A 27-year-old Williamstown entrepreneur has launched his first start-up, the Chekd app, which aims to ensure reviews of local businesses are the most reliable on the market.
Ryan Danaher said the idea was born of the realisation that people believe current review apps were biased and untrustworthy.
“The main thing about the app is that the key aspects of a place
– for example, for a cafe, the coffee, food, price and service – they’re all rated out of numbers, rather than writing a review.
“Ours is a lot simpler. You can review all those key things of a place in less than five seconds.
“It’s a little bit of a tweak of an idea I had about six years ago. The original idea was to have live data, so you would know how many people were in a restaurant at a certain time, so you could book it based on that.
“The same thing applied to nightclubs and bars and what not … but I quickly found out that that was illegal – it’s illegal to track people without their permission, and in order to get live data you’d need everybody, rather than just the people who approve it.
“But once I did the research to figure that out, I sort of stumbled across the fact that a lot of people find current reviewing applications quite untrustworthy and quite unreliable.
“We are just trying to sell simplicity more than anything else.”
