Likeli, a young Wilmington-based startup, is taking its initial steps toward bringing its product to the public. Last week, the company launched its website (likeli.co) and announced it will begin hiring for several positions.
The app — the brainchild of founder and CEO George Taylor III — is a relationship discovery app meant to address and solve what Taylor calls the fatal flaws of other relationship services such as Tinder and eHarmony.
Likeli tries to solve those problems by trawling through the social media presence of potential partners, looking at everything from the grammar in their Facebook statuses, the subjects of their tweets or the jobs they’ve listed on LinkedIn, to create a matchability score.
The company operates under the assumption that people are best defined by what they say and do over time. The app looks at an individual’s collection of social media outlets to build an objective profile so that the online actions of two users can be compared.
“Our competition either relies heavily on subjective and exaggerated profiles and data
[over-curated questionnaires or web pages] to connect users,” Taylor said, “or they force users to swipe to make a choice based on hundreds, if not thousands, of pictures. In all cases, the results are generally poor. Currently, there is no solution out there that can accurately score the compatibility of two people [friends, dates or otherwise].”
Every profile a user would view on Likeli would be accompanied by a score, based on the data compiled by social media activity, that would theoretically reflect the chances two people would be compatible in interests and personality.
The idea for Likeli came to Taylor while he was in college.
Like many of his peers, he spent time in college using relationship apps and websites unsuccessfully. Picking a potential date became something that was based on superficial observations, wildly exaggerated profiles or long, time-consuming surveys that created a low probability of success, he said.
Taylor comes from a family of entrepreneurs. His father, George Taylor Jr., is a serial entrepreneur based in Wilmington and is also the chairman of Likeli. His brother, Kurt Taylor, is the founder of Next Glass, a wine and beer discovery app based in Wilmington, and is also an adviser for Likeli.
Before founding Likeli, George Taylor III was the CEO at National Speed, an auto shop for high- performance cars started in Wilmington by Taylor’s father.
Public release of the app is still months away — George Taylor III said the company is targeting the first quarter of next year — but Likeli is committed to the Wilmington area and is looking to bring in up to six employees, mainly programmers, app developers and data engineers, in its first wave of hirings.
“June was a big month for us,” the founder said. “We were able to run our prototype and proved that our new technology could accurately score relationship outcomes. This affirmation gave us the green light we needed to hit the ground running with hiring and development.”
Going into the future, Likeli has plans to use its app to do things beyond finding dates, things such as finding potential friends or roommates.
The company sees college campuses as being key to getting a foothold and plans to focus on getting high-density use at influential universities in its initial roll out, an approach similar to that taken by the social media app Yik Yak.
“The highest percentage of students drop out (during) the freshman year, and more often than not it's linked to loneliness and isolation,” Taylor said. “They're just unable to engage and find or make friends.”
“We're at the early stages of this,” he said, “but we believe we can help with this very important problem by matching students with friends and giving them the confidence and the platform to reach out and connect.”
