A few weeks ago, a new lodging-and-dating service announced itself to the online world.
LoveRoom, from the mind of 23-year-old Hollywood entrepreneur Josh Bocanegra, pitched itself as “the Airbnb
for Attractive People.”
At the time, the company wasn’t much more than a steamy landing page featuring an unlicensed photo of former “Smallville” actress Kristin Kreuk and self-explanatory tagline, but it was enough to launch a flurry of posts on tech blogs.
Betabeat summed up the site’s aim as “No Uglies,” Mashable predicted it was “sure to spark a lot of hate” and Forbes more or less declared LoveRoom to be a lot of nothing.
Forbes was wrong. LoveRoom went live Nov. 15 and is accepting signups (though it’s officially in beta). Only a few days after going up, Bocanegra announced LoveRoom had more than 2,000 members.
He’s also defended the site from accusations that it’s a lurid hookup tool, preferring to view it more in the way of a romantic comedy.
“Imagine if you can go anywhere in the world and stay with someone with a similar interest,” Bocanegra said. “It would be cool to meet a woman in Paris who has the similar interests, such as religious views, or had the same personality and you can share a room and get to know her.”
LoveRoom members fill out profiles on the site with basic traits: age, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender of preferred partner and whether they’re seeking a room or sharing one.
Unlike Airbnb, the site doesn’t have hosts list a specific price for their rooms; users can message prospective hosts/boarders directly through the site and work out those details.
The company, which at the moment employs only Bocanegra and his girlfriend, is an outgrowth of an earlier site he developed – dating site InterestMi. He’s already a serial entrepreneur; at 16, he built Beats4Real, which leases out hip-hop beats.
But something like LoveRoom hews a lot closer to his dream concept for a company (though he’s still figuring out the revenue part).
“We’ve been wanting to work on a service to connect people,” Bocanegra said. “This is what came out of months and months of market research.”
As the site continues to accept a flurry of new members, he’s speaking with local investors. Los Angeles happens to be the home base of a number of dating services, including Santa Monica’s eHarmony; the JDate.com and ChristianMingle.com operations of West L.A.’s Spark Network Inc.; and West Hollywood’s darling hookup app, Tinder, which is owned by IAC/Inter-ActiveCorp.
Up next is a LoveRoom app, which Bocanegra hopes will be released before Valentine’s Day. Although he’s a self-taught programmer and built the site himself, the move toward mobile will likely require some outside talent.
As he takes the service from ridiculed idea into what he believes will be a long-lasting business, LoveRoom will be backing off the “attractive people” tag. Which he said was misinterpreted anyway.
“When we say it’s for people who are attractive we’re saying, ‘Hey, if you’re single and want to stay with someone of the opposite sex, they’re probably going to be attractive to you,’” Bocanegra said.
As for the criticism he got from the tech blogs of recent, he added: “Hey, bad press is better than no press.”
Cornerstone Incubator
Los Angeles already has a lot of tech accelerators and incubators. Cornerstone OnDemand, maker of human resources software, is driving that point home with a newly announced incubator designed to inspire similar cloud-computing startups.
The Cornerstone Innovation Fund pledges to invest at least $250,000 and up to $1 million in a few companies every year. Tech yearlings will also be offered office space at Cornerstone’s Santa Monica headquarters in the Water Garden office complex.
The fund stands out among the piles of accelerators in Los Angeles in its commitment to cloud-based companies. Traditionally, these programs have tried to keep their rosters broadly defined across the tech spectrum.
Staff reporter Tom Dotan can be reached at [email protected] or (323) 549-5225, ext. 263.
