You've heard it said before: "I'm bored." In fact, you've probably even said it yourself one or two hundred times. Boredom is painful, it's annoying, and, frankly, it's boring. It's gotten even worse in recent years thanks to the rise of remote work, social media, and the COVID-19 pandemic. With nothing to stimulate people except for the same old routines that no longer work, boredom is hurting millions of people and relationships across the country.
The statistics paint an unfortunate picture of the way that boredom affects us. In millennial and Gen Z friend groups, 61% of friendships that ended say that they simply grew apart from each other as they were unable to find any shared experiences to enjoy together. Boredom can also lead to trouble for couples, as 71% of men and 49% of women identified boredom as the reason they cheated in their relationship.
Thankfully there is an antidote to boredom: new experiences. A study by Van Boven & Gilovich showed that experiences are more enjoyable for most people across a wide range of demographics. This has shown to be especially true for those earning more than $35K a year. If you're looking for ways to relieve boredom, all you need to do is go out and try something new like a Capoeira dance class or combat archery. Problem solved!
Unfortunately, there isn't currently an easy way for people to easily discover and enjoy fun in-person experiences in the city. Apps like Yelp and Groupon can include listings for kite surfing classes or rock climbing, but these experiences are often buried underneath the thousands of other businesses that offer unrelated products and services. This leaves people completely unaware of the hundreds of fun experiences that exist all around them. Problem not solved.
Entrepreneur and software engineer Leo Liu knew there needed to be a platform exclusively designed to show fun experiences run by local businesses. That's why, together with his fellow entrepreneur James Pratama, they built Alohub, a discovery platform for local experiences. Alohub makes it easy to find your next excursion, giving you access to a catalog of 50-100 fun experiences in your city. Just by clicking a few buttons, you can use Alohub to reserve your next polo lesson or comedy show with friends, family, or dates.
Alohub even offers people the ability to join social time slots to enjoy experiences with new people. After all, shared experiences are how we made friends all the way through childhood and college. But the second we join the workforce, we often find our work colleagues don't share the same interests as us due to age differences and other factors. Alohub rekindles the way that we genuinely connect with other people by allowing us to connect the old-fashioned way-through shared experiences. Nothing builds community more than a shared adventure taking a heart-pounding experience!
Leo Liu's history as an entrepreneur began long before he developed Alohub. From his childhood growing up in China, Liu became obsessed with solving problems through hands-on building thanks to his family's furniture business. He then later attended high school in New York at the age of 15 before going to Babson College in Boston, where he studied business. At the same time as studying business at Babson College, Liu was also taking engineering courses at Olin College of Engineering.
It was during his time at college that he noticed there was no consistent and centralized communication channel among the student body. He also realized the gap between students looking for goods and services and students looking for cash. This led him to create Blistify, an on-campus online community and marketplace where students can exchange goods and services (such as laundry or meal delivery). Within the first month of launch, over 500 users signed up and over 10 local businesses reached out for advertising partnerships.
Liu and Pratama met each other when they were Freshmen at Babson College. Their friendship began when they discovered they were each interested in the ways that technology could be harnessed to solve critical problems in society. Liu joined Pratama at the tech startup DataRobot during their Senior year, where they worked on projects assisting businesses and governments with answering key business questions using data and machine learning. Liu's role at DataRobot was to work as a software engineer building innovative products for businesses and the federal government.
Leo Liu's background creating Blistify and working at DataRobot was the fertile ground that allowed him to create Alohub in conjunction with James Pratama. As a software engineer, Liu is responsible for building the Alohub website and its tech infrastructure. From its core, Alohub leverages data and machine learning techniques to help people make better decisions and build tailored experiences for each one of its users. It also aims to help expand people's circles to create an inclusive and connected community of people who like to do adventurous things together. Alohub not only determines what people like to do but also who they enjoy hanging out with.
Liu built the current Alohub website, which has started out as a web-based application with plans to build a mobile app in the near future. He also has the future goal of being able to establish Alohub as the go-to discovery platform for local experiences, and he's well on his way. Alohub has worked with many businesses in Boston, and its users have joined an average of 4 Alohub experiences each. That's an astounding number of repeat users for an app that has only been on the market for less than 5 months.
Successful entrepreneurs identify a problem in society and then find innovative ways to solve it. Leo Liu has certainly seen his fair share of entrepreneurial success, from founding his first app Blistify to working as a software engineer at DataRobot. Now, with his new app Alohub, it seems there isn't much that Liu can't tackle given the right opportunity.
