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Buffy Li was very patient when she took time off from her Spring Break to talk to me.<\/p>\n
Li, an 11th grader at Santa Cruz\u2019s Kirby prep school, spent her most of the week off coordinating the launch of her new app, TagDat<\/a>. While she\u2019s stressed about getting her ducks in a row, the app is actually the second\u00a0startup she\u2019s worked on, so she knows how it goes.<\/p>\n As one of the founders of TagDat, a nascent would-be Yelp competitor with $280,000 in pre-seed funding, Li doesn\u2019t have time for much of a social life. She does however manage to dutifully maintain an Instagram account for her cat, a cornflower blue-eyed ragdoll named Bailey (at the time of writing, Bailey had 27,400 followers<\/a>).<\/p>\n Buffy Li, co-founder<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Li\u00a0created\u00a0TagDat with co-founders Wilson Li (no relation), 21, and University of California student Zheng Cai, 31. The team combines Li\u2019s minimalist design ideals and foodie bent with Cai\u2019s big data chops (he\u2019s an astrophysics post-doc and NASA Hubble Fellow) and Wilson Li\u2019s startup knowledge.<\/p>\n Prior to TagDat, Li\u00a0taught herself app design with her first app, Haorizi, a Chinese social network for women, when a family friend needed to bring another designer in to collaborate with the company\u2019s existing team.<\/p>\n \u201cI have always been interested in all kinds of designing,\u201d Li said. \u201cI\u2019ve tried a lot of things in the past, drawing, oil painting and whatnot. I really love UI\/UX design for websites.\u201d<\/p>\n TagDat<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Just three years ago, Li\u2019s family moved to Santa Cruz from Wuxi, \u201ca fairly small but developed city\u201d near Shanghai. Since moving, she\u2019s been balancing her intercontinental work travel with her other responsibilities, like AP Physics.<\/p>\n After the TagDat team got a prototype off the ground, they connected with Shanghai Man Feng Asset Management Company, which chipped in $250,000 in a pre-seed round.<\/p>\n \u201cWe presented them with the idea, and we had a working prototype at that time,\u201d Li recounts. \u201cBoth my partner and I got got to give the pitch. We divided it half and half and I covered the technical design side and he covered more the marketing side.\u201d<\/p>\n In an industry often openly hostile to women twice her age, Li hasn\u2019t had much trouble proving herself. \u201cIn most encounters I\u2019m really lucky that people really take me seriously and that they believe in what I\u2019m doing.\u201d Li noted that any\u00a0skeptics went quiet after the app\u00a0raised its initial funds.<\/p>\n If you ask Li, Yelp buries its most useful information, and even when it doesn\u2019t \u201cthe results aren\u2019t very good.\u201d Of course, as a new local reviews app, TagDat needs to fight an uphill battle to populate its database. For now, it will rely on a combination of external listings\u00a0like Google Places mixed with and data from alpha\/beta testers.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com\/2017\/04\/screen-shot-2017-04-04-at-12-59-14-pm.png?w=267&h=300\")
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TagDat departs from\u00a0Yelp\u2019s mold in a few ways. For one, it\u2019s bright and playful, more like Foursquare but without the gamification or identity crisis<\/a>. But the core difference is that TagDat relies on tags rather than text. It\u2019s like the emoji equivalent of local business reviews, letting users rate a place with at-a-glance descriptors like \u201cspicy\u201d or \u201cauthentic\u201d rather than digging through a bunch of not very searchable words.<\/p>\n