Despite where you started this wild journey with us — as a user, customer, partner, lurker, or friend — you probably know that Twizoo started as an app. Back in July 2014, we launched the Twizoo app in London where you could find restaurant recommendations based on what people said on Twitter.
To our pleasant surprise, we shot to the top as Best New App in the App Store within our first 48 hours on the market — and this was before the days of ProductHunt. Team Twizoo was out to create a product that leveraged the millions of untapped and disorganized opinions shared on social media organically everyday, and deliver these opinions to the masses through our app (or apps, we hadn’t decided yet). People liked this concept, and we hit the ground running.
Fast forward two years from then to last summer, and we announced that we were doubling down on our backend engine versus the app. We decided to narrow our focus on our strengths — building this crazy-good engine that can automate surfacing high-quality pieces of user-generated content from social media. Instead of fighting the uphill marketing and user experience battle of attracting users in a crowded market like restaurant discovery, we begun forging relationships with this market instead, and explore interest in them delivering the social opinions that the Twizoo engine surfaces to their users, not just ours.
Excitingly, the interest was high. After all, who wouldn’t want to tap into a non-stop source of high-quality and relevant social media posts to complement your content and product strategy? Most of these companies thought social media content was off limits for them at scale, due to the noisy landscape of social media and human curation step necessary to find and filter the best content to display on each page. We were offering them an opportunity to finally leverage this organic content that they knew existed, but had no way of strategically integrating into their website pages at scale.
In fact, some of the companies we originally saw as Twizoo competitors are now some of our earliest adopters and customers. They helped shape Twizoo into what it is now: a powerful engine packaged as a simple Javascript widget that ingests attributes from each of their website pages, then finds and displays the best content from social media to complement that page in real-time. This means no keyword or filter set-up, no exchange or syncing of database IDs, no human curation of content. Just recently, a customer demonstrated a 7% conversion uplift from simply copy and pasting Twizoo’s widget into their marketplace pages. Since we first announced Twizoo’s, dare I say, ‘pivot’ last summer, we went live with our first enterprise partner shortly after in August, where we’ve grown to power 10,000s of their website pages with fresh, relevant user-generated content from social media. The Twizoo engine now spans not just restaurants for our partners, but hotels, points of interest, private jets, cookware, consumer healthcare products, and most recently, fashion — processing millions of Tweets to power millions of impressions to users across the world. And we’re just getting started.
All of this means that Twizoo is no longer an app company, we are a data company with an exciting and busy future. And although we’ve kept the Twizoo app running in the background, it’s not gotten the love it needs for over 6 months. Despite our dedicated users who still turn to Twizoo for restaurant discovery, the app is getting buggy, powered by unsycned content and outdated algorithm versions that we simply don’t have the bandwidth to address. Time has gone by fast, but it’s time to draw a line in the sand. Twizoo is a data company, not an app company.
So, we will be taking the Twizoo app down from the App Store, effective immediately (cutthroat, I know. If you’re reading this and have the Twizoo app installed, you are sitting on a rare gem) and turning off the servers supporting the app on Friday March 3rd. We want to say a sincere thank you to everyone who started on this Twizoo journey as an app user. You helped us shape Twizoo into what it is today, and hope you will continue following and supporting our story.
To the next step.
Love, Team Twizoo xx
