Robbie Shipman loves food.
The 46-year-old founder and CEO of Arroyo Grande based Econcept Inc. says he travels the California coast constantly seeking new flavors and dishes to sample, usually with the help of a slew of social media review apps like Yelp and TripAdvisor.
While the experiences are mostly positive, he said, one bad meal around two years ago gave him an idea: an aggregator smartphone app that takes restaurant and business reviews and puts them all in one place.
“I was in the Bay Area and saw a five-star, awesome restaurant on TripAdvisor that had more than 100 reviews,” he said. “But while I’m sitting at the restaurant, I click over to Yelp and it only had three stars.”
The dining experience ended in disappointment.
“It was pretty bad,” Shipman said. “I remember thinking, ‘Man, I would not give this place five stars if they paid me.’ If I had read those Yelp reviews, I would not have gone because there’s so much to choose from in the Bay Area.”
That was the light-bulb moment for Shipman’s app, which is set to premiere on Aug. 25. He wanted to start local, and decided to call it 805 Reviews.
After two years of tedious beta testing, the app is ready for an official launch, which will happen at Downtown Friday in Santa Maria.
Shipman said he hopes the app will allow consumers to make smarter choices about where to eat, stay, and go.
“The biggest advantage is you can look at a hotel and see Yelp, Google, and TripAdvisor reviews all in one place,” he explained, adding that 805 Reviews combines a dozen different review websites and apps to determine an overall rating.
The platform also provides links to calendars for six live theaters in the area, as well as TripAdvisor pages for the Santa Maria Valley, Pismo Beach, San Luis Obispo, and Paso Robles.
Other links found on the app and its website include area Groupon deals and coupons.
Shipman says he hopes to eventually sell coupons through the site, in addition to the services it already offers businesses, which include notifications each time a customer writes a new review on social media along with website customization.
“A lot of the stuff I do is not reinventing the wheel,” he said. “What I do is take several peoples’ wheels and put them together.”
At the moment, Shipman has six employees, but he expects that number will grow if the rollout for the app is successful.
“The cool thing about this product is we are debt free,” he said. “So overhead for scaling out a project is very inexpensive, and once you have the master product complete, all you have to do is duplicate it into the next city—which probably requires three more people each time.
“Right now we’re only in the 805; however, the platform is built to be in any zip code. So as we run this next year, the next project will be 559 and we’ll have to scale out for that zip code and area.”
Shipman said his app will help facilitate more reviews on other platforms like Yelp and TripAdvisor by sending notifications to users that they can copy and paste reviews written on 805’s website to those other review apps. At the moment, 805 Reviews pulls from 12 platforms to generate its reviews: Yelp, TripAdvisor, Facebook, Citysearch, FourSquare, Google Places, Yellow Pages, Google My Business, The Knot, TrustPilot, WeddingWire, Zillow, and Zomato. Shipman says he plans to add four more review sites to the aggregator in the future.
The app will be available for download following the Aug. 25 launch.
For more information, visit 805reviews.com and 805reviews.biz.
Highlights
• The Solvang Chamber of Commerce is accepting resumes for a new executive assistant. According to a chamber press release, the position is part-time and around 20 hours per week. To apply, send resumes to susie@solvangchamber.com or call 688-0701.
Staff Writer Spencer Cole wrote this week’s Biz Spotlight. Information should be sent to the Sun via fax, mail, or email at spotlight@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Aug 24-31, 2017.