Alan: Hi, this is Alan Olsen’s American Dreams and I’m here today with Yiqiu Gao and Sijia who are the co-founders of Netaround. Welcome to today’s show.
Yiqiu: Hi, American Dreams.
Alan: So can you tell me about your company Netaround?
Yiqiu: Yeah, so we are actually autonomous social networking. Autonomous social networking means people can freely build up connections at any event without having a context change up front. So the autonomous social networking is powered by location technologies. People create location based geo-fenced on at like certain event venue so that all the attendees who are currently in that range site can quickly discover that zone and jump in and once they jump in, you will have all the attendees leased and you can assess their profile and also do a private chat with people. So this can substitute the business card because traditionally, the business card is really hard to organize and there’s not much information on the business card so it’s not really efficient. So with that around you can very quickly get all the attendees profile information and that’s a very awesome way of networking in any event.
Sijia: I would say it’s more efficient so we can directly find the right person to talk to cause each profile, they have a special tag they put for themselves. So if I’m an investor and looking for a marketing startup, I can just write my tag “looking for a marketing startup”. And if I’m a marketing startup looking for an investor I can just put “looking for investor” so people can directly know what I am about, why I am here for this event. So they can directly talk to me, so it’s more efficient. Yeah.
Alan: How does a person find your company?
Yiqiu: Uh, the person find the company?
Alan: Yeah, if they want to sign up for your app and..
Yiqiu: Oh, so we actually launched on the app store a couple days ago. So they can find us on the apple store and download Netaround. Currently we only have iOS version unfortunately, but we are planning to have the angel version out soon. So, yeah, they can go to app store directly and search for Netaround and download it.
Alan: Okay, and is this your first company?
Yiqiu: Yeah, exactly. We actually graduated from, you know, college. And so we started our startup.
Alan: I am amazed at the fact that you’re right out of college, you’re going to do your own company. What inspired you to do that?
Yiqiu: So I was once in a competition and there were 100 people in that competition. And I was actually looking for someone that I wanted to personally approach them, but then I was being drug into group chatting things and I didn’t find that person in that group thing. Because there are only half of them in that group, and that group is only by invitation. So I found that it’s not really efficient to only do something based on location or based on same topic or interest. And so people can just discover and freely jump in if they are in the same commonality, you know, stuff. So that’s why I came up with this idea. Just trying it out.
Alan: And how old is your company right now?
Yiqiu: So currently we have my co-founders and other co-founder back in New York, we are based in New York and two developers. So we are Boot-strapping and we just launched a couple days ago and we are actually planning on user acquisitions right now.
Alan: This is what entrepreneurism is about and I really admire you for stepping out and launching your own company right out of college.
Yiqiu: Yeah, thank you so much. Yeah, it’s a little challenging.
Alan: Just curious, you were classmates in college?
Yiqiu: Yeah, we are.
Alan: And what school was that?
Yiqiu: Pace University.
Alan: Pace University. Okay, Yiqiu and Sijia, thank you for being on today’s show.
Yiqiu: Thank you so much.
Sijia: Thank you so much.
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