Posts from Foursquare

About a month ago, William Mougayar, an AVC regular if there was ever one, emailed me about an idea he had to create a web service to make social conversations easier. We went back and forth on the idea. I pushed him to come up with a simple name and a simple UI. I told him "make it like gmail for social conversations."

Over the past month, he and his crack team of something like two or three developers did just that. And today, I'm pleased to tell all of you that William and his team have built something pretty special.

He calls it engag.io. It's a good name. An io channel for social engagement. Here's what my engagio inbox looks like this morning:

My inbox is dominated by AVC discussions. For most people, their inbox will have a multitude of conversations from many services; Twitter, Foursquare,  Hacker News, Facebook, and hopefully AVC too.

There are a few other nifty features shown on the left sidebar. Engagement shows who you are engaging with. Shared links stores all the links being passed back and forth in your conversations. And Sites shows what sites your friends are having discussions on. So engagio is not just your inbox for social conversations. It is your dashboard for social conversations.

William's got a blog post up on the engagio blog explaining his vision for the product. It's a good read.

Engagio is offering 100 invites this morning to AVC readers. The first 100 users will get in. The invite code is avcengage (lower caps). Give it a try and let us know what you think.

Just In Case You Were Wondering: Neither me nor USV has any financial interest in engag.io or eqentia, it's sister service.

I interviewed Dennis Crowley yesterday at the NYU Entrepreneurs Festival. I tweeted out the livestream so I'm sure some people were able to catch it live. I hope they put the video up soon because Dennis was great and I think people will get a lot of value out of his thoughts on entrepreneurship, startups, and building a product and a company.

But this post is about something Dennis said about product roadmaps that really struck me. Dennis said that all the way back to Dodgeball, the predecessor company to Foursquare, he and Alex had a roadmap for the product that was years ahead of what they could actually build. When Dennis and Naveen decided to start building Foursquare, Dennis pulled out that roadmap and updated it to reflect the power of modern smartphones. And that roadmap goes way out, well beyond what Foursquare is today or what it will be in a year from now.

So when I asked Dennis about the moment when the Foursquare team watched the Facebook Places announcement, he said "I got up and told the team that any company can copy what we have built, but we just have to go on and build the things we want to build because nobody else has that roadmap."

That is the power of a visionary founder leading a team to build the things that are only in his or her mind. I recall Mark Pincus, in the early days of Zynga, tell me about a game he wants to build someday. Zynga still has not released that game. When Jack Dorsey came back to Twitter, he said he was finally going to build Twitter 1.0. Think about that. And think about what Twitter 5.0 is in Jack's mind.

The best founders have these long roadmaps.  If they can stay engaged in their companies, they can realize them over extended periods of time. There are so many reasons why this doesn't always happen. Founders leave. Companies are sold. But when it all comes together, the result is magical.

I'm a huge fan of the photo checkin on Foursquare. When I see a friend checkin somewhere interesting to me, I always leave a comment on that checkin saying "photo checkin pls" and I usually get one back.

The checkins with the photos are the ones that stand out in the feed on the phone. And for that reason, I put a photo in almost every checkin I do. It just makes Foursquare so much richer.

But the killer move is the "multi photo checkin". Not everyone knows this but you can add more photos to a checkin. If you just open that checkin on your phone, there is a camera button that allows you to add more photos.

Last night my colleague Gary Chou was eating sushi and started doing a multi photo checkin. I begged him to stop as I was starving and hadn't eaten in a long time.

When Christina went down to OccupyWallStreet, she did a twelve photo checkin which I can't seem to find on Foursquare right now or I'd link to it. It's essentially a photo collage of her visit there. It is great. (update: Christina provided this link to her OWS visit in the comments.)

These multi photo checkins remind me of the blog posts Gotham Gal does on her restaurant reviews. In fact Foursquare could make doing a restaurant review on a blog a piece of cake with a slick export checkin feature. Consider that a feature request Alex and Dennis.

A few weeks ago I ran into Dennis Crowley in the USV offices. He whipped out his iPhone like the excited kid he still is and showed me Radar running on his phone. He was running a pre-release of iOS5 and a pre-release of the new Foursquare app. His phone alerted him, just like getting a text message, that he was at USV and he ought to check in there.

I said, “Dennis, this is the feature we’ve all been waiting for. This is what I’ve wanted Foursquare to do since the day I put it on my phone.”

There are features and then there are game changing features. Foursquare’s Radar is a game changing feature. Radar will prompt me to checkin more frequently, to use lists more actively, and to find people and places I need to know about while I’m out and about. Radar is one more bit of the big Foursquare vision being rolled out.

Here’s Foursquare’s post about Radar and another with answers to some frequently asked questions. It’s interesting to see that Radar is leveraging some new technology in iOS5 to make it work without draining the battery:

Radar uses a very battery-friendly location-finding mode that is totally new to iOS 5, the same one Apple’s own Reminders app uses.

Now, can we get Radar on Android and Blackberry please??

I like simple ways to think about things. Like mobile first, web second. These kinds of constructs work for me. One that I've been using a lot lately to describe what we like and don't like as much is User First, Brands Second.

When you are building your product and thinking about your go to market strategy, you need to decide who your first users will be and how they will take your product into the market. You can focus on getting everyday internet users first. Or you can focus on getting brands first and working with them to get users. This decision is critical and will impact almost everything about your business going forward. So don't make this decision lightly.

There are some great businesses that have gone with the Brands First, Users Second approach. Two that come to mind are Groupon and Buddy Media. They are very different businesses but both go first to brands, work with them to craft offerings for users, and then work to get those offerings in the hands of users.

Contrast that with Foursquare. The Foursquare app launched without any brands on it and went after user adoption directly. Today they have over 10mm registered users. Millions of users engaged on the Foursquare service attracts brands. And the brands come to Foursquare without much effort on Foursquare's part. This is the User First, Brand Second approach.

Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr are all User First, Brands Second services. The brands are all over these services now. But for the most part, these services didn't do much to bring them. The engaged users did.

Our firm vastly prefers the Users First, Brands Second approach. I don't want to say definitively that we would not invest in a Brands First, Users Second business, but it would have to be something very interesting to get us to do it.

We do have several portfolio companies that took some version of a Brands First, Users Second approach to market. WorkMarket brings large employers and staffing firms onto their platform who put work orders into their system. That brings workers who pick up the work and get paid via the Workmarket platform. SoundCloud initially targeted audio content creators who put their work on the SoundCloud platform and according to Quantcast, that audio content brings over 14mm people a month to the service. But in both cases, these services launched day one with a valuable offering to both brands and users and they were not crafted specifically for the brand's benefit. That is a key point to be focused on.

The biggest problem with a Brands First, Users Second approach is you can get caught up in product development efforts to satisfy the brands and as a result you can't put enough energy into satisfying the users. And if that happens too much, you end up servicing the needs of the brands over the needs of the users and then you are a service business not a platform.

So when thinking about whether or not your company is a good fit for investment by our firm, think about whether your business is User First, Brand Second, or the other way around. That will be one of the first things we focus on when we evaluate it.

Last week I posted about a service called BillGuard. BillGuard scans your credit card bills for questionable transactions so you don’t have to. It’s a great service. One of the things you do when you set up BillGuard is you connect your credit card(s) to the BillGuard web service. It’s straightforward and easy. Once you do that, the magic happens.

I did the same thing yesterday. I connected my Foursquare with my American Express card. Once you do that, when you check in at places that have Foursquare specials, you get automatic credit when you pay with American Express. Foursquare calls this “load to card“. You can do it here.

I really like the idea of syncing my credit cards with web services. I’m not so into the social value of sharing my transactions with everyone (where Blippy started), but I am very much into the personal value of leveraging my transaction history into various web services I use frequently. And I am also very into the idea of getting the benefit of offers and deals automatically credited to me via my credit card account.

I think we have just scratched the surface of what is possible when you sync up your transaction activity with other services in your life. There is great opportunity in this idea.

The day Google+ launched, I sent a friend at Google who was involved in building the service an email requesting an invite. I got the invite late that day and started playing with the service. Here's my profile. I'm not sure if this page is public or you need a Google+ login to see it. At some point Google will open the service to everyone and I expect this page will be public, but I'm not sure.

In any case, I hope Google+ succeeds. Given the blog posts saying this will kill Tumblr, Twitter, Foursquare, etc, you might wonder why I feel that way. Well first, I don't think competitors kill companies and services. I think the vast majority of "deaths" are self inflicted. Facebook didn't kill MySpace and Friendster, they killed themsleves by failing to address the shortcomings of their services and their inability to respond to changing market dynamics, in