It’s Friday night. It’s 5 p.m. Work week complete. Now what? Where should you go? What should you do this weekend? There’s actually an app for that.
Enter GoNation, a local discovery app connecting people to places.
Powering the pulse of a city with a mobile-first platform, GoNation offers social, searchable and shareable data in hopes of transforming the way people experience the cities where they live.
Powered by a team of tech-savvy creatives, GoNation found its roots in Connecticut and Boston, and is headquartered in Milford.
The local discovery app was founded by high school friends Chaz Tanase, a longtime nightclub promoter, Matt Basileo, a POS expert, Matthew Brisch, a Northeastern entrepreneur and Sean Burke, an MIT grad and former senior software engineer at Localytics.
Tanase, CEO and cofounder, was inspired to create an app to connect people to places using his experience working with small businesses as a promoter for nearly two decades throughout the state.
“I have worked in the nightlife scene since I was 19, when I was a DJ and promoting in Norwalk. Then we did a lot of print marketing but once social media started playing a role in promotions, there was a huge opportunity for small businesses,” Tanase said.
Francesco Luja, owner of La Foresta Restaurant and Wine Bar in Killingworth, said he’s a traditionalist, meaning he prefers to talk to people face to face.
“I’m an old fashioned-guy, not meaning I’m old, I am 42, but meaning I prefer to talk to people. Unfortunately, people prefer to click a button rather than make a phone call. Forty percent of our dining reservations are made online. So we needed a way to showcase what we’re doing online to reach our customers,” Luja said.
With 15 years in the industry, the former partner behind Adriana’s restaurant in New Haven said social media plays a bigger role than it did when he first entered the restaurant industry.
GoNation has helped elevate La Foresta’s presence online, crafting a mobile-responsive website allowing for real-time updates, menu changes, virtual tours and photos.
“We couldn’t have had a better person build a website — it’s out of this world, one of the best websites you’ve ever seen,” Luja said. “The customers are literally seeing things that I can put right through my phone. If I have a special I can take a photo and boom — it goes to the website right away. You’ll actually see a photo of the rack of lamb the way it comes right out of our kitchen.”
GoNation launched as a mobile-focused square space platform for restaurants to promote to anyone in the area, manage menus and share on social media for free to access the app’s 10,000 users, functioning as a dual marketplace.
Over the past six years GoNation’s team of developers have been working to perfect the formula, launching the consumer model in April 2018 for Android and IOS devices.
“We are a local discovery app but we share data with outside platforms in real time, which is more powerful than a website, allowing a business to update and share on social media instantly,” Tanase said.
Keeping ‘a pulse’ on the city, this free app connects small businesses to the thousands of qualified users, sharing where to go, when it’s happening and what to eat on any given day of the week.
The app feels a bit like Pinterest and looks quite similar to Instagram, sharing information about hours, menus, live music and grand openings of local businesses in any given community on a feed of pictures, GIFs and videos.
“Whether there is one person or 10,000 people on GoNation, they are qualified users meaning that anyone using the app wants to spend money,” Tanase said. “It’s a hub for local businesses to be seen and heard.”
With the Northeast its primary focus, GoNation is working with nearly 1,000 businesses in Fairfield and New Haven counties, in addition to West Hartford. The app also powers major cities like Cambridge and Manhattan.
“We will continue powering the world of local discovery and changing the way that local data works,” Tanase said. “Every major city in the U.S. will be using GoNation and we will be international in five years.”
Contact Mikayla Silva at news@newhavenbiz.com
