The Hotlist is the world’s first geo-social aggregator that shows you what’s going on today, tomorrow and throughout the week among your personal network of friends. A custom “hotlist” is generated for you on the places and events your friends are planning to attend and when they’ll be there – so you can easily make plans and connect in person.
Let’s be realistic: with so many options in a given area, social planning has become a time-consuming task of staying in the loop on the latest events and newest venues, figuring out what’s popular and what to avoid, plus coordinating with your friends on where to go next.
We created The Hotlist to help take the guesswork out of everyone’s social plans.
The Hotlist gathers social data from Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yelp and other sites to calculate the popularity of specific events and venues based on your network of friends.
Our system pools, filters and conveniently presents all the information you need to decide where to go such as: where friends are planning to go, when they’ll be there, the guy-to-girl ratio and what people have to say about venues and events. Our “Social Map” then instantly shows you what’s happening amongst your Facebook friends, in your city, and around the world. Even better, we give you a look inside events and places - like who’s planning to be there, who already arrived, what they’re tweeting and what your friends think of it – before you go.
Rely on us to keep you in the loop about the best places to eat, drink and play. The Hotlist is the easiest way to figure out what to do, allowing you more time to actually enjoy your friends, instead of just texting them.
It all started one really frustrating Friday night in Manhattan. A group of us headed out in the city to meet up with some people, hit up some cool places and have some fun. But instead, the night was an absolute bust. We spent too much money, didn’t enjoy the crowd anywhere we went and had no idea where our other friends were, scattered throughout Manhattan. Sound familiar?
We eventually gave up and ended up at a nearby diner. Maybe it was the delectable mac-n-cheese or the nostalgic sound of Guns N' Roses, but something served as our muse and prompted the collective idea, “Hey, we should create something that would let us see where our friends are!”
We developed a shared vision to ditch the endless texts, stop relying on indecisive friends and end the stress of planning a night out. We were going to make it much easier to find out what was going on and connect with friends. The result was a rough sketch of New York City on a diner’s napkin, a ton of research, some setbacks (and successes) along the way and an immense amount of development. The Hotlist began as a small, modest website to help organize a few friends. It shortly mushroomed into tens of thousands of their friends - and their friends – and their friends - all over the world.
We had some initial bugs, but our users remained faithful and we weren’t going to let them down. So, on a whim we entered the prestigious NYU Stern Business Plan Competition. Despite competing against MBAs and PhDs, we became the youngest team in history to win the $25,000 first prize.
After accepting the grant, we left our jobs in finance - to our parent’s dismay - and began building the true foundation for The Hotlist.
We’ve come a long way since the days of reporting to work in an NYU dorm room and we’re excited to tackle all the obstacles still ahead. So please check out The Hotlist and tell us how we can better keep you in the loop of what’s going on in your area and around the world.