GayCities Launches

Well, I’ve been teasing you for months on this blog – the day is finally here. My startup GayCities, the Gay Travel and City Guide unveiled our new site today.

With GayCities we’re developing the most comprehensive, user-friendly online travel community and city guide for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. We want to be the place to share invaluable insider information on where to go, eat, and stay wherever your travel.

I started the site after being disappointed in the lack of information online for the gay traveler. On a trip to Boston, I wanted to stay in a nice B&B in the South End and find out the most popular bars for gay men about my age. For the B&B, I turned to TripAdvisor only to be frustrated that there was no easy way to filter by “south end B&B”, and then when I did find places, I found it difficult to find opinions of people like me. Sadly, I even found a number of reviews that had veiled negative references to the clientele or owners. And when looking for nightlife I found almost nothing online and what I did find was out of date. And for a city the size of Boston, that shocked me. As I dug into it, I found that many cities suffer this same problem.

So GayCities was born. A gay city guide with comprehensive, up-to-date info about gay bars & clubs, restaurants, gay friendly hotels with reviews, photos, maps – all the stuff you’ve come to expect.

While reviews are the backbone of the site, today we’ve rolled out a bunch of great features. I’ll let you read about those over on the GayCities blog.

I’ve focused on bootstrapping to get to this point, but now I want to grow the site, add richer content and tell the world about it, so I’ll be seeking a round of friends/family/angel funding. If you are interested in participating (or know someone who would be) in this round, let me know.

You all have been so supportive to me through this process, and for that I am very thankful. There’s one more favor I have to ask – help me spread the word. Pass it on to your LGBT friends and link to http://www.gaycities.com/ from your blog or site – you know how Google/Yahoo love sites that are heavily linked to.

and P.S. over on the GayCities blog, I link to some of the press we’ve gotten (washington post, sf chronicle, techcrunch)…