Superlocal CEO Alex Kehr on building an auto-logging location app and getting acquired by Foursquare

Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Yeah. Yeah. And congratulations. I'm I'm super excited for you in the new role. Thank you. Come back on soon. Cheers. Really quickly, let me tell you about Bezel. Get bezel. com. Shop over 25,000 luxury watches fully authenticated in-house by Bezel's team of experts.

And let's bring in our next guest, Alex. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? Alex, good to see you. Sorry that I was trying to get hold of. No problem. Yeah. Yeah. You're like the most online founder yet. For two hours there, you were doing some regular work. It's a it's a flex leaving you on.

Um, congratulations on the acquisition. Break break break give give us some quick background on you and Super Local and then and then the deal. Um, and uh, and then I'm sure we'll get into a bunch of stuff. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I I guess I built Super Local for a while. We we built a a bunch of products.

I mean, initially it just me working on on one thing totally unrelated. But in in sort of like the last iteration, Super Local was or is a very personalized map. So you can kind of imagine it like Google Maps in Chachu T had a baby with some OG four square vibes sprinkled in.

And I mean that basically means it does three things like it has uh it automatically maps all the places you've been. So your map just populates without you doing anything.

Um you can also check in like that's the OG4 square part and then that sort of builds you a persona or like the automatic stuff builds you persona like where we understand who you are by the places you go to. Like my map knows that I don't really like Starbucks. I'd rather go to Menadis and Venice.

So it knows like that's my personality. Uh so when I search for places, it takes that into account. Awesome. How did the four square deal come about? Had you known the team for a while? Was it the kind of thing where you were, you know, friendly with the CEO and and it just made sense at some point?

What did that look like? Yeah, I mean I I've known them for a while. Uh, I don't know. Then it just came up and I thought it was a good idea. Nice. And so you're m you're continuing to to scale super local. Are are we happy about the acquisition? Are we ringing the go? Oh yeah.

No, it's like obviously I was I was obviously obsessed with Foursquare since I dedicated like the last song. Congratulations. Yeah. Yeah. So how does how does uh how does Super Local fit into Foursquare's overall strategy going forward? You're continuing to operate it independently. Yeah.

I mean, we're just operating exactly like we used to. Uh I mean, that's like the current thing. We just building what I was building before, but without like the constant fear of potentially always dying as a company. Amazing. What what what are the what are the business models that work here now?

Uh the the story of Foursquare was like it's going to be the next Facebook and it's going to be just an ad network. Then there were stories about um you know targeting for advertising. That seemed like a good model. Uh obviously you could just pay for the app and subscribe.

Um there's a whole bunch of different business models. What do you think is most promising over the next few years in this category? Yeah. I mean I know like they're they're mainly focused on their B2B stuff. Yeah. Uh so I I don't know as much about like the B2B side.

So I'm basically just focused on growing our consumer app.

Uh and what yeah what are you bullish on on the consumer side like because some I mean this is happening in the context of AI like uh there's a lot of people on the $20 plan for chatt a lot of people use the free version some people are on the $200 plan Google has a $500 plan so there's clearly a willingness to spend on consumer AI apps that are just on your phone.

At the same time advertising is undefeated. It's one of the greatest business models ever. Uh and if you can get to scale that makes a lot of sense. So, how do you see this playing out for you?

Yeah, I mean I I feel like Play Search actually has maybe like some of the easier monetization in general cuz like if we have like hotel search things like that, there's like pretty good ways to make money from like Expedia by booking people out.

Uh I mean we we've done stuff with subscriptions and they've actually done quite well. Um but that was actually before we had any AI search things in it. They always did rather well just through like little gamification features. Um so I don't know that'd be a cool thing to scale. Uh yeah, things like that.

I think it's kind of like how are you thinking about the cost side of the business? I feel like the reason that we wound up in the paradigm of like $20 chat GPT subscriptions is because uh the GPUs are on fire.

And uh we talked to George Hutz and he was like I open AAI is losing money on me because inference cost is actually material as opposed to you know database queries which are essentially free um you know for an individual user. Uh, has has your AI bill ever been stressful? Uh, no, not really.

