Startups

GoBabl wants to take on the location-based social media analytics market

Earl Knight recently quit his job in sales to pursue his startup full-time.

GoBabl founder Earl Knight at Indy Hall. (Photo by Juliana Reyes)

GoBabl was born in a little room in Gothenburg, Sweden, during the long darkness in the fall of 2012.
Earl Knight was a year out of Pennsylvania’s Bloomsburg University and playing basketball for Gothia Basket, a team that had folded in 2010 and was trying to relaunch. It was tough. As he describes it, it was dark and cold for most of the day. The team promised to cover housing, food and transportation and when he got there, he realized transportation was a bus pass. But most of all, Knight was lonely.
“I’m sitting there in my little room and I’m like, ‘Where are all the people? What are they doing right now?'” he remembers.
He wondered why there wasn’t a social media platform he could use to find people nearby.
Those were the early inklings of GoBabl, the location-based social media analytics platform he started after moving back to the States. Knight, 28, recently quit his job in software sales to run the company full time.
GoBabl is entering the market in a time when there are already established players, like venture-backed GeoFeedia, Snaptrends and Ground Signal, but Knight says he’ll beat the competition with a lower price. He recently landed his first paid contract with a U.K.-based marketing agency called Digital Radish, he told us during an interview at coworking space Indy Hall, where he’s a member.


News startup Billy Penn was also an early beta-tester of GoBabl, using it for location-based Twitter and Instagram search in their reporting, and Billy Penn managing editor Shannon Wink’s journalism students at Temple used it as a way to report on breaking news. Billy Penn has since stopped using it, but Wink said it’s been a great tool for teaching students how to evaluate information as it’s happening.
Knight worked with Philly developers Thomas Elliott, who now works at Thomson Reuters, and Anthony Calabro, who now works at Momentum Dynamics, to build the prototype, but he now contracts with a remote team in Ukraine. He joked that all his paychecks go toward the dev team, so he’s living off baked beans and hot dogs for now.
Knight is bootstrapping the business right now, with help from a $15,000 grant from the state-run Business Enterprise of New Jersey, which supports entrepreneurs who are blind or visually impaired (Knight is legally blind). He won the grant in 2015, when he was living between Old City and his hometown of Haddonfield, N.J.

Companies: Indy Hall

Before you go...

Please consider supporting Technical.ly to keep our independent journalism strong. Unlike most business-focused media outlets, we don’t have a paywall. Instead, we count on your personal and organizational support.

3 ways to support our work:
  • Contribute to the Journalism Fund. Charitable giving ensures our information remains free and accessible for residents to discover workforce programs and entrepreneurship pathways. This includes philanthropic grants and individual tax-deductible donations from readers like you.
  • Use our Preferred Partners. Our directory of vetted providers offers high-quality recommendations for services our readers need, and each referral supports our journalism.
  • Use our services. If you need entrepreneurs and tech leaders to buy your services, are seeking technologists to hire or want more professionals to know about your ecosystem, Technical.ly has the biggest and most engaged audience in the mid-Atlantic. We help companies tell their stories and answer big questions to meet and serve our community.
The journalism fund Preferred partners Our services
Engagement

Join our growing Slack community

Join 5,000 tech professionals and entrepreneurs in our community Slack today!

Trending

The man charged in the UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting had a ton of tech connections

EDA officials are ‘hopeful’ Tech Hubs program will live on under Trump

From rejection to innovation: How I built a tool to beat AI hiring algorithms at their own game

How a laid-off AI enthusiast pivoted to become a founder — while holding down a day job

Technically Media