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The Yeti app is only a few months old, but its beginnings started long ago as something much different. Back in July 2012 CEO Alex Capecelatro and his team launched an app called At The Pool. At The Pool was an app focused on discovering people with similar interests, then meeting them offline. It had received good press and had a modest, yet growing, user base in over 100 countries, but At the Pool wasn’t meeting expectations. Unfortunately, “we had over built it. It had too many features, too many things to do,” said Capecelatro.
Despite unease about At The Pool’s progress, they found, however, that one feature on the app was quite popular: the comments section. Users were talking about the things they loved doing and where they loved doing them, but just weren’t meeting up. Offline social discovery wasn’t working, but the At The Pool team had found something that was. They knew they needed to pivot.
The pitch to their investors was rather simple. “We basically put up on a white board: here’s five tabs, here are all the features. We’re hacking all these features out and we are focusing on this,” said Capecelatro. “It was a feature within the product that was proven to do really well, when we did that people were onboard.”
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From that Yeti was born.
Instead of connecting people to do activities with, Yeti works like Tinder for places. Users upload pictures of places, then swipe right, to show they like what they are seeing, or swipe left to show they don’t like what they are seeing. In fact, it was Tinder’s CEO Sean Rad who had recommended the swipe-left, swipe-right card stack functionality to Capecelatro in the first place. Over time Yeti learns what you like and don’t like, then sets you up to discover places matched to your taste.
It works great for travelers because as soon as a vacationer sets down in a new city the app can begin to search for places a user might like. Locals with wanderlust can use the app effectively too. Capecelatro said app usage breaks down about 50 percent local usage and 50 percent travelers.
“Yeti is a local recommendation engine,” said Capecelatro. Something that is needed because “Text based search engines are a hassle and take a lot of time, and Google brings too many results.”
“It is a really smart recommendation platform that can learn about the user and tell them about things around you,” said Capecelatro. “If we learned you hate sushi we are going to show less of that and if you love coffee shops we will show you more of that.”
The company sees this swipe-to-discover process as a great way also to make money. “At the end of the day lots of locations want to be discovered,” said Capecelatro.
Yeti is testing that idea with Whole Foods through a contest to upload healthy food content onto the app for discovery. “The Whole Foods relationship, they realized that they can post on Twitter or Facebook but that content will be quickly lost in the stream,” said Capecelatro.
By partnering with Yeti, businesses like Whole Foods can more easily be discovered by people who like products similar to theirs. “If it works well with one shop the idea is to scale it out to others,” said Capecelatro. Eventually, businesses would pay to be listed closer to the top of the card stack. Also to help scale that idea, the company is beginning to work with location data from providers like Yelp, Foursquare, Google Places, Instagram, and Factual.
Capecelatro knows pivots and app launches aren’t easy. “Most users will give you one chance,” said Capecelatro, “so we’re launching and doing really small roll outs.” In the last five weeks the company has already launched four updates and will continue to tweak the platform in small increments going forward. If the Yeti team has learned anything it is that pivots and product improvements never end.
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