How Rummble Turned Competitors to Customers

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Rummble was in the location-based review space before anyone had heard of Foursquare. In 2008, the website was already helping people figure out where to go based on where they were and what their former preferences said about them. But while you’ve probably heard of Foursquare and Gowalla (and even that puts you in the extreme minority), you probably haven’t heard of Rummble.


Even though 200,000 users have signed up for the service, few of them have used it on a daily basis even at the company’s peak. Rummble’s prospects were looking dim as large players like Google and Facebook entered the location-based services space.

A bit of an identity crisis ensued. The startup added a Foursquare-like badge system, launched a Twitter app, created a white-label product for a WiFi directory, and at one point even started a video show.

During South by Southwest this year, the UK-based startup announced a completely new focus that departs from all of its previous dabblings. While its main recommendation product will stay in operation, the company plans to focus on a B2B service powered by the same recommendation technology.


Mashable recently chatted with Rummble COO Alex Housley and Commercial Director Louisa East about how their company will make the transition from competing with location-based services to competing for their business.

Navigating a Growing Location-Based Service Space

In many ways, Housley says Rummble started in the place where location-based startups like Foursquare have now ended up. It focused on personalized recommendations from the start, basing them on how users and contacts in their social networks interact with the app.
 
“We worked at the technical stuff first — the deeply technical stuff first — with the personalization and recommendations rather than focusing more on the mechanics that have been quite successful with some of the other location based services, the user interface,” Housley says.

Foursquare and Gowalla launched in 2009. Facebook and Google both joined the game In 2010.

“It’s become such a crowded space and there are a lot of people doing the same thing, there’s some big names out there that are practically household brands,” East says. “So at the beginning of this year we put together our heads and thought that we know that the technology we had was really really solid and just figure out how we can use that technology in other areas.”

If You Can’t Beat Them…

At South by Southwest this year, Housley was greeted at the Austin airport by a large banner ad for Google Places — further evidence, he thought, that the announcement he was to make at the conference was on the right track.

Housley later revealed that Rummble would be focusing on a B2B service that would lend its recommendation technology to other players through an API.

At a time when people are asking how location-based services will make money, Rummble wants to be part of the answer. The company also wants to provide the service for ecommerce and media sites.

“We were doing it already for location — the personalization and recommendation — and we thought it would be more potential to not have that engine locked into Rummble, into our consumer side,” Housley says.

He declined to comment on whether founder and former CEO Andrew Scott shared this vision, but he did acknowledge that Scott has left the company and has yet to be replaced.

Looking Forward

In the last several months, Rummble has been working with a handful of partners to create demo applications of Rummble’s API on their websites.

A wine site, for instance, has integrated Rummble’s API to create a personalized recommendation list for each of its customers even before they make a single purchase. To do this, the API gathers information about what each customer is searching for, what they’ve viewed, and what they place in their shopping baskets. It attaches a different level of significance to each action when factoring it into recommendations. Rumble also helps match site users with others who share their interests.

Rummble’s plan is to target location-based services that lack recommendation services, ecommerce sites, travel sites, private sales clubs, and publications with its new B2B service. It will charge these companies a small rate per transaction in exchange for using the technology.

“If you’re looking at building a consumer app from scratch, it makes sense to get some of the mechanics right first,” Housley says.

• Image courtesy of iStockphoto, gunnar3000, Flickr, asmythie

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