DoubleDutch Helps You Build Your Own Private FourSquare-style Social Check-in App

At the 1st ever SF App Pitch event held at pariSoma Innovation Loft in San Francisco, I caught up with Double Dutch CEO and Co-Founder Lawrence Coburn and spoke with him in detail about his latest internet venture – the iPhone App called DoubleDutch.

DoubleDutch is a free (for end users) iPhone App that make it very easy for hotels, event organizers, city bloggers and other similar entities to create their own private Social Check-In Apps into which their niche audience / attendees can check-in, network, collaborate and share.

Lawrence Coburn is the CEO and Cofounder of Double Dutch. Lawrence, an internet entrepreneur, has extensive experience and expertise in user generated content, online communities, location based services, widgets, and social media distribution.

Lawrence also blogs at Sexy Widgets and LocationMeMe.

Interview with DoubleDutch CEO and Co-Founder Lawrence Coburn.

What is DoubleDutch?

Lawrence: I’m the founder of Double Dutch and Double Dutch is a white label platform for building your own geolocation app.

What does that mean?

Lawrence: It means any community can have their own Foursquare-type service.  The idea is that if conference organizers wanted to offer their attendees the ability to check in to different events around the conference, the can do so using Double Dutch.

If a university wants to have a private check-in app just for their students with just their dorm information geotagged, they can do that with Double Dutch.

If a hotel wanted to have a virtual concierge where it would allow their guests to check in at tourist attractions around the concierge, they could do that too with Double Dutch.

So it’s serves as a great networking tool.

Lawrence uses DoubleDutch to Check-in at the SFAppPitch Private Event

What category does DoubleDutch fall under?

Lawrence: We call it B2B2C — which is business to business to consumer.  We’re looking for large brands, conferences, companies that want to deliver a geolocation app for their users.

What is DoubleDutch’s Apple App Store Status?

Lawrence: We have an example App in the Apple App Store.  It’s called Double Dutch and it basically shows you the features.  It’ll show you all the features that are available to your company or your community.  It’s a way to take a test run with the app.

Is DoubleDutch available for mainstream use right now?

Lawrence: It is.  You can play around with the app, download it off the store and if you’re interested in building your own Double Dutch for your own company under your own brand, contact info @ doubledutch.me.

Is DoubleDutch only for iPhones?

Lawrence: We’re going to have HTML 5 next month and that’ll work on any web kit browser.  So right now we’re just iPhone.

How much does DoubleDutch cost?

Lawrence: It’s a free app for the end user.  Our prices start at $10,000 setup fee (for the organizers) and then there’s a monthly usage fee for having your own private app.

Besides Hotels and Conference Organizers, who else can leverage DoubleDutch App successfully?

Lawrence: Another really good example is local city guides.  We’re seeing a lot of newspapers launch their own local city guides using their local content, like restaurant reviews and bar reviews under their own brand.

The New York Times launched one (Scoop)last week.  Similarly, we can help local media companies launch their own city guide using our platform.

What is your business model?  How does DoubleDutch, the App, make Money?

Lawrence: It’s through licensing.  Software licensing and then on a per user basis.  It’s similar to Yammer.  If a bunch of users end up using it, you pay more.  If nobody uses it, you don’t pay much money at all.

Tell me a little bit about DoubleDutch, the Company.  When was it founded, who are the founders?  Are you funded or looking for funding?

Lawrence: We raised seed funding in September of 2008.  We launched the geolocation product in March of 2010.  We are based in the Mission District (San Francisco).  We are 7 Employees.  My co-founder is Matthew Spolin, the CEO.