Half of Americans rely on friends and family for restaurant recommendations but your inner circle may not have the same tastes as you. Some turn to social media to discover what influencers are recommending. Others are reliant on static review sites like Yelp. But lost in these exchanges is a centralized, trusted destination to organize and access consistent recommendations that are relevant to the specific user. Seek seeks to change this with its social recommendation platform that connects consumers with like-minded curators that provide recommendations across six different segments – restaurants, cafes and sweets, nightlife, attractions, events, and activities. Users can discover, save, and share consumer leisure recommendations from curators that share similar tastes rather than relying on anonymous reviews. The newly-launched platform, currently focused on NYC, is designed for curators to build audiences and interact with their followers, offering monetization options that preserve authenticity but also allow the curators to earn a living.
AlleyWatch caught up with Cofounder and CEO Shanna Liu to learn more about the inspiration to build a social discovery platform for consumer leisure that actually works for users and curators, the company’s strategic plans, recent round of funding, and much, much more.
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
This was our first capital raise — Series Seed after bootstrapping the company for about 9 months. We raised $4 million in the round that was led by Valar Ventures with participation from QED Investors, Western Technology Investment (WTI), Entree Capital, Breyer Capital, and Goodwater Capital.
Tell us about the product or service that Seek offers.
Seek connects influencers in the consumer lifestyle space with consumers looking for a better, faster way to sift through the thousands of leisure opportunities to pick the ones where they’ll have the best time. For influencers — we call them curators — Seek provides an authentic way to organize, catalog, and share their expertise (including ways to monetize the expertise in the future). For consumers, Seek provides both the marketplace to discover new curators that share your taste, and the curated content to make better, faster decisions about where to go and what to do.
Maybe the easiest way to think about it is that Seek is the next generation integration of traditional social media and traditional site review/recommendation platforms. Think of the offspring of your favorite social platform and your favorite review site.
What inspired the start of Seek?
In short, I had a recommendation fail while on vacation right before Covid and I became obsessed with how existing recommendation and review platforms could be improved to eliminate the trust gap and get more personalized, relevant information. From that root came the eventual observation that the influencer/creator community was the key to unlocking a new type of experience.
Giff Carter (Cofounder and COO) and I were both working at Stash doing a bunch of things, and as this came together we were ready to go back to seed-stage and jumped on the opportunity.
How is Seek different?
Seek is different in several ways.
First, Seek focuses on the creator/curator as its key client. Unlike current social media platforms that are fundamentally built as peer-to-peer sharing platforms without monetization, Seek puts the curator at the center of the platform.
Second, Seek focuses the consumer experience around discovering new curators and discovering new places through curators. This is a fundamental restructure of the discovery experience because it now starts with trust.
Finally, Seek is fun. Yes, there’s this utilitarian component — I need to find a bar to take a date tonight or a place to go on a hike tomorrow. But there’s also this fun component where you can just swipe through cool places and see what others are doing.
What market does Seek target and how big is it?
Seek works for everyone. Right now, we’re focused on a Gen Z and Millennial NYC launch. As we gain traction well expand to other areas and as the user base grows it will look more and more like the broader population.
What’s your business model?
We want to be completely aligned with our curators. Our mission is to help our tastemakers turn their passion into a profession. We’re helping them create predictable, sustainable revenue streams by developing premium content on the platform to which consumers can subscribe. This frees curators from inauthentic product advertising as their sole source of revenue and allows them to be fully dedicated to what they love and do best: discovering and sharing unforgettable leisure experiences.
How has COVID-19 impacted your business?
COVID has created this massive, pent-up demand among almost everyone to go out and have fun. As the world re-opens over the next 18 months, we expect consumer leisure demand to explode and Seek intends to be there to help with that discovery.
What was the funding process like?
We’ve been through a bunch of fundraises at prior startups, it always takes way more time and focus than you expect or hope, and no matter how good your idea is you always get more declines than participation. So, it’s emotionally draining and exhilarating at the same time. There’s a lot of investor demand for post-COVID boom opportunities, and of course, it helps that we have a track record with a bunch of high-profile investors. We’re grateful for their confidence in us and it’s clear the influencer space is hot right now.
That said, it’s still a long grind.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
Raising meaningful amounts on a consumer-focused product that is pre-launch is hard. Every round needs belief in the market, the product, and the management team. But that is way easier when VCs can play with the actual product and see real live consumers doing the same. Pre-launch, it feels more ephemeral and it’s just harder.
Raising meaningful amounts on a consumer-focused product that is pre-launch is hard. Every round needs belief in the market, the product, and the management team. But that is way easier when VCs can play with the actual product and see real live consumers doing the same. Pre-launch, it feels more ephemeral and it’s just harder.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
A number of factors. First, the creator economy and the influencer economy are huge, undeveloped, and growing massively. Investors want in early. Second, it’s an easy pain point to understand — no one is satisfied with current recommendation platforms, and there currently are no social platforms that serve as a repository for influencer or creator expertise. It’s easy to see how the two fit together and work. Finally, we had some really good initial data and traction around influencer engagement.
Honestly, it didn’t hurt that we were coming off a huge success at Stash — a unicorn startup track record really helped.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
We’ve quietly released a beta version of the app to a few hundred influencers and consumers to get testing and feedback. We’re iterating and improving that functionality as we work towards a late October full release. Getting that release out and the related product and marketing work is our sole focus for the next 6 months.
What advice can you offer companies in New York that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
Data. Take the time to get data to support the notion that product-market fit is soon. Surveys, interviews, waitlists, etc. You have to convince investors that you will get product-market fit and that scaling isn’t too far away.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
We’re laser-focused on the next six months. We want to get the launch version of the product out and we need to get NYC right and put ourselves in a position to expand to other cities.
What’s your favorite outdoor dining restaurant in NYC
This is literally what Seek solves!!! Once we launch Seek to the public, you’ll be able to join and get all of our recs! But in case you need something right now, we like Boqueria in Soho a lot — it’s in that sweet spot of great food, good ambiance (they’ve done an awesome job setting up their outdoor area), and a reasonable price point.
