background location tracking right out the gates. By doing so, they enable all users to experience the utility of the product within the first day.

As you move throughout the city, the app sends push notifications to let you know they’ve captured your visit to a location and to prompt you to rate it: hit or miss. If you have friends that have visited that location and rated it, they’ll let you know that too. Once you rate a location, you get to see what your friends rated it. You also receive a notification when a friend rates a place you’ve been to, so you can compare your ratings. With minimal effort and this fun social pull, you build a searchable collection of your spots around the world.

The core way to interact with friends in the app is by sending them “uhoos” or little nudges to try out new places. In the future, the founders say they’re going to build out ways for users to discover places collaboratively, to reduce friction behind the age-old question asked in the group chat:  “Where should we go?”

This is start-up number two for founder-duo David Wallach and Josh Richardson. When asked why go at it again, Josh said “We are obsessed with building products that should exist today, but don’t, and will feel obvious when they do. Turning a fun idea that our friends love into a scalable and investable business on the back of unique technology is the really exciting part.”

In regards to inspiration, he added “We were initially inspired by Zenly, a real-time location app that transformed background location tracking from a scary, hidden thing to a super useful tool for consumers,” and notes “bringing location-matching tech together with AI allows us to create a bunch of value for the consumer by enabling them to draw utility from their own data.”

The Bigger Picture

Potentially surprisingly, the team behind uhoo! isn’t looking to replace Google Maps or Yelp. “In the medium term, Google Maps will always be the suggested place to go for directions and breadth of business proximity data” says Josh “We don’t want to compete with them on that, we want to carve out a distinct use case around search. Our differentiator will be our data. We want to be the first place a user goes when they want to better understand where they’ve been and where their network is going.”

AI search is quickly becoming a saturated market and the tools themselves seem to lose differentiation every week. However, the data that feeds these AI platforms can be a powerful differentiator. And that’s the end goal for uhoo! To build a new AI search engine that uses proprietary, user-greenlighted data to empower the users themselves.

Sooner rather than later, you’ll be able to ask uhoo! some really cool prompts like:

• Create a list of all the dancy bars I liked in Medellin and send it to John
• How many times did I go to the gym in July?
• Do you think Jenny and John will like Automatic Slims?

Needless to say, the uhoo! team has big plans for the near future of uhoo! And in the meantime, enjoy being able to see all the places you’ve been without having to lift a finger…well, besides opening the app of course.

Website: https://uhoo.fyi/
IG: https://www.instagram.com/uhoo.fyi/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@uhoo.fyi
App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/uhoo/id6455731347

Published By: Aize Perez