When Nadav Saadia and his co-founders launched Cool Cousin
in 2016, they were aiming to create a new version of a travel agency.
Their idea was to connect travelers looking for information
with locals - or “cousins” - who would be willing to offer personalized
advice and tailored guides to cities around the world without compensation.
“We had been talking about the decentralization of travel
information,” Saadia says, who serves as Cool Cousin’s CMO.
“People have bad experiences with biased content and fake
reviews. We want to be a trustworthy platform with authentic reviews.”
Saadia says it’s that human touch that sets Cool Cousin
apart from competitors. Users filter the community of locals by age, gender or interest to connect with the right person. Once connected, the
user can message the “cousin” to receive personalized guidance.
“You don’t only get the content, you get the person, you get
the connection,” he says.
“Airbnb took someone with an extra room and made them not a
hotelier but a host. We truly believe that someone willing to make themselves
available and that will give a good service to travelers, there’s no reason why
they can’t turn into a new, redefined version of a travel agent.”
The app has 500,000 users and
nearly 1,000 people on board as “cousins” in 70 cities including New York, London, Paris and Tel Aviv, with five new cities
being added each month. Cool Cousin also secured $2 million in seed funding in
July 2017 led by Tel Aviv-based Elevator Fund.
But since the people who act as “cousins” are not paid, Saadia
says they realized in order to grow and to enhance services, Cool Cousin would need to offer more than the emotional
satisfaction of helping others.
“Enter blockchain and token economy,” he says. “We’ve been
wrapping our heads around it for the past six to eight months. It felt like a
perfect fit for Cool Cousin.”
Saadia says the tokenized, smart-contract-based platform
will make the service more efficient, helping onboard new “cousins” more
quickly (currently, there are several thousand in the pipeline); it will also allow people to earn income through enhanced services.
“For example, helping to book a trip or a restaurant
reservation or to curate a list of Airbnb apartments so you won’t have to do it
yourself,” he says.
“Or maybe we will limit the numbers of times you can ask
your cousin for advice for free, and then you have to pay to get
‘all-you-can-eat’ messaging.”
Cool Cousin will do a public sale of its cryptocurrency,
named CUZ, on April 3.
Users will be able to pay with CUZ tokens or with fiat
currency that will be exchanged for tokens.
Cool Cousin will keep a fee from each transaction “that
thanks to blockchain, can be much lower than if we did it any other way,” Saadia
says. A portion will also go into a community pool that will be used to
incentivize participants to help govern the Cool Cousin community.
“For example, cousins could earn extra tokens for helping us
validate new applicants that want to become cousins. Or they can proofread
content, or replace a bad image with a better image,” he says.
“It allows us to have an autonomous community so we can
scale much faster without overhead. The system and the community will run
itself.”
Saadia says the company is developing the smart contracts and
in-app wallet and hope to roll out the first features by early summer.