A cross between app and website, tourism hub and local guide, Check What’s Good is bridging divides to tell Wilmington (and St. Petersburg) residents about events happening right under their noses.
Check What’s Good was co-founded last year by siblings Dustin and Megan Rowe, as well as Mahmud Ahsan. The Rowes live in different cities but noticed the same problems with finding things to do.
“I live in St Petersburg, Florida, which is a pretty ‘happening’ city, but we’d go to the same trivia happy hour every single Tuesday,” Dustin said. “And then I would just see on social media: ‘Oh, there was this cool concert or a pop up festival that I just had no clue even existed until after it happened.’ And so that was kind of the initial problem: How do I find cool stuff happening in my city before it even occurs?”
Dustin, who has a strong background in software engineering, started building an AI tool to capture all of the events in his area. Megan jumped aboard, using her marketing experience to develop the business side. And soon, Check What’s Good grew to serve both Wilmington and St. Petersburg.
The website is browser-based, but Dustin said it has the look and usability of an app (without requiring the time and storage of a download).
“I think the big thing we do differently is we’re super mobile-first,” Dustin said. “We’re really made to feel like an app experience, like a seamless experience on your phone, whereas a lot of the traditional city websites are more blog style, desktop-optimized.”
The startup’s AI technology also allows them to tap into more events than a human could track down, Megan said.
“If somebody were to manually put events in, that’s a lot of chasing things down,” Megan said. “We pull from so many websites, and that saves us a lot of time, and the technology we’ve built behind it—that Dustin’s done a really good job with—has made it super simple for us to get events on the website and have a lot of different options without a lot of friction.”
In Wilmington, the pair is able to gather around 300 weekly items, which they vet to identify the top 100. These events appear under categories like “events,” “newly opened,” “restaurants,” “weekly deals” and more, populating vertically so that viewers can scroll through photos and videos on a web page that resembles a social media feed. Just last month, the site attracted 300,000 views.
Business Model and Moving Forward
The startup currently operates with a B2C model, selling ads on the website and social media. But the siblings plan to pivot to a B2B service whereby city tourism departments could adopt the software to attract visitors and revenue. This model would allow Check What’s Good to expand to new cities without direct oversight from the Rowes, while ensuring that software updates would be centralized and seamless across all cities.
The initial funding for Check What’s Good came from local angel investors, enabling the siblings to work on the startup full-time. Megan also participated in a women-in-tech accelerator with UNC-Wilmington.
Megan said that social media has been a large part of the company’s initial success. She posts regularly on the Check What’s Good Instagram account, reaching about 350,000 people each month and bringing new customers to local businesses.
“There is a business that was just mentioned in a video a couple weeks ago,” Megan said. “And they called me a week later, and they’re like, ‘You literally sent us more people than the mayor did when he did our ribbon cutting at our grand opening.’”
That wasn’t the only time one of their videos highlighting a local spot went viral. Megan posted about a $50 experience at one Wilmington business, and within a few weeks, 700 people had made reservations with them, adding up to over $35,000.
QUICK BITS
Startup: Check What’s Good
Co-Founders: Dustin Rowe, Megan Rowe, Mahmud Ahsan
Founded: 2023
Location: Wilmington, NC & St. Petersburg, FL
Website: checkwhatsgood.com
Funding: Angel-backed
“I feel extremely grateful to be a conduit for businesses and the general population to get connected to each other,” Megan said. “There’s so many amazing places around here, but they’re fighting an uphill battle with SEO online, trying to build a presence with their social media, getting people in the door. So being able to be like, ‘Hey, these people are really great,’ and actually having people go—that feels crazy, and I feel extremely honored to be in that position.”
Megan added that running Check What’s Good has helped her become more immersed in her community—and that she’s going to way more events than she ever would have before.
The company’s next step is to find a design partner, or a city tourism company that is interested in their software, and to build a case study around the business. After finding that initial partnership, Dustin said he anticipates a rapid wave of contracts with new cities.
For anyone interested in connecting with events in Wilmington or St Petersburg, visit checkwhatsgood.com to plan your experience, or connect with Check What’s Good on LinkedIn to follow their journey.
