When you’re a reporter for a local tech new site presented with Bestions, a new Q&A website dedicated to determining, quantitatively, the BEST of any single thing, the first question that pops into your mind is:
What’s the best local tech news site?
But who needs numbers to tell us the answer to that? For every other BEST determination, however, Daniel Erlbaum, who describes himself as CEO and unpaid intern, recently launched Bestions in beta so that anyone could sign up and ask or argue what is the BEST of absolutely anything.
Erlbaum got the inspiration for Bestions after getting into an argument — in this case, it was over who was the best athlete to play in any major sport, Erlbaum told Technically Philly.
“He argued for Wayne Gretsky and I argued for Michael Jordan,” said Erlbaum, a Philadelphia-area native who grew up in Merion and Haverford. “We were equally amazed that the other didn’t see the truth in our best so I walked away from that lunch thinking, hmm, what if there was a definite place to reference and debate and decide the best of anything.”
Bestions is both qualitative and quantitative in nature. Once you have an account, anyone can ask a question about what is the best, vote on someone else’s question, make a suggestion or follow the voting on a particular question. The qualitative part is the heated debates that can take place in the comments section. The quantitative parts are the tallies of “best” suggestions and votes, which you can view in graphic or table form.
For Erlbaum, who says there is some amount of truth in numbers, the quantitative part is key. Someone could argue all day that Geno’s makes the best cheesesteaks in Philadelphia, but if Jim’s is winning, well, it’s harder to argue with the numbers.
Here’s how the debate on cheesesteaks is actually shaping up at Bestions:
The trick is to collect enough data i.e., users. Since launching last Wednesday, Erlbaum says that most of his outreach has been through his personal networks so most users on the site are asking questions, and thus inputting data, related to Philadelphia.
Erlbaum says the number one thing he realized as his development team began to build Bestions was that people are very interested in the best.
“There are 277 million global monthly ‘best’ Google searches,” Erlbaum said. “And 9.4 billion results, which means lots of people want to know the best. There is so much that comes back to you in Google that it is kind of hard to narrow it down.”
Erlbaum, 39, who has lived most of his life in the Philadelphia area and now resides in suburban Merion, hasn’t always been fascinated with debating the best. His family owns the famous David’s Bridal chain so after college he joined his uncle in the business. After taking David’s Bridal public, Erlbaum started up a local branding company called Finch Brands, based at 4th and Chestnut in Old City.
His success as a businessman has helped him to personally fund Bestions through its beta period. In the future, though, he has big goals for the growth of Bestions.
“My expectation is that I would want to raise meaningful money in the millions, rather than the hundreds of thousands, to scale what I expect to be a successful platform,” Erlbaum said.
For now, though, Erlbaum plans to keep Bestions in beta for the next three to five months as they build additional features and watch to see how it spreads.
“I think it will naturally be Philly focused at first, but as more and more start to network and socialize this, it will begin to expand naturally,” Erlbaum said.
In the near term, at least, he hopes Bestions will help the debate over the best Philly cheesesteak rage on, but with quantifiable evidence that a confused traveler or an adventurous local can use to decide where to try a cheesesteak.
“I am not fool enough to think that these debates will ever stop or because its so on Bestions its a closed case,” Erlbaum said. “There will always be the joy of debating that question and it’s obviously personal.”
Perhaps Bestions will provide a new form of bragging rights for the lucky local cheesesteak establishment that comes out on top. Or, better yet, the lucky local tech news site.
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