At 9PM on a Wednesday night in 2015, a group of Columbians, including Connor Bogin ’17BUS, were in Midtown Manhattan, looking for a cool bar to grab a drink. They wanted to find a fun crowd instead of being the only people in an empty place. They took out their phones and each used existing apps to find venues. Unfortunately, after stopping by four bars that were each underwhelming, the group decided to skip drinks and go home. The next day, the group started working on CrowdHopper because they believed crowds matter when choosing where to go, and no one else was providing the info they needed.
Since that evening in 2015, CrowdHopper has evolved into a reality. It is the outcome of true collaboration across Columbia University, with team members from Columbia Engineering and Columbia Business School and support from Columbia Entrepreneurship and the Lang Entrepreneurship Center. As of late July 2017, the CrowdHopper app is live in the App Store with crowd sizing for 10,500 places in NYC and 3,500 in Seattle. It has solved the problem of not knowing where to go on a Wednesday night by showing users how busy the places around them are based on venue type. Whether a user is looking for a Mexican restaurant or a craft cocktail bar, CrowdHopper has them covered.
What’s next for CrowdHopper? Its immediate goal is to prove that users care about CrowdHopper and love using it by tracking downloads and active users. Next, these Columbians intend to raise a seed round that will enable CrowdHopper to add more functionality, expand to more cities, and improve underlying data. Help out by downloading CrowdHopper here: tinyurl.com/
Happy Hopping!