Reviews are only as valuable as the credibility of the source. Third party reviews can be helpful to us as consumers, but only so far as they can be trusted. Amazon and Google have been proven to be rampant with fake reviews while it was recently demonstrated that one-in-three reviews on TripAdvisor are also fake. FAVER allows you to leverage the experience and reviews from people you personally know and trust. It’s all about trust and the credibility of the source.

FAVER isn’t typical “Social Media.” In fact, its purpose and value is best recognized with principals that oppose traditional Social Media. FAVER isn’t about quantity but rather quality. FAVER helps you focus on those few close valuable relationships that you have with people with whom you share common interests and tastes that you already know you can trust. Where Social Media seeks to waste your time, FAVER’s goal is to help you improve the quality of how you spend your time and money in the real world. FAVER’s mission is to help you make decisions that will help you make powerful memories with the short free time you have in life.

FAVER’s focus is less about selfies or diatribe posts and more about the individual’s various personal passions and items of interest. Following the people you’re fascinated with on FAVER will give you insights into the things they care about in a more meaningful way than any other social media platform. FAVER helps give you insight into their interests and favorite things like their Top 10 Hip Hop songs of all-time; their favorite Sci-Fi movies or what book they’re currently reading – their favorite tv shows, travel destinations or even what Video Game they’re currently playing. FAVER helps its users discover new items within their own categories of interests by exposing them to the favorite things of people they trust, care about, or are interested in.

Yes! FAVER’s technology allows you to leverage the expertise of the people you trust, even if they’re not using FAVER yet. We do this by allowing you to generate requests for recommendations (we call this “asking a Faver”) and enabling you to send them out to your personal network as a text message, from your phone number, with a link. This link, when clicked by the recipient, will simply open a web-page on their safari or chrome browser on their phone, without having to download anything, and will present them with a very simple response page that they can reply to with their personalized recommendation. You, as the user, will then receive any incoming recommendations from your trusted friends into the app, where you can then store and organize these various recommendations, even if they come from your friends that aren’t current users of the FAVER application. But don’t worry, your friends will join you on FAVER once you share it with them!

Yes. FAVER enables you to collect and organize all of your interests in one place! FAVER allows you to organize the things you care about, segmented by categories, into lists based on Past or Future experiences. What this means is you can collect the things you’ve already done in the Past and organize them into Collections of items, based on their respective category, and keep track of whether you liked that experience or not. And you can do the same for experiences you want to have in the Future. As an example, you can collect all of the Travel Destinations you’ve ever been to in a Travel Collection list. You can then assign each destination a sentiment around your experience: “Fave” = “Like” or “Disfave” = “Dislike.” Simultaneously, you can build out a “Future List” (We call these Bucket Lists) of the destinations to which you’d like to travel; effectively building out your own personal “Bucket Lists” of experiences you want to have based on the recommendations you’ve received or from researching the “Past Collections” of your trusted friends who have already “been there, done that.”

It’s a two-part story. One based on a positive experience and the other based on a negative. I’ll start with the positive.

Part 1: a book – As an avid reader, I was coming to the end of a book and wanted to plan ahead for my next read. I love to read, but books represent a substantial investment of time. Not wanting to waste that kind of valuable time on a bad book, I called my brother-in-law, who’s an even more avid reader than I am, to ask what good books he had read lately. I called him because I had learned over time, from trading book recommendations, that our tastes aligned so well that I can trust virtually anything that he recommends to me. He gave me two or three recommendations which I wrote down on a scrap of paper that I had handy. Fast-forward a few weeks to when I finished the book I was reading and I couldn’t find the piece of paper on which I’d written the recommendations he’d given me, and I had to call him again. This is when I realized that there had to be a better way to get, give, save and organize recommendations from my trusted friends, not just for books, but for anything! And that’s when the seeds of the idea of FAVER were planted. 

Part 2: a trampoline – Shortly after the experience of example one, my wife and I decided to buy a trampoline for our kids. Buying a trampoline isn’t like buying a pack of gum in the checkout line. They’re expensive, come in different shapes and sizes and vary in quality and functionality. As such, I did what most consumers do today when considering a substantial purchase; spent hours on research. After reading through what felt like 100’s of reviews, I settled on what these reviews told me was the best trampoline on the market and I bought it on Amazon. Needless to say, $500 and a couple weeks later than the alleged delivery date, several heavy boxes arrived. However, after hours of attempting to assemble the mess I was given, something somewhat resembling a trampoline stood before me, but was completely unusable as it was a sham product from overseas that had populated the internet with fake positive reviews. After all the time and money wasted, I was out $500, hours of my life that I could never get back, and I still didn’t have a trampoline. So I now needed to tackle the headache of figuring out how to do a return coupled with the re-packaging and shipping of multiple boxes of trampoline parts. It took threats just to convince the company to commit to the return, I even had to agree to pay for a portion of the very expensive return shipping costs, all because I made the mistake of buying a bad product. This was my first substantial experience of buying a product online based on fake reviews, and it wasn’t fun.

Third-party reviews sites are rampant with fake reviews, and we, as the consumers who believe them, pay the price. Needless to say, I wish I would have known beforehand what experience I was going to have with the trampoline so I could have just simply avoided it, but the fake reviews deceived me. Contrast that with the experience I had obtaining a book recommendation from my brother-in-law, a known and trusted source. That’s when it dawned on me that reviews are only as valuable as the credibility and trustworthiness of the source, and that’s when the seeds of FAVER blossomed further into what it is becoming today; a trusted word-of-mouth recommendations platform, for anything.

FAVER is dedicated to helping people find the best of everything by leveraging the experiences and expertise of the friends they know they can trust, who have already “been there, done that.” FAVER is changing the way we share by helping you easily get, give, save and organize recommendations from trusted friends, for anything.

Life is short. I wanted to help people live life better and make meaningful memories with the limited time we have to make them. I created FAVER to help people avoid wasting time and money on buyer’s remorse experiences.