Startup Alley Spotlight: YOBO helps you find places through Emojis

YOBO‘s mission is to connect places and emotions. Using their mobile app, travelers and locals can find and rate places with their personal emotions using nothing but Emojis.

Our interview series of Startup Alley participants continues with insights from CEO and founder of YOBO – Tobias Szarowicz. Tobias is a member of Travel Massive Berlin. In this Q&A, he tells us about how the idea of YOBO was born and how they hope to make travel better for everyone.

How did you get into the travel industry?

There was one key event that lead us to start working on YOBO. We were using Yelp, Foursquare, TripAdvisor, and Google to plan a short weekend trip to Prague – and ended up with the same drunk British stag party at almost every place we went. The reason for that was simple – we all put the same popular bars, restaurants, and clubs on our list and ended up at the most touristic places in town.

This experience made us think about how we could use technology to personalize the real hyper-local world around us, so people could feel local wherever they are.

Tell us more about your startup and how you came up with the idea.

After this moment we thought a lot about what makes places special for people. We figured out that it’s not the ratings, because you can feel good in a poorly rated place or – like in our case – feel bad in a top-rated place.

I think it’s more likely to be about the emotions we feel at these places, because local experiences are made of emotions.

But what is the best way to display these very personal emotions and feelings people have at different places? By using Emojis 🙂

On YOBO, people use Emojis to find and rate places based on their personal emotions. On the one hand, it allows us to keep all information about places visual (using no text at all), while on the other hand, it makes emotions in cities searchable. You can find a place where people feel crazy or search for something cool. And if you’re desperately looking for a burger, just hit the hamburger emoji.

YOBO works like a hyper-local Instagram. Our users share photos of locations and rate and categorize these places using their emotions (emojis) – we call them Happy Places. Those Happy Places are then compiled into other users’ individual recommendation feeds based on their current location.

Three months ago, our website and iOS App went live and grew from Berlin to London, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, New York, Miami, and Los Angeles.

What is unique about your product or service?

As you can see, having fun while discovering the world is a really important factor for us. But using emojis also allows us to do something else – personalization. Spotify can recommend you new music you might like, Netflix can do the same with movies.

We focus on the real world and recommend places our users personally might like.

We use image recognition to get cognitive data out of the pictures and the emojis our users are sharing to prioritize, classify, and verify this data. This method – called reinforcement learning – allows us to reach a much higher personalization level than any other local platform while keeping our users anonymous.

How is your startup changing the future of travel?

Imagine you arrive in a new city, open our app and find highly personal and individually handpicked recommendations on where to go and what to do. All places where you will probably feel the happiest. It already works with movies and music, so why shouldn’t it work with places in the real world?

What’s another travel company you admire and why?

I love Airbnb. It was the first company worldwide that proved that people don’t want to feel like tourists while traveling.

To me, traveling means to feel like your destination is your new home for a while – it’s about feeling local wherever you are.

Tourism has created artificial bubbles that actually keep people from feeling local and discovering new things. And it caused some major problems like overtourism. I think local personalization based on real emotions is the golden key to solving this problems.

Follow Tobias on Travel Massive to connect with him and find YOBO on the App Store.