When it comes to finding a cooking class or a tango lesson in your area for tonight, it isn’t as easy as booking a table in a fancy restaurant. The newly launched service Vimbly acts as both a directory and a reservation service for activities and hobbies in New York City.
These days, making a reservation for an activity is much harder than booking a table in a restaurant or buying plane tickets. Vimbly wants to be the service that takes over that particular space, like OpenTable has done for the restaurant industry.
In addition to searching for activities, you can simply browse the featured activities of the week if you want to try new hobbies, such as a flying trapeze class or an intro to pole dancing. Every page can be filtered using a few criteria: the day of the week, price limits, and the time of the classes.
“Two years ago I wanted to learn intro photography. I pulled up Google, typed in NYC photography class, and got a slew of results. Half the hits were in the wrong part of town,” co-founder and CEO Sam Lundin told us. “Then there was a vendor nearby that looked perfect — but their class was $300. All I wanted was a simple $50 class that fit my schedule,” he continued.
But even reserving an activity is much easier than before. Instead of having to send emails back and forth or interrupting what you were doing to call, you just book online. You pay using PayPal if you need to pay in advance.
Aside from experimenting with new hobbies, the service could be used to plan a different kind of date, for example. Similarly to HowAboutWe for Couples, instead of booking a table in a restaurant, you could do a cooking class together. Another use case is to try the activities in the “Make Me Interesting” section, which is pretty self-explanatory.
The service is currently funded by the partners. The two founders have a background in finance and are currently closing on new funding. More than 150 activities are currently available for New York City.
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