Description of Awessome! as a product

1. All your friends recommendations in one place
Akshay Arabolu
Founder
akshay@awessome.com
678-982-5939
@shaymus
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2. Pitch
A fast, easy way to share recommendations
with friends
Goal: To become the go-to resource for finding
recommendations
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3. Problem
People currently share recommendations on various
platforms all the time. This valuable data is now lost.
Tweets have a half-life of
about 4 min
Facebook posts have a half-life of about
30 min

4. Solution
An app that makes it fun & ...allows you to follow your
easy to share recs. And.. friends recommendations
Easy SMS &
Email sharing
+
Fb & Twitter
broadcasting 4

5. Team
Akshay Arabolu  Software M&A Banker, Updata Advisors
PM + User  Systems Engineer, Goldstone Technologies
Acquisition  BS Comp Sci, Purdue | MS Finance, GWU
 Self-taught coder. Open source contributor.
Travis Pew  Author 4 scientific papers on cancer @ U of Chicago Med
Tech-Lead  BS Hons Biology, U of Chicago
 Visual Designer @ Senzari (500 startups, $3Mil raise)
David Elgena  Creator WTHR App. Won international design accolades
Designer  BFA Graphics, Cedarville U | MFA Visual Arts, Miami Intl’ U
Josh Breinlinger  VC at Sigma Partners
 Employee #1 @ oDesk
Advisor  BS, Mech Eng MIT
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6. Notable Competition (many other smaller competitors)
Recently acquired
by Google Ventures in
Direct
03/12
Built by ex-Virgin by Yahoo in 10/12
group execs
Indirect
LiveStar

7. Monetization & Market Size
Market size
Hard to quantify, but on Twitter alone we’ve extrapolated ~1
recommendation / sec
 Food & location based recs will be our biggest category
 Despite Yelp, Foodspotting etc, most people still share
these via Facebook, Twitter, Email & SMS
Monetization
Similar to eCommerce apps, allow users
to purchase products, make reservations
etc directly from our app

8. Past & Present
Past
• Team previously built GetComparisons (Quora for comparisons)
• Launched in 2011
• Received some attention ->
• But didn’t gain enough traction
• Learning from this experience, pivoted to build recommendation app
Present
• In 2012 started working on Awessome.com
• Released first version of our iOS app recently
• Looking for seed funding to finish product & build user-base
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