REQQI

The best recommendations come from people you trust. However, finding trust-worthy recommendations on the Internet can be hard. Review websites may have hundreds of things to choose from, each with an averaged rating from hundreds of individual reviews from people you don't know—very confusing!

In 2012, Ben Caulfield and I set out to solve this problem.

The first few weeks were spent on working out the user experience, how all the pieces would fit together and eventually creating a demo-able prototype. Using this prototype we were able to raise the initial investment to allow us to work on this project full time.

The service is built around the idea of having trusted groups, with each group covering a specific topic such as music, films, books, or places to eat or drink. Group sizes are limited to 20 people to keep the recommendations authentic, personal, and to really make you think about who you trust.

We launched a product in closed beta at the end of 2012.

We aim to distribute REQQI to a wider audience by using our technology to allow publishers who already have a lot of recommendation-rich content to aggregate their recommendations in one place. This would be achieved using a set of widgets they can display on their own pages or through separate pages on REQQI itself.

We are currently in negotiations with the world's top publishers.

Technology

Laravel, PHP, MySQL, Apache, Linux, Git, jQuery, LESS, Bootstrap

Role

Co-founder

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