#StartupsEverywhere Profile: Jordan Scott, Founder & CEO, Cobble
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Making Group Activities Less Planning and More Time Together
Cobble provides an answer to an age-old question posed by many couples and friend groups who desire quality time together, but are overwhelmed with the sheer number of activities out there. We sat down with Founder and CEO Jordan Scott to talk about the inspiration behind the platform and the roles AI and data security play in how Cobble operates.
Tell us about your background. What led you to Cobble?
I founded Cobble in 2020 because I was sick of having back-and-forth conversations with my husband every night that looked like this: “What do you want to do tonight?” “I don't know, what do you want to do?” “What do you want to eat tonight?” “I don't know.” I realized that we have so many options—from where we go to dinner, to what we watch and what we cook, there's a lot of life to live out here. But when I looked around, there was nothing that drove the decision-making process between human beings and optimized how we spend our time together.
With current leading companies and apps, everything is geared toward helping the individual make a decision quickly and in isolation. They're missing a massive opportunity to collect all decision-makers into one place. Enter Cobble, which provides a solution for bringing people together to drive decision-making in a smart, social, and fun way.
What is the work you all are doing at Cobble?
When it comes to planning different group activities, current communication methods can be inefficient and frustrating. You often have to corral entire groups of people and deal with texting back and forth. We built something that helps people make decisions about where to go and what to do, and hope to expand into providing solutions to all of the decisions that we make with other people. The first version of Cobble was focused on couples (though we've since expanded to servicing all types of groups and relationships) and mainly featured choices about where to go eat. Of course, during the pandemic, in-person dining was restricted, which required us to pivot to helping people make decisions about things to do in the home.
We are currently available in seven cities, but we recently went through Google's machine learning and AI-focused accelerator, which allowed us to scale our content exponentially and essentially be everywhere at once. We're rolling that out this year.
Where do the ideas on Cobble for group decisions come from? How do you make sure users are using the platform as intended, and not to plan illegal activity, etc.?
Originally, we had curators in each of our cities that populated the app with options. You can't make a great decision without a great idea. During the Google accelerator we were able to map out the recommendations already on our platform and find similar ideas from outside sources like Google, Yelp, Foursquare, etc. The process for actually pulling that recommendation content into Cobble is straightforward; we use an Application Programming Interface. Now, we don't have to launch city by city anymore. We can essentially spin up a new city in a couple of days. Ultimately, we want people to be able to drop the Internet into Cobble to make a decision, whether that's picking the best flight for a group trip or which TV you should buy for your house.
In terms of policing our users’ content and activity, users are interacting with each other and making decisions together in closed loops on Cobble. I like to think of it as a new form of social media where you're only interacting with the people who actually live life with you. It’s not reasonable to expect chat providers to be constantly monitoring everything happening in closed loop group chats, so it wouldn’t be reasonable to expect Cobble to do that either, especially at our current size. Maybe one day we’ll have a more public-facing part of the service, where users can decide what activity to make public, but then our content moderation efforts would have to be huge and complex. Even giant Internet companies just cannot figure out this battle against some of the harmful stuff that teens and kids are seeing on these platforms. It's just so tough, especially for a startup.
What role does AI play in the way Cobble operates?
When people connect in Cobble, the platform learns and observes the decisions that they make together and then begins improving recommendations and content. AI can be tricky to think about, and people are doing a million different things with it. That’s what’s cool about our platform.Personalization has always been the name of the game and historically focused on the individual. Where Cobble is novel is how we're using AI to improve personalization as it relates to the group, not just the individual. We refer to it as “personalization 2.0”—taking into consideration the group aspect and driving better, more realistic decisions since we don't all operate in a vacuum.
How does Cobble approach user privacy? Have recent regulatory changes impacted your business?
Cobble is a consumer-facing app where everyone can make decisions within the platform with other people. The goal is to learn how people are driving decisions together and help them make better, more efficient findings, so we need to be able to collect data about how people are making those determinations. We don’t collect any more data than we need, and we don’t share or sell that data, but there’s an atmosphere of distrust and confusion around data collection that makes it harder to collect what we do need to make our product work. For instance, some digital marketplaces that offer the Cobble app are requiring us to implement a pop-up as soon as people open the app. This really hurts our onboarding funnel—people see the pop-up and think they’re signing up for something that’s using or selling their data without their permission, but we don’t do that.
We also have a lot of revenue sharing agreements with different higher-level platforms (reservation platforms, ticketing platforms, etc.), so that aspect of privacy is always front of mind. Eventually, we want users to be able to make a decision on Airbnb, for example, using their Cobble profile. So if Airbnb started paying us to help people make choices about travel accommodations, we’d have to take on even more precautions to protect users’ data and deal with an even more complicated landscape of privacy requirements.
What are your goals for Cobble moving forward?
We’ve raised just over $3 million, and this year, we're hoping to raise a seed extension before we do our Series A in 2025. We’re currently speaking with seed investors and are looking to raise an additional $3-4 million.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
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