Lavahound: location-based iOS app from Wayne enters crowded ‘discovery’ market

Three entrepreneurs with a hodgepodge of experience hold court around a 4 foot by 6 foot breakfast table in the attic of one of their homes in Wayne. They often keep a bowl of fruit in the middle, where each partner can reach it.
“We’re in a classic startup space,” said Sean McCloskey, the co-founder of Lavahound, a versatile, location-based iOS application built for discovery. Clients, including those they have and those they want to have, tend to be large enterprises hoping to gamify existing experiences, like universities, amusement parks or other institutions seeking an interactive experience around location.
Like Sesame Place, the familiar, family theme park in Bucks County, that is currently an alpha user of Lavahound, around their ‘Spooktacular‘ event that runs to the end of October.
“We’ve created a photo treasure hunt around the park that encourages visitors to find various places of interest and trick or treat stations around the park using their mobile phone,” said McCloskey, 30, who adds that engagement is high among trial users.  “Our app gives visitors a map that pinpoints what to find, a gallery of the images that shift in accordance to where you are, and info related to what you are finding.”
Next, the Lavahound team wants to move into the tourism and education fields, both crowded markets, he said.
Indeed, location-based services and gamification are a hot market nationally right now, a concern, McCloskey said, that doesn’t have him worried because of the sleeker, faster-moving product and the team that surrounds him.
McCloskey, a 1999 St. Joe’s Prep alumnus, is just one of the three entrepreneurs who sit at that breakfast table in that Wayne attic.

He first thought of the idea in August 2010 walking down Lancaster Avenue in Bryn Mawr. Passing a mural he hadn’t noticed before, he wanted to know the story behind it. McCloskey said he decided then he wanted to connect stories like that around locations, first with the help of the enterprises largely behind them, not unlike how two civic hackers had built a Philly-specific Mural Arts Guide web app.
“I figured there should be a way for people to learn about this mural and other things like it in a fun and engaging manner as they are looking at it. That is where our gaming dynamics come into play,” McCloskey said. “Once you engage people, learning naturally flows from there.”
So he took the idea to web designer Brendan Stock and entrepreneur Jeff Shieh, 42, who was the first employee at And1 and had worked with McCloskey on past ventures. McCloskey and Shieh began business planning and outreach when they were introduced to Charles Olivia, 49, a mobile entrepreneur as early as the mid-1990s who was teaching marketing classes at St. Joseph’s University.
Olivia was made CEO, Shieh COO. McCloskey retains the co-founder title. Stock, 26, is the startup’s first employee.
They spent the early part of 2011 working with Conshohocken-based app shop Transmogrify on PhoneGap with HTML5, before deciding a native application was a better move. Stock handles most of the day-to-day IT management. In its current form, Lavahound has been live since August.
Lavahound remains self-funded, though their executive team are actively speaking with angel investors and other area venture capitalists, said McCloskey.
Beyond Sesame Place, Lavahound is being tested in a variety of universities, said McCloskey, “as far south as Loyola University New Orleans and as far north as Muhlenberg.”
“Schools are a nice fit because they have a great story to tell and students like to learn in a playful and contextual way,” he said. “We’ve given them the platform and they are helping us define how it is used.”
Though McCloskey conceived of the initial concept, he has other ventures.
He founded and still leads online retail company Worthy Fashion, which gives customers the choice to donate a percentage of profits to a charity of choice, in addition to owning web design and consulting business Magis Creative, of which Stock is also an employee. Rounding out his efforts, McCloskey has been an official partner with Amazon since 2008, brokering online retail deals, and he has also partnered with Loffles.com, the promotional giveaway site Technically Philly profiled in August.
McCloskey was a 2003 political science graduate of the University of Richmond, 13 years before Shieh, who was a vice president of And1 from 1996 to 2004. Olivia, with degrees from the University of San Diego and an MBA from the University of Notre Dame, worked on a variety of mobile product companies starting in 1994.
Ahead of its pitch for tourism agencies, the Lavahound team has developed a ‘Where’s Ben?” trek throughout Center City seeking portrayals of Ben Franklin a la Where’s Waldo, in addition to an ‘Amazing Race-like hunt along the Ben Franklin Parkway, McCloskey said.
“I’ve had a blast creating it and I hope to find partners that want to share in the fun and use the app to help people explore, play, and learn,” he said.