Urban residents and visitors often rely on generic search engines or review sites that provide noisy, low‑trust listings for venues, events, and experiences. This makes it hard to discover activities that align with personal tastes and the social context of their friend network. Pinned Social delivers a mobile application that surfaces locally relevant venues and events based on the curated pins of a user’s friends.
Funding
Funding not disclosed
Founders
Product
Problem
Urban residents and visitors often rely on generic search engines or review sites that provide noisy, low‑trust listings for venues, events, and experiences. This makes it hard to discover activities that align with personal tastes and the social context of their friend network.
Solution
Pinned Social delivers a mobile application that surfaces locally relevant venues and events based on the curated pins of a user’s friends. The platform builds a real‑time recommendation graph from each friend’s geotagged pins, applying collaborative‑filtering algorithms to rank suggestions by relevance and proximity. Users can browse a map view or feed that highlights socially vetted options, then tap to view details, RSVP, or add their own pins. The app syncs with native iOS and Android push‑notification services to deliver timely alerts for new friend recommendations or nearby events. All interactions are stored in a cloud‑native backend that supports scalable user growth while maintaining low latency for location queries. Business partners can integrate via a RESTful API to push promotional content directly into the user’s feed, ensuring ads appear in context with organic recommendations.
Target Audience
The primary users are socially active urban adults (ages 18‑35) who rely on peer recommendations to explore dining, nightlife, and cultural events. Secondary customers include local businesses and event organizers seeking targeted exposure to nearby consumers.
Features
- Friend‑based recommendation engine that aggregates geotagged pins and applies collaborative filtering for personalized ranking
- Real‑time location services using GPS and map SDKs to surface nearby venues within a configurable radius
- Cross‑platform native app built with Swift (iOS) and Kotlin (Android) for optimal performance and push‑notification support
- In‑app social feed with pin creation, commenting, and sharing, leveraging a GraphQL API for low‑latency data retrieval
- Cloud‑hosted backend on AWS (Lambda, DynamoDB, S3) providing auto‑scaling and secure storage of user pins and preferences
- Contextual advertising layer that injects local business promotions into the feed via a REST API with targeting based on user interests and location
- Offline caching of venue metadata to enable discovery without continuous connectivity
- Analytics dashboard for users to track visited places and for partners to monitor campaign impressions and click‑through rates