By Kendal Enz
Having a hard time finding good deals at local businesses? A team of Johns Hopkins University (JHU) alumni has the solution to your problem.
Earlier this month, former classmates Stanley Ho, Sunyan Lee and Yiran Zhang officially launched Promotious, an app that offers users promotional deals for small Baltimore businesses.
“The business development side of building Promotious has been a lot of fun,” 25-year-old Ho said. “We had to learn how to talk to customers and business owners, which took us out of our comfort zones.”
Getting out of their comfort zones has paid off for the computer science graduates: Businesses presently offering promotions through the app include Chocolatea Café, Hopkins Deli, PJ’s Pub, Masala Kitchen and Niwana Restaurant. While businesses will eventually be charged for the advertising service, they can currently take advantage of the free beta version.
Promotious Co-founders Yiran Zhang, Stanley Ho and Sunyan Lee.
Unlike major promotional platforms like Groupon, once businesses register with Promotious they can begin releasing promotions instantly. The system also tracks and analyzes the released promotions, helping businesses to better understand which ones are yielding the best returns. Perhaps the most innovative aspect of Promotious is its integration with iBeacon technology, which allows businesses to send push notifications to app users who are within a 150-foot radius.
The idea for Promotious was born when Ho and Lee met in the Center for Leadership Education’s Computer Science (CS) Innovation and Entrepreneurship course, in which students develop and implement new business ideas.
“We wanted to relax after a long day in the CS grad lab, but as a nerdy group of international CS dudes, we didn’t really know where to chill out,” Ho said.
After searching Groupon and LivingSocial extensively for deals at restaurants near the Homewood campus and finding nothing, the young men decided to investigate the issue further. They spoke to business managers in Charles Village and learned that their experiences with Groupon and LivingSocial had not noticeably increased traffic or revenue to their restaurants.
“After doing some market research, we knew that we could build a platform that was both more user-friendly and more effective—in terms of cost and otherwise—than the current systems,” Ho said.
Work on the app that would eventually become Promotious began slowly, or as Ho described it, it was “on and off, kinda like a Sine wave.”
The start-and-stop progression of the app changed when Ho, Lee and Zhang were accepted into AccelerateBaltimore, a business incubator program offered through the Emerging Technology Centers. But even with the funding and mentorship provided through AccelerateBaltimore, getting Promotious to market has required a formidable amount of work. Along with speaking to dozens of local business owners and conducting multiple surveys on user preferences, they’ve had a host of less obvious issues to deal with, such as legal matters related to Maryland liquor laws.
“A word of advice to future JHU entrepreneurs: Do a lot of research into which [legal] firm to partner with, as it’s kind of like getting into a relationship,” Ho said.
For Lee, the most difficult part of the process has been scrapping countless hours of work, no matter how technologically beautiful, in order to write a program that better fits the needs of the customer.
“The most challenging thing is not in building and maintaining—it’s being able to set aside our biases and prioritize customer demands above all else to achieve product-market fit,” the 22-year-old said.
While launching Promotious has been a daunting task, it has not been without its merits.
“[I enjoy] knowing that our app has the capacity to solve important problems for local businesses in a tangible way,” Lee said, “[and] knowing that we can increase traffic and spending at those venues.”
Developing and launching Promotious has been an incredible learning experience for the three co-founders. Perhaps their biggest take away?
“Listen to your customers and listen to your customers,” Zhang, 25, said.
The young men hope to turn Promotious into a full-time job, eventually expanding the app to cities such as D.C. and New York. If the current interest in their app is any indication, they’ll have no trouble achieving their goals: Over 100 JHU students attended the Promotious launch party held earlier this month at PJ’s Pub in Charles Village.
For the moment, the three business partners are simply focusing on recruiting more businesses to sign-up for their beta test, as well as getting more users to download their app.
“[Promotious] becoming a full-time job depends on how much money we raise and how receptive the market is to our platform,” Ho said.
To download the app, visit www.promotious.com.