The internet has made a lot of things easier, but it’s still difficult to collect offline information, like the prices of dishes at a restaurant, or how much it costs to get your car fixed. Aarhus, Denmark-based PriceFlurry seeks to solve this problem by crowdsourcing information on prices.
Founder Pavel Volgarev compares PriceFlurry to Wikipedia – anyone can leave price information and reviews for the goods and services they purchase. The end goal of having all of this information in front of you is to help consumers make smart purchasing decisions, or find deals. The service can be found online or as a Windows Phone app.
For small businesses, the service offers a platform to promote companies and their prices. Companies could also hypothetically reward their customers for using PriceFlurry, which then helps fuel more growth.
“We don’t charge anything for this partnership, our goal is to attract more users and hopefully help small local businesses to gain more customers,” says Volgarev. “But once we’ve established that partnership we can later offer them paid services, like an analytic package that will allow them to dig into the data that is not on PriceFlurry.”
For growth, PriceFlurry is going with a very platform-based approach, already opening up their API for other developers to build off of. When they launched they tried going global from day one and promoting it everywhere, but it’s difficult for users to stick when there is no information for them. So right now they’re concentrating on gathering users in Aarhus, while his business partner focuses on Moscow.
In the future, they are also working on adding social features to the app so you can follow people with the same interests. Gamification features are also being considered, like adding badges and points to make the service more engaging.
It will be interesting to see what happens with PriceFlurry. I think there’s room for a very price-focused Yelp-style servcie, but it all comes down to growing enough traffic to become self-sustainable.