But I guess it's also another advantage of play search. It's not like you need a new place every day. So, it's like like I would never like your app technically is like a just purely like DU app. I feel like it's probably like weekly, monthly, whenever you actually need a place. And that's that's not that frequent.

I mean, I think it depends on like the city. Like I'm sure in New York City people look for places more than LA, things like that. But Foursquare is pretty famous New York company. Are you moving out there? Stay. Are you in LA now? Oh, no. I'm gonna move to San Francisco. San Francisco or so.

What are you gonna do without Arowan? I know. I even have my Arowan water right here from this morning. There we go. He's committed. Committed. I would always run into him when I when I lived in Venice. See him all the time. Um, awesome, dude. Well, congratulations.

Um uh and uh yeah I I want to see like over time uh the feature on super locals like you basically can like remove the fog from the world so you can basically see like how like a video game basically. I know I know the guy who posted that Aiden.

He posted that original viral image that went super viral of of the fog of war on Google maps and people were talking about building it.

I I yeah we had it before that actually super random feature we built like we were space we were like at butcher's daughters and one of our engineers brought up you just made it over the weekend and I it just crush it. That's amazing. Unexpected thing that did really well. I love that. Yeah.

Bringing in like almost a little bit of like the wonder of uh Pokemon Go and and kind of IRL virtual experiences. Like that's actually crazy how little the map would change because we Oh yeah. leave home. Yeah. Go to work, go to the gym, come back, get breakfast, go to the studio, go home.

Just do that over and over and over. Just the war is just like the pipe on the one freeway that we go on. Come right back. Awesome. Well, thank you for joining, Alex. Congratulations and uh hope to have you on again soon. Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Better rest of the day. Have a good one.

Uh how did you sleep last night? I I put up decent numbers. I think I might have you beaten. I'm up from yesterday. Remember, yesterday was an 82 for me. Today 87. I did terrible. Get that Ashton Hall sound effect ready. 87 for John. I did terribly. 93% quality. 81% consistency. 6 hours and 51 minutes.

My son, how'd you do? Well, give us the number. Don't hide it. Don't hide. You're trying to dodge it. Oh, well, it hasn't showed today. I thought you put up a great show. I thought you really put up a great show. I didn't let it get in the way. That's good.

Um, I uh it was funny this morning because the uh my son decided at 400 am that that sleeping was over. Basically got in bed. But then the issue is is is my my side of the bed was heating up as like the heat alarm clock. Oh yeah. Which is just once you use it. Go to. com use code tbn.

Um and uh but he started realizing that like my side of the bed was just like really warm. Oh cozy. Yeah. And so he just like kicked me off the bed until I was like, "Okay, I told you my four-year-old I I had to tax Matteo, the CEO of Fight Sleep. Make my my four-year-old has demanded Nate sleep. I'm not kidding.

" And uh you know, hopefully there's news to share there soon. But um uh we I I I might I might get him one a big one and just wrap it around the edges uh because he's a huge fan of it. Um and he's he's very excited. He wants a he wants a third zone in the middle because he says that's where I sleep.

We're like, "Nobody, that's not where you sleep. " Well, I have a post to pull up rap. Um, so, uh, this is a post from PE, the US director of federal housing.

He said, "After significant studying and keeping in line with President Trump's vision to make the United States the crypto capital of the world, today I ordered the great Fanny May and Freddy Mack to prepare their businesses to count cryptocurrency as an asset for a mortgage. " No way. And there is a great post here.

here if we can get this pulled up guys. Um, showing stacking sats. You're going to get Rob Poi says these mortgages are solely collateralized on Vartcoin. And that will happen. That will happen. That will happen. I'm sure they will value meme coins uh slightly differently hopefully than uh you know the majors.

Hopefully. Um anyways uh super fun show today. Yep. Uh, I think that's pretty much it. Leave us five stars in Apple Podcast and Spotify. And if you leave us a review on Apple Podcast, if you're listening there, put an ad for your business in the review. We'll read it on the show. And thank you so much for watching.

Have a beautiful afternoon and