Click here for Part I & Part II

Helping Baltimore locals create the perfect night out

Philip DiMuro is the CEO and co-founder of Loople. Loople is a free app for iPhone and Android that helps users find local drink and food specials. With Loople, users can create the atmosphere for their ideal night out by filtering restaurants and bars by drink types, seating availability, live music, and more. Philip came up with the seed of the idea while working for the Boston Beer Company, and launched the app last year with the help of his co-founder Dave Phelan. As of September 2016, Loople is only available in Baltimore, although the team plans to expand if the app proves successful.

Philip DiMuro spoke with citybizlist publisher Edwin Warfield for this interview.

EDWIN WARFIELD: What are your long-term goals for Loople?

PHILIP DIMURO: One of the big goals with Loople is to constantly grow our user base, but most importantly focus on growing the daily actives and weekly actives on the platform. Right now we’re about to break 14,000 users on the platform. We’re currently only available in Baltimore City. We have a great density of our users in the Canton, Fells Point, Federal Hill neighborhoods. I think we still have even more things that we can do in this market. We’re still just happening into the young professional demographic, which are our core consumers right now, and we’ve seen our weekly active users constant growth with that—which is our core metric. We’ve grown 41% every month on average over the last 12 months that we’ve been in business, which is the real heart of our business: been making sure that we provide enough value that our users return to it.

Q. How do you make sure you’re differentiating Loople from other, similar apps?

A. A great question about deciding what separates Loople—that’s been something we focus on constantly. It’s by constantly executing and solving a real need in the market. Right now, mobile apps—the way that they are, only 20% of apps ever get opened up more than once after they’ve been downloaded on the phone, and that’s because most apps do not solve a real need for a consumer that makes them want to come back on there week after week. I challenge you to think about the apps that you use on your phone that aren’t actually main apps. By providing the data about the industry in real time and providing a complete view of the industry, which most of our competitors do not do, we’ve been able to continually grow these weekly active users because we’ve solved a real problem for them.

Loople has been our first go-to market strategy. My passion is in entrepreneurship—so is my cofounder’s. We want to build businesses throughout our lifetime. I think tech is an excellent place to be in. I think mobile apps, because they do have a lower barrier to entry to get in, are excellent starting points. So, Loople’s been our first of the products that entered into the App Store, but we definitely have other ideas in our brains that we constantly think about. It’s interesting to see that some of them have come about so far in the last couple of years as technology and geo-location has been brought to the forefront, and some of them haven’t been yet. And I can see, if we continue to prove out the model with Loople, we could expand into other markets or other businesses and be a larger app company.

Connect with Philip on LinkedIn

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Edwin Warfield, CEO of citybizlist, conducts the CEO Interviews.

If you're interested in reaching CEOs, please contact edwin.warfield@citybuzz.co

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