Juraj Pal
@jurajpal · Co-Founder & CEO at Sure
Thanks for the hunt @chrismessina ❤️ And hey Hunters 👋
We’re really excited to be sharing Sure with you today.
Sure is a Facebook Messenger chatbot for the most Instagrammed food & drink spots near you. It was born from our frustration with the current restaurant discovery apps and we hoped to build a better product for our generation living in the age of info overload.
For many, decision making has become a legitimate pain. With so much to choose from, every choice feels like a sacrifice and the #fomo is real 🙀
When it comes to choosing a place to go, most people ask their friends or influencers who they can relate to. By being on a platform like Messenger where our users naturally chat with their friends, we hope to blur the lines between tech algorithms and word of mouth recommendations.
Today, we’re introducing Sure to 22 cities 🌎 including San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, Austin, Chicago, Toronto, Vancouver, London, Copenhagen, Berlin, Rome, Paris, Vienna, Barcelona, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Prague, Bratislava, Sydney, Tokyo, Singapore and Hong Kong.
You can read more about what took us so long and what’s next for Sure here:
https://blog.surebot.io/launchin...
We’re still learning so we would love to hear all your feedback. Will be here answering all your questions today 💬
Juraj, Alex and Seb
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Dmitry Dumik
@ddumik · CEO at Chatfuel.com
@jurajpal super cool, congrats on the launch! 🙌
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Juraj Pal
@jurajpal · Co-Founder & CEO at Sure
@ddumik thanks, means a lot 💪
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Dennis Yang
@sinned · Co-Founder, Dashbot.io
@jurajpal Awesome! Instagram is such a great source of signal for what people actually love. Congrats on a fantastic launch!
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Kevin Lou
@kevinbryantlou · Business Development, Beacon
@jurajpal already loving the simplicity of this! Might be the perfect use case for messenger
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Jevin Sew
@jevinsew · Rails / iOS developer
@jurajpal Love the idea! Kudos for making it an invisible app!
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Juraj Pal
@jurajpal · Co-Founder & CEO at Sure
@sinned thank you so much Dennis 🚀
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Juraj Pal
@jurajpal · Co-Founder & CEO at Sure
@jevinsew thank you so much 🤓
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Jared Schaffer
@jbschaff · founder/product thetribeapp.com
@jurajpal just tried it out, spot on! Sure is going to be my new go to food finder. Any way to toggle km to miles?
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Artem Gladkikh
@g___a · Co-Founder & CEO at Test4startup
@jurajpal OMG This is a great idea!
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Juraj Pal
@jurajpal · Co-Founder & CEO at Sure
@g___a thanks Artem 😍
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Angik Sarkar
@kyunbit · CEO, Waylo
@jurajpal One of the best bots :)
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Juraj Pal
@jurajpal · Co-Founder & CEO at Sure
@jbschaff thanks Jared 🤗 Right now we only support km but thanks for bringing it up!
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Antonio Martinez Baez
@tono_mb · OSOM Co-Founder
@jurajpal congrats! out of curiosity, why did you start with those specific cities?
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Juraj Pal
@jurajpal · Co-Founder & CEO at Sure
@tono_mb thanks 🎉 It was a combination of several factors such as the size of the city or the fact that we have some users there already (50% of our beta users were in the US), etc.
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Juraj Pal
@jurajpal · Co-Founder & CEO at Sure
@kyunbit thank you 🙏
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Andrew Yaroshevsky
@andrew_yaroshevsky · CPO at Chatfuel
@jurajpal @chrismessina awesome bot! Congrats!
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Juraj Pal
@jurajpal · Co-Founder & CEO at Sure
@andrew_yaroshevsky @chrismessina thanks Andrew 🚀
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Daniel Verten
@danielverten · Growth
Amazing idea guys, just tried it for breakfast in Copenhagen, great recommendations! Love that I don't have to make decisions in the early morning. @jurajpal, are you guys planning to expand into travel recommendations?
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Juraj Pal
@jurajpal · Co-Founder & CEO at Sure
@danielverten 👋 and thank you for trying it out! I think travel recommendation make a lot of sense with personalised and curated itineraries, transacting within the messaging app, etc. Definitely something we want to explore 🌎
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Sebastian Krumhausen
@krumhausen · Product manager and strategist @surebot
@danielverten @jurajpal Good idea! Which kind of travel recommendations would you like to see?
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James Campbell
@jcampbell_05 · Founder, Bottr.co
It will be great to find places based on social cues rather :) than weak indicators like ratings.
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Juraj Pal
@jurajpal · Co-Founder & CEO at Sure
@jcampbell_05 thanks James 🤗 That's exactly what motivated us and we hope to get even better at this!
