Glia is a search and discovery app aimed at helping consumers find businesses (restaurants, stores, etc.) that align with their social and political views, when deciding when to spend their hard earned cash. We spoke with Co-founder Barry Klein to learn more.
| Company Name: | LAMID Studios |
| Mobile App: | Glia |
| Located: | San Diego, CA |
| Partner Since: | 2014 |
| Website: | www.glia.is |
| Facebook: | www.facebook.com/glia.is |
| Twitter: | @glia_is |
| Tumblr: | www.glia-is.tumblr.com |
| G+ | +Glia |
| App Store: | iTunes |
| Name and Title: | Barry Klein, Co-founder |
Q: Introduce readers to Glia. What do you do?
A: Glia is a platform that empowers people to shop with a purpose by connecting users with businesses based on their social and political values. You can think of it as “Yelp meets eHarmony,” designed to help people with values-based shopping and discovery. Users create a personal values profile in a quick, fun, and simple process where they report and rank their views on social and political issues. Then, while out and about, they can search for businesses (such as retailers or restaurants) and see which businesses align (and don’t align) with their values— making it easier to decide where to spend their hard earned dollars.
Q: Why is location data important for Glia?
A: When first coming up with the concept behind Glia, we asked ourselves how would we want to use it. My initial idea came about when I was trying to figure out where I’d want to go with my wife for a special dinner. I realized how little I knew about the places where I was likely to spend a significant amount of my money and that if I knew the values of the people who owned the restaurants were similar to my own, I’d be more likely to try a place or go there more. We also know how busy people are and how much time we spend out and about, so we wanted a real time, location based application that could be used when out in the world, actually making a spending decision.
Q: Why did you choose Factual as your location data provider?
A: Factual is the premium resource for location data on businesses. Your team provides the most extensive and thorough data for individual businesses. This allows us to not have to worry about that aspect of our app.
Q: How do you determine which companies align (or don’t align) with each issue?
A: We understand that people are not just Democrats or Republicans— they’re more nuanced. The issues that motivate you and me are different. When users sign up for Glia, they’ll find 50+ different values to choose to establish their own profiles. To determine how businesses themselves align with each issue, we are working with the former Heads of Research for the Republican National Committee and the Democratic Governor’s Association. They helped set up our research operation so that we know the right avenues to go down to collect data, not just on what businesses say they support, but also how they actually act. We have our own internal algorithms that deal with complicated situations (such as a business who claims to support a value but spends their money in a contradictory way) and weight different actions by businesses in different ways.
Q: One of the clever things Glia does is gather data on users’ preferences using “yes/no” style quizzes (Should we spend more money on education or prisons?). Where did you get this idea from and how did you design these quizzes?
A: We came up with the idea for the polls during a brainstorming session on how to get meaningful information from users while keeping them engaged and entertained. To design these polls, we added a nationally recognized pollster to our team to help with probing and understanding the nuances of what people think on a given issue. We developed a list of questions to get a more granular level of understanding of what users think. We also keep an eye on the news and know the issues that people are generally interested.
Q: Do you find you get more information from these polls than user profiles?
A: It runs the gamut. We have people that will only respond with 5 values when they’re first on-boarding but will then do 50 poll questions in a session. Just as well, we have people who fill out 18 values and answer no poll questions. We are exploring what drives that behavior so that we can continue developing the app to fulfil our users’ needs. We encourage people to share as much information as possible to get the maximum about of value from Glia.
Q: Why did you choose to build a mobile app (instead of a desktop experience)?
A: This is something that we talk about all the time. It stems from something that I started going down the road on earlier— the idea to give you that “thumbs up/thumbs down” opportunity as you’re walking around. That said, a web app is in our near future with more robust data and features (so you can better understand where the scoring comes from and even get involved in the process).
Q: What’s a great feature about Glia that users aren’t taking advantage of?
A: The main thing that users don’t appear to take advantage of as much as we would’ve thought (and we understand why and try to draw attention to it now) is the User Profile screen. After a user on-boards and swipes in their values, the user profile screen comes up that shows those values and the user has the opportunity to move those selected values up and down (so the most important issues are ranked first). I think what a lot of people do is just hit save right away, since we’re all busy and eager to get to the “wow moment.”
Q: Do you have any advice for aspiring entrepreneurs or app developers?
A: When you have an idea for a new business you have this belief that it’s golden— that it’s unique or a key improvement and will be loved by many. Fellow entrepreneurs that I speak to discuss the high rate of failure and that for all the AirBnBs out there, there are many many many many more failures. I think part of going through this process is embracing the sense of optimism when you first had the idea without going overboard, or spending money that you don’t have, or not paying attention to what you’re seeing in the data that’s coming through to you. This “clear eyed optimism” is important so that you can stay in this business for the long term and become an overnight success that was two or three years in the making.
- Julie Levine, Marketing Associate
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