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There are almost infinite ways to find things to do on a Friday night. You could check Ticketmaster for movie times, Yelp for nearby restaurants, or OpenTable for a place with seating. If you’re in another city or country, there’s TripAdvisor, or you could just Google whatever you had in mind and see what turns up.
Rarely, however, does such planning include a quick search of Zerve.com. But Scott Newman, founder of Zerve, believes that will change. His article of faith? Newman and his company have been around for what in the context of tech counts as a long, long time—more than a decade. Now that the internet industry, despite its obsession with new new things, isn’t so new anymore, Zerve hopes the experience gained in the online trenches will start to count as a virtue.
Zerve is a rare example these days of a tech company that’s become successful by doing just one thing, and doing it really well.
Despite its relative obscurity, Zerve is not some fresh-faced startup hoping to beat veterans at their own game. Zerve itself is the veteran in this space. For the last 12 years, the New York City company has been quietly building one of the country’s largest databases of local events and activities. Thousands of local event companies—the kind that offer walking tours and teach wine and cheese classes—use Zerve’s software to manage their businesses and book reservations, much like restaurants use OpenTable. And yet, throughout its more than decade-long history, Zerve has focused exclusively on luring more business clients.
Now it’s making a play for the consumer market, too.
On Monday, the company is debuting a new version of Zerve.com that Newman says will help people answer the question: What should I do tonight? Users can choose from 32 cities, select a date and time of day, and find a list of things to do, from food and wine festivals in town to special shows and performances.
One Thing to All People
In going after the consumer market, however, Zerve is setting itself up to battle formidable competitors. It’s asking consumers, in essence, to break the Yelp-Google cycle and instead start their search on Zerve. That’s a big ask for a company with next to no brand recognition. And yet, Newman is hoping that Zerve’s narrow expertise will make it a more valuable starting point. “There’s more to life than dinner and a movie,” he says. “We want to make it easy to find all those other things around you that you didn’t know existed in the first place.”
But what’s more interesting than what Zerve is doing now is how it got here. Zerve is a rare example these days of a tech company that’s become successful by doing just one thing, and doing it really well. More often, it seems, tech companies are looking over their shoulders, trying to mimic what the other guy is doing.
But even as Yelp’s star began rising in the late 2000s, years after Zerve launched, Newman says he was never tempted to make the company another all-purpose review site. “We tried to ignore the well-funded industries that already have tons of companies going after them,” he says. “We didn’t feel the need to fight it out.”
Business Takes Time
Zerve also was bootstrapped for its first 10 years and only recently raised $18 million from the likes of Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Yahoo founder Jerry Yang. By sticking to one niche and remaining independent of investors looking for a quick exit, Zerve was able to develop relationships with businesses who were willing to hand over real-time data about what events are running when. Zerve also says it has amassed more reviews about the companies it serves than all the other platforms combined. Now that Zerve is launching a consumer product, that information will be crucial to serving up more relevant search results.
Zerve’s move to embrace consumers is an especially appealing prospect to the company’s thousands of existing business clients. “I’ve been bugging them for a long time to do this,” says Rick Scarano, founder of the Classic Harbor Line boat tours. Scarano has been using Zerve since 2005 to track customers and monitor reviews. “I have no way of quantifying how much of the success we’ve had can be attributed to them, but what I do know is they’ve made our lives a lot easier,” Scarano says. Now, he hopes the new site will help attract a lot more business, too.
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