Hopkins affiliates release Promotious app

Promotious, a mobile app founded by two recent Hopkins graduates and a current senior that offers discounts for Charles Village restaurants, launched on April 9.

Unlike other services that offer discounts for local businesses, Promotious uses iBeacon, a new Bluetooth-powered technology that allows businesses to interact with customers when they are near the stores’ locations.

Promotious will send users push notifications if they walk by a restaurant that serves a type of food the user enjoys.

“Let’s say you’re walking down the street, and you see that you like burgers,” senior Sunyan Lee, Promotious co-founder, said. “You’ll get a push notification on your phone based on your preferences. Algorithms will alert you if we think that you like burgers. Without you ever having to pull out your phone, we could give you notifications about what you might potentially want to walk into.”

Although the app will alert users if they’re near a restaurant they might enjoy, it doesn’t provide information about users to specific restaurants.

“It doesn’t track your location or anything,” Lee said. “What happens is as soon as you walk in front of the business, each of the businesses have a little beach, and it doesn’t waste your Bluetooth, your battery or your data.”

The three founders came up with the idea while trying to figure out what to do one evening.

“After a super long day working in the computer science lab, we were super tired, and we wanted to chill out,” Promotious co-founder Stanley Ho, who received a masters degree in computer science from Hopkins in 2014, said. “We walked around Charles Village trying to find a place, but we couldn’t really find any promotions or anything going on. So we thought, ‘Hey, why don’t we ask the businesses about their experience with platforms, and why aren’t they using them?’”

The founders approached local businesses, who told them that they weren’t satisfied with existing discount services.

“The businesses said the experience was bad because it took too long to release a promotion,” Ho said. “We had to give a really big cut of the revenue.”

The founders hope that Hopkins students will want to use their app because it allows users to save money near campus.

“Ideally, [we would target] anyone who wants to get cheap deals for their meals or other goods,” Promotious co-founder Yiran Zhang, who received a masters degree in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from Hopkins in 2014, said. “Right now, for the Hopkins neighborhood, we are targeting mainly the students.”

The app took about three weeks to actually create. However, additional time was needed to fine-tune its elements and features. One of Ho’s friends, a designer, helped the team with their process, and they also performed many customer interviews. Because the app is so new, the company is trying to spread the word.

The Promotious team has also hired two undergraduate interns to help market the app.

“The image that we want is one that the app is for local business and reaches college kids,” Matthew Fraser, an intern for the company, wrote in an email to The News-Letter. “It is a little difficult because most of the restaurants believe that their way of promoting deals is the best, but it’s not really reaching enough students that would purchase the deals if they knew the deals existed. We are trying to show them that this will only benefit them.”

Ho also said it was difficult to convince local businesses to sign on with them.

“We’re beta testing Charles Village,” Ho said. “Since we’re Hopkins students,... we understand and we get connections to Hopkins demographics more, so it’s just us approaching the businesses actively trying to set up a meeting with them. But it’s actually much harder than expected, trying to meet the business owners.”

In the process of building the brand, Promotious has made six verbal agreements with local businesses; two of those businesses, Chocolatea and Masala Kitchen, already have active discounts on the app.

“Obviously, we want as many downloads as possible,” Lee said. “We were aware that we only have two businesses listed, so that’s something we’re working on.”

The founders have realized through their experience speaking with business owners how their app, in particular, is unique as opposed to some other large promotion platforms. Ho commented how all the business owners get a generally free voice in the promotions they choose to offer. The Promotious founders keep in constant touch with business owners to help figure out what types of deals to post on the app.

“If the beta test shows positive traction or potential promise, we’ll probably expand to Mount Vernon because there’s so many restaurants and bars and everything, and we talked to the businesses and a large chunk of their revenue is from the students from University of Baltimore,” Ho said.

On Friday, the company held a launch party at PJ’s Pub offering free beer and wings for anyone who downloaded the app. Those not able to download the app, which is only available for iPhones, were encouraged to like the app’s Facebook’s page and help promote the app on social media.

“They had free fries and wings, and when they hit 100 downloads, we all got a free drink, a beer or a glass of wine,” senior Rachel Davis said.

Overall, students voiced positive opinions about the app and its existence.

“I’d definitely be interested in downloading the app,” freshman Molly Brambil said. “It would be awesome to get discounts in Charles Village, especially because a lot of [the stores] are overpriced because they know we’ll pay.”

Freshman Christian Cholish said he thinks the app will be more useful for people who are visitors to the area.

“I think if our [restaurant] options were greater and I had more I needed, like some kind of tool or variable that let me decide where I was going to eat, that would be useful, but my options are so limited that something like that isn’t going to make a big impact in my decision,” Cholish said.