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Sillas Victor
@sillaspoulsen · GIF Lover and Product Guy
Really cool concept! I love the idea that it's popular places from instagram, that is usually where I find the best recommendations.
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Alexandra Neczliova
@alexneczli · Co-Founder at Sure
@sillaspoulsen Thank you! We are a little Instagram-obsessed ourselves 😅 📷
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Stefano Zorzi
@stefanozorzi · partner, Founders
Food recommendation is hard, but it seems you have a fair shot at it. One of the most important things is managing consistency and serendipity. What's your take on how to introduce new places to users, so that they also discover the "unexpected" and not only what they know they would like? Congrats for launch!
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Juraj Pal
@jurajpal · Co-Founder & CEO at Sure
@stefanozorzi you're so right! While we almost want our users to stop "browsing", we need to be careful so we don't kill the thrill of discovery that we naturally have when it comes to food and travel. I believe, one way to keep this "surprise" element in, is to use the data we have about the user and the smart backend to introduce new but personalised recommendations.
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Sebastian Krumhausen
@krumhausen · Product manager and strategist @surebot
@stefanozorzi We're working on a way to notify our users of new and cool places. Also, you're right personalisation can be limiting (echo chamber)
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Kunal Bhatia
@kunalslab · Co-founder & Design Lead @SlidesUp
Very cool! I just found some coffee shops I had never heard of before. How can you input dietary restrictions like vegetarian? I wasn't able to find that.
Would be nice to be able to do two things: (1) send a location of somewhere you're going to be able to make plans and (2) get personalized results if you have friends that visited a recommended place in the past (hopefully that's possible with an integration to Instagram).
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Juraj Pal
@jurajpal · Co-Founder & CEO at Sure
@kunalslab thanks 🙏 Better solution for dietary restrictions is part of our new Profile section (coming soon).
(1) you can actually do this already now - just type another location in the little search bar when sending your pin (2) this is a really good point and we'll work on it!
Love the gif choice btw 😂
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Kunal Bhatia
@kunalslab · Co-founder & Design Lead @SlidesUp
@jurajpal Nice! For (1) I was only able to move my pin (on Messenger in Chrome/Desktop). I couldn't see a search. Perhaps being able to type it into the chat directly when you ask to send location?
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Juraj Pal
@jurajpal · Co-Founder & CEO at Sure
@kunalslab good point! It only seems to work on phone in the Messenger app
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Joshua Karjala
@joshuakarjala · CTO, Founders
Hi guys - super cool app! Are you considering any way of filtering based on dietary requirements? And maybe saving that as a default?
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Juraj Pal
@jurajpal · Co-Founder & CEO at Sure
@joshuakarjala thanks Joshua! 🙏 Definitely - the idea is that the tags are gonna be getting more personalised the more you use it. And if you're for example vegan, you should never have to repeat yourself in every search cause the chatbot will remember this about you 🤖
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Joshua Karjala
@joshuakarjala · CTO, Founders
@jurajpal aweseome!
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Rikke Koblauch
@rikkekoblauch · Product designer. Building @thestepsapp.
Exciting to see Sure on PH today! 👏
I remember trying out a very early version of Sure almost two years ago, seems like a lot has happened since then. Will definitely give it a spin again!
How do you make sure your recommendations and content is accurate and good?
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Juraj Pal
@jurajpal · Co-Founder & CEO at Sure
@rikkekoblauch thanks for your comment and great to see that you're still with us as one of the very first users 🙌
We realised that people tend to trust social media influencers, particularly Instagrammers, more than strangers on e.g. Yelp and that's why we focus on Instagram influencers like food bloggers in our curation engine. We look at things like their follower base and quality of pictures but to make the place info as accurate as possible, we connect it with other APIs like Google Maps and Foursquare too.
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Peter Buchroithner
@peterbuch · CEO, Swell
great job guys. Another 2 apps I could delete from my phone today (Yelp + Foursquare). Not many left.
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Juraj Pal
@jurajpal · Co-Founder & CEO at Sure
@peterbuch thanks Pete 💪 💪 💪
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Antal János Monori
@anthonymonori · Mobile dev @LEGO, Technologist, Tea-nerd
I've seen a couple of the early iterations of this product and they really been listening to the valuable feedback coming from their early users. I am fairly certain sure this will happen again and Sure will get even better by time and by the community!
Really looking forward to use Sure on my next trip for some hand picked curated spots to try out!
Best of luck to the team! CC @jurajpal @krumhausen @alexneczli 🙌
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Juraj Pal
@jurajpal · Co-Founder & CEO at Sure
@anthonymonori @krumhausen @alexneczli this means a lot Antal 🙌 Thanks for sticking around, being patient and sharing all your feedback with us 😍
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Harvey Mok
@harveymok · Business Dev & Social Media Manager
This is so cool! I am really excited to try this out when I am faced with a mean dilemma, however playing around with it just now it seems to give me a lot of places that are over 1.5km away, while it's nice to know what's good around town, it would be nice to be able to narrow down the distance to short walkable distances. But I love the idea, no more weaving through fake comments and saving Instagram posts all day
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Juraj Pal
@jurajpal · Co-Founder & CEO at Sure
@harveymok thanks a lot Harvey! 👊 We'll fix the bug with max distance asap 🤓
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Sebastian Krumhausen
@krumhausen · Product manager and strategist @surebot
@harveymok thanks for the feedback. We're adding more cities. which city are you in?
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Harvey Mok
@harveymok · Business Dev & Social Media Manager
@krumhausen I am in Hong Kong :)
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Sofi Sitha
@sofisitha
Awesome work guys! 🙌🏾 I've been following you from the beginning and I love the new Instagram feature 😍 I'm going to use Sure wherever I travel 🌎
I was just wondering, why did you specifically choose Facebook Messenger as a platform for your chatbot?
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Alexandra Neczliova
@alexneczli · Co-Founder at Sure
@sofisitha thank you for the support! ❤️
We believe that being on a platform like Messenger where our users chat with their friends anyway, we have the potential to blur the lines between tech algorithms and word of mouth recommendations. Plus Messenger having more than 1B MAUs seemed like a great starting point 😊
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Sebastian Krumhausen
@krumhausen · Product manager and strategist @surebot
@sofisitha More platforms coming soon! :) On which platforms would you like to use Sure?
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Kriti Sharma
@sharma_kriti · Director, Mobile Products, Sage
awesome update @jurajpal ! love using sure in London
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Juraj Pal
@jurajpal · Co-Founder & CEO at Sure
@sharma_kriti thanks Kriti 🤗
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Daniel Friis
@daniel_friis · Strategic Technologist @ SPACE10
I've been following these guys for a year now, and really excited to see them on PH today.
Very cool product! 🙌
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Alexandra Neczliova
@alexneczli · Co-Founder at Sure
@daniel_friis thank you so much for all the support guys! ❤️
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Noah Kim
@wuss · Startup in Progress ▓▓▓▓░░░░░░░░ 30%
This feels a lot like "Upside Down - Yelp Edition".
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Juraj Pal
@jurajpal · Co-Founder & CEO at Sure
@wuss is that a good or bad thing? 😅
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Noah Kim
@wuss · Startup in Progress ▓▓▓▓░░░░░░░░ 30%
@jurajpal lol.. just an observation ("Stranger Things" reference from Netflix). Interesting app for sure. My comment was in regards to Yelp's flow where the photos are more the end net result, whereas your approach where it's the catalyst.
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Juraj Pal
@jurajpal · Co-Founder & CEO at Sure
@wuss ah, get it now - good point! And I'm gonna hide in shame as a Stranger Things fan 😅
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Clemens
@britzsquad
I was never really interested in chatbots, but this one might actually be useful. Good Work!
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Clemens
@britzsquad
But you need to keep in mind that you'll find the most beautiful coffeeshop not the one with the best coffee.
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Juraj Pal
@jurajpal · Co-Founder & CEO at Sure
@britzsquad your comment is gold ✨ And good point in your second comment, we'll keep this in mind for sure! Thank you 😻
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Joe Laresca
@mojolaresca · Entrepreneur
this is genius. I'd love to help blow this up. @Juraj — have time for a quick chat?
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Juraj Pal
@jurajpal · Co-Founder & CEO at Sure
@mojolaresca thanks so much Joseph - means a lot 🙌 Yes - ping me at juraj@surebot.io
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Lolita M Taub
@lolitataub · AI and Enterprise Tech
Talk about bringing food porn to life! Congrats Juraj and team! Love it. #foodies #bots
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Juraj Pal
@jurajpal · Co-Founder & CEO at Sure
@lolitataub what a great new tagline! 😂 Thanks Lolita!
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Artem Goldman
@goldman_artem · CEO Visabot http://visabot.co/
Love it!
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Juraj Pal
@jurajpal · Co-Founder & CEO at Sure
@goldman_artem thanks Artem 🙌 Huge fan of Visabot 👊
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Sofi Sitha
@sofisitha · Referenced in “Best of March 2017”
Favorite of March 2017
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Juraj Pal
@jurajpal · Co-Founder & CEO at Sure
@sofisitha 😍
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