Redbeacon launches Facebook, BigTent deals

Startup for local services leverages social communities and moves into distributed strategy

RedBeacon, an emerging startup with former Google employees as founders, on Wednesday announced a couple strategic moves to distribute its local jobs service. As part of its move to have a "white-label" service, RedBeacon has announced its first partner - BigTent, a social community for organizing groups with a lot of mothers as members. People seeking a local service will be directed to a co-branded page that will say BigTent on it, but will be powered by RedBeacon.

RedBeacon co-founder Ethan Anderson, who sat down with me recently for an interview, said this is just the start of the many partner deals they're seeking to establish.

Ethan also talked about RedBeacon's launch with Facebook whereby a RedBeacon user can get Facebook friends to recommend service providers. For instance, if a person is seeking a personal trainer, they can get their friends on Facebook to help whittle down which one is best. The way it works is that RedBeacon asks a user if they'd like to ask their Facebook friends for recommendations. Once a persons' request for a personal trainer gets three price quotes from a personal trainer, a notice is sent to their Facebook friends seeking recommendations about personal trainers. 

Ethan said that a recent Razorfish study showed that more than 70% of people share a recommendation with people at least once every few months. So his team is betting the activity from Facebook friends will help drive awareness for the company.

RedBeacon has been running on $200,000 in funding. Each founder (there are three) put in $50,000, and they also received $50,000 as being the winner of TC50 in 2009. They expect to announce some venture financing sometime this year.

See the interview for visuals on how the Facebook and BigTent integration works.