Hey everyone,

We're Yousef, Obaida, and Ahmad, the founders of TryNearby.

Yousef co-founded FaZe Clan and spent 15 years creating content for 10M+ followers alongside hundreds of other creators. Ahmad and Obaida co-founded one of the first social media clipping companies, building the infrastructure that tracked billions of views across thousands of videos for creator campaigns. We've watched creator content become the most powerful distribution channel on the internet, and we're bringing it to local businesses.

TL;DR

84% of small businesses on TikTok say it helped grow their business. Almost every restaurant owner we meet knows that and has no idea how to act on it.

TryNearby handles it. Every month we send a new group of creators who live nearby to visit, film, and post a review, for a $399 subscription. All of it is handled by us and our AI agents.

Today, 120+ restaurants are subscribed and have had 2,500+ videos posted for them. We nearly doubled one restaurant's revenue in their first month, and owners tell us people walk in every day saying "we saw you on TikTok." Almost half our new restaurants now come from other owners referring us.

Our launch video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSG0v1MNwik

The problem

There are about 1 million restaurants and cafes in the US. Most of them are invisible in the places people actually decide where to eat.

The options an owner has today:

• Agencies cost thousands a month and often don’t drive real results
• Influencers work, but finding the right local ones, negotiating, and doing it again every month is a job by itself
• Creating their own content is a second full-time job they don't have time for, or a full-time hire they don't have the budget for

And here's the thing: the algorithm doesn't reward a business talking about itself. It rewards people talking about the business.

So the thing that actually works — someone who lives nearby posting about your food — happens once or twice, or not at all.

And the platforms keep rewarding the ones who show up. TikTok's new Local Feed ranks by location and recency, so the restaurants getting fresh content every month reach their own neighborhood. The ones who don't, disappear.

The solution

TryNearby is a subscription that puts local creators inside local restaurants every month, and their followers through the door.

$399/month. Every month we automatically schedule a new group of vetted creators who live nearby. They come in, film, edit, and post. The restaurant just serves the food.

Part 1 — They sign up, creators start showing up

The moment a restaurant joins, our matching agent finds the creators nearby who fit that spot and sends the invites. Sometimes a creator is scheduled to visit within five minutes of a restaurant signing up. Creators pick their own time from the restaurant's availability. The restaurant doesn't coordinate anything or answer a single message.

Part 2 — An AI agent runs every creator relationship

Every creator on TryNearby is managed over iMessage by an agent we built. Onboarding, match invites, booking, reminders, reschedules, questions. It handles over 10,000 texts a month.

It also learns as it goes. Every conversation teaches it more about that creator: what they like to eat, where they'll actually drive, when they're free, what they turn down. That context feeds the matching, so the invites get better the longer someone is on the platform.

For creators, it's a personal assistant that helps them become better creators while bringing collaborations straight to their iMessage instead of them chasing restaurants.

Part 3 — Restaurant owners get their own AI agent to text

Owners get an assistant in iMessage too. It watches every video, comment, and review, and tells them what's happening: who's visiting this week, how the last video performed, what people are saying. So when a dish sells out the week after a creator posted about it, the owner knows exactly why.

Our team sits behind both agents. Anything either one can't handle gets flagged to us in seconds.

Traction

10 months in:

• 120+ paying restaurants across Southern California
• 37% month-over-month growth with over 90% monthly restaurant retention since November
• 2,500+ videos posted by local creators → ~35M views, almost entirely from people within a few miles

What that turned into for the restaurants:

• A restaurant in San Diego nearly doubled revenue in a single month
• Another had a whole new demographic of customers drive a 50% increase in sales
• Dishes featured in creator videos hit record sales the following week

Every single owner tells us the same thing: people are walking in and saying they saw them on TikTok.

Team

Yousef co-founded FaZe Clan after starting as a 14-year-old YouTuber in 2010. He spent 15 years in the creator economy, built an audience of 10M+ followers and over a billion views, and helped take FaZe public on the Nasdaq at a $1B valuation.

Ahmad co-founded one of the first social media clipping companies, where he built the first and largest infrastructure for short-form clipping, tracking 10B+ views across tens of thousands of videos for some of the biggest creators on the internet. UC Berkeley CS, previously a senior engineer at WeightWatchers.

Obaida co-founded the clipping company alongside Ahmad. He was an early employee at Replit, previously Goldman Sachs, and grew a consumer app from $360K to $2M ARR in 18 months. Master's in applied economics from Johns Hopkins.

If you own a restaurant, know an owner who wants more foot traffic, are a local creator, or are just interested in TryNearby, we'd love to talk → 📧 hello@trynearby.com