A Conversation About Erie
The data Erie
has never had.
Until now.
Geez is a group coordination app launching in Erie, Pennsylvania on August 20, 2026. Every time a group uses it, anonymous behavioral data is generated — where people want to gather, what they want to eat, when they coordinate, how often. This brief is for the organizations that should have that data.
VisitErie
PSU Erie Economic Research Institute
CRIZ Development Partners
Erie Restaurant + Venue Partners
The Core Proposition
Every city wants to know how its residents actually live — where they gather, how they spend, what they need, what they choose. Survey data is delayed, filtered, and self-reported. Transaction data is fragmented and siloed. Geez is the first platform that generates genuine community coordination intelligence as a natural byproduct of helping people. Not surveillance. Not surveys. Just the aggregate pattern of real decisions, made in real groups, in real Erie.
01 — The Problem Worth Solving Together
Erie invests in experiences.
No one knows if they're working.
VisitErie tracks hotel tax receipts and visitor origin. The Pennsylvania Tourism Office measures spending categories. The PSU Economic Research Institute models labor markets and sector outputs. These are excellent instruments — but they all measure what happened after the fact, at the macro level, with significant lag.
None of them answer the questions that actually drive investment decisions:
Unanswered Today
Where do Erie residents want to gather — but don't?
Not where they go. Where they try to go and the coordination breaks down before they get there. That friction is invisible in every existing dataset.
Unanswered Today
Which dining and experience categories are genuinely underserved?
Yelp shows ratings. OpenTable shows reservations. Neither shows what a group of 8 wanted and couldn't find — the unmet demand signal that shapes where new investment should go.
Unanswered Today
When do residents coordinate socially vs. when do they not?
Seasonal tourism data doesn't capture resident social rhythm. Which months do Erie households gather most? When does coordination friction peak and kill plans that should happen?
Unanswered Today
What does the grocery coordination pattern look like across Erie households?
Grocery store foot traffic is private. Household list behavior is invisible. The weekly coordination pattern — who plans, how far in advance, how often it breaks — has never been measured.
02 — How It Works
Coordination as
intelligence infrastructure.
Geez helps groups decide. An organizer opens the app, inputs their group's preferences anonymously, and receives a singular output — a decision. That interaction, multiplied across thousands of Erie households, generates a data layer no other platform produces.
"Every dinner decision is a vote. Every grocery list is a household signal. Every get-together is a map of where Erie wants to be. Geez captures all of it without asking anyone a single question."
Three tools at launch. Each generates a distinct signal:
Weekly Groceries
Household coordination tool — anonymous list, shared output
Generates: household grocery coordination frequency, planning lead time, list complexity, and shopping rhythm — anonymized at the zip code level. First time this data has existed in Erie at scale.
Signal for Erie Partners
Grocery stores & retail — true demand patterns, not loyalty card data filtered through corporate privacy walls
Economic planners — household food security and coordination stability as a community health indicator
Group Get Together
Single-event coordination — when, where, who, anonymous input → one answer
Generates: group gathering frequency, venue preference distributions, occasion types, timing patterns, and geographic clustering — where Erie groups want to be, at what scale, at what time of year.
Signal for Erie Partners
VisitErie — resident social behavior to complement visitor data; the gaps between where residents gather and where tourists go
CRIZ developers — genuine demand signals for venue types, neighborhoods, and experience categories before investment decisions are made
Local restaurants & venues — anonymous group preference data they've never had access to; what the group wanted before they booked
Dinner Decider
Anonymous preference collection → singular restaurant recommendation
Generates: cuisine preference frequency, price range distributions, group dining occasion types, and — critically — the gap between what groups want and what Erie currently offers. The unmet demand map.
Signal for Erie Partners
Restaurant investors & operators — before you open, know what Erie groups are looking for that doesn't exist yet
PSU Erie Economic Research Institute — behavioral ground truth for service sector gap analysis and economic diversification research
03 — The Privacy Commitment
The Anonymity Seal.
Non-negotiable. Architectural.
The data Geez generates is useful precisely because it is trusted. Trust requires a privacy commitment that is structural — not a policy that can be walked back, but a design decision that makes individual identification impossible at the system level.
What Geez Never Does — The Anonymity Seal
✕
Never sells individual user data to any party, ever
✕
Never exposes individual preferences, choices, or inputs to other users or partners
✕
Never links aggregate insights back to individual identities
✕
Never shares raw user data — only aggregate, anonymized, community-level insights
✕
Never uses coordination data for advertising targeting of any kind
✕
Never monetizes guest data — guests are free and their privacy is unconditional
Partnership data sharing, where it exists, is aggregate-only — zip code level, category level, seasonal level. Individual Geez users will never appear in any partner dataset. This is not a legal disclaimer. It is the product design.
04 — What a Partnership Looks Like
Three specific conversations.
One city. One year.
Geez is not proposing a data licensing deal. We are proposing a shared investment in understanding Erie — before the CRIZ investments are made, before the Bayfront builds out, before the 2027 Great Lakes Summit puts Erie on a national stage. The data will be more valuable if the right people help shape what questions it answers.
VisitErie
Erie County Convention Center Authority — tourism marketing and destination development
VisitErie tracks visitors. Geez tracks residents. Neither dataset alone tells the full story of Erie's experience economy. The gap between where residents gather and where visitors go is the white space where the strongest investment decisions live.
Proposed Conversation
Resident experience mapping — Geez provides quarterly aggregate reports on where Erie residents gather, at what frequency, in what categories. VisitErie layers this against visitor data to identify convergence and gap zones.
Four-season signal — understanding resident social rhythm year-round to inform VisitErie's four-season tourism strategy with behavioral ground truth, not only visitor surveys.
Co-branded Erie launch presence — VisitErie's participation in the August 20 Geez launch event as a community anchor elevates both brands as Erie economic partners.
PSU Erie — Economic Research Institute
Pennsylvania State University Behrend — economic research, labor market analysis, city planning
The PSU Erie Economic Research Institute has identified the core challenge clearly: Erie has the institutions, but hasn't converted research excellence into commercial and community outcomes. Geez is a commercial product generating behavioral data that no research institution in Erie currently has access to.
Proposed Conversation
Behavioral data access for economic research — Geez provides anonymized, aggregate coordination data to EREI for inclusion in Erie economic research, city planning models, and transformation analysis.
Service sector gap analysis — Dinner Decider unmet-demand data as a research input: what do Erie groups want that the city's restaurant and experience economy doesn't currently offer?
Coordination as economic indicator — a novel research question: does household coordination frequency correlate with economic confidence, social cohesion, and neighborhood health? Erie as the first city to study this.
CRIZ Development Partners
City Revitalization & Improvement Zone — Erie Bayfront & downtown redevelopment
CRIZ zones succeed when businesses that open inside them match what the community actually wants — not what developers assume they want based on comparable markets. The Market House and Bayfront investment will perform better with demand intelligence than without it.
Proposed Conversation
Pre-investment demand mapping — before tenant mix decisions are finalized, Geez data indicates which dining and gathering categories Erie groups are actively seeking and not finding.
Post-investment performance signal — as CRIZ businesses open, Geez Get Together and Dinner Decider data shows whether they're attracting the groups they were designed for — at the aggregate level, without any individual tracking.
Neighborhood gravity mapping — which Erie neighborhoods are social coordination hubs? Where do groups naturally want to gather? That's the data that should inform which CRIZ zones get which investment types.
05 — The Window
Why now.
What's coming.
Aug 20, 2026
Geez launches in Erie — The Inauguration
Watson-Curtze Mansion. ~50 invited guests. First real-world activation of Geez in Gene Zarnick's hometown. Community-first, not investor-first. Erie is the city where Geez earns its keep before it grows anywhere else.
Oct 18, 2026
Geez App Store launch — national availability
Erie is already running. Middletown CT and Chelmsford MA complete the three-city opening. Erie has a four-month head start as the founding Hub city — and the founding dataset.
Q1 2027
First Erie community data report available
90 days of real coordination data. Aggregate, anonymized, Erie-specific. First time this dataset exists. Available to research and tourism partners under a shared data agreement.
2027
Great Lakes & St. Lawrence Governors Summit — Erie hosts
Governor Shapiro chairs. National visibility arrives. Erie will want to show what a coordinated, data-informed community experience economy looks like. Geez can be part of that story.
How to Begin
One conversation.
No commitment required.
No commitment required.
Molly Zarnick leads all Erie partnership conversations for Geez. She is the Head of Events & Partnerships and the person who will be in Erie before, during, and after the August 20 launch. Every initial conversation is exploratory — we are not asking for anything except a 30-minute call to understand what questions your organization most needs answered about Erie.
Lead Contact
Molly Zarnick
Title
VP, Events & Partnerships — Geez
General
connect@geez.network
Website
geez.network