24 Monday Dec 2012
Posted in From our Founder
Here’s to wishing you the warmest time with family and friends this holiday season. Don’t forget to bundle up as winter approaches!
As always, we deeply appreciate all your support over the past year. Watch out for even more exciting event venues and party spaces, along with new website features in 2013!
From all of us at Froomz,
21 Wednesday Nov 2012
Posted in From our Founder, Froomz News
Tags
Last night, I spent several hours at an animal hospital because our guinea pig Snowy was suddenly ill. When another guinea pig died last year, it broke our girls’ hearts. So I was determined to find a vet that could see Snowy immediately. After relentlessly calling around, we finally found one that was open late.
I can’t describe the joy and gratitude I felt when we left the animal hospital with some medicine and a good prognosis. Although I never was a big fan of rodents, being able to put the ailing creature into capable hands and bringing comfort to the girls I deeply love is a huge accomplishment on this Thanksgiving eve.
I felt the urge to say Happy Thanksgiving and thank you to those who were working late hours so that others can enjoy peace and happiness.
On this traditional Thanksgiving Day, let’s have a toast for the joy of good health, the comfort and safety of our family and friends, the privilege of working with bright and tenacious individuals, and the courage to take on new challenges.
Wishing you all a great Thanksgiving Day!
Yan Heim
CEO/Co-Founder
Froomz
15 Monday Oct 2012
Posted in From our Founder, Froomz News
Tags
Anthemos Georgiades, dreamforce, froomz, salesforce, sustainable business, trust, Yan Heim, Zumper
I was so encouraged with the recent seed investment by the top VC firms in Zumper, a new apartment rental marketplace. What do Zumper and Froomz have in common? We are facing the same chicken vs. egg challenge that any new marketplace has, and we both believe in the mission of building a sustainable business from ground up.
“This will take years, not months, but we’re committed to making this work,” said Anthemos Georgiades, CEO of Zumper. Along with building a business from ground up come the challenges of velocity and scalability , which are on every investor’s mind.
I firmly believe venue participation is key in building a viable marketplace that enables real time booking and have refused to take shortcut by automatically scraping facilities just to inflate our size. Our philosophy is to build trusted relationships with both venues and their customers.
A well known VC recently asked me, “What’s Froomz’s winning edge given that several funded startups are doing this?” Money can buy advertisement, can generate hype, but money cannot buy trust. Social commerce, collaborative consumption, and marketplaces at their core are about trust. Do I trust Appelblom Jewelry enough that I’d book a bridal shower on Froomz without ever doing a site visit? Do I trust Froomz to handle my credit payment and keep my data secure?
The Friday before the Dreamforce event, an event planner from Salesforce asked us to find a venue for a reception hosted by an EVP close to the Moscone Center on Wednesday during the Dreamforce week. Most of the downtown San Francisco venues have already been booked solid by this conference with over 90,000 registrants. She trusted us with her last minute booking need for an important event at a critical time and we got it done.
This month we are celebrating the one year anniversary of our open beta with the debut of Froomz 1.0. This is the result of 12 months of painstaking discovery and development, balancing what the venues want and what meeting and event planners need. Some of the new features include the ability to search for venues based on guest count and venue name from the home page, expanded location-based search options that include region and proximity to address, and more options to refine results based on criteria such as venue type, privacy options and configurations.
We are in the process of building even more features around trust and efficiency. We also hope you like the new web design.
Stay tuned!
Yan
