Our History
The idea for HoodFind came to the founder, Ara Berberian, as he was pursuing a separate start-up. Like any responsible entrepreneur, Ara had to maintain a tight budget for shopping, entertainment and other expenses as he was launching his business.
What was the best way to maximize his budget without necessarily sacrificing quality? Ara turned to local search websites for the latest deals and recommendations but he soon drowned in a sea of dated offers, junk information, and fluffy user-reviews. There simply wasn’t the one source that cut through the clutter to help him find what he was looking for. After learning that several friends had a similar experience, he realized that there was room for a totally new approach to local search.
Terry Kavanaugh, seeing that his good friend Ara stumbled upon a pretty swell idea, left his day job to help hone the vision and test market the service. After talking with business owners throughout Chicago, Ara and Terry soon realized that these businesses had no real tool to quickly and effectively promote new sales, great specials and unique product lines and services on the web. So the big realization came: Why couldn’t there be a Craigslist-like website that offered a way in which the freshest and best information about local businesses could be easily posted, found and shared?
After spending several months putting together an Alpha demo site, which got a great reception at TechCocktail 7 - Chicago, the HoodFind co-founders along with the addition of talented folks like Adrian Basalic, Sachi Shirasaka and Lane Fujita, continue to develop this functional and fun website to improve local search.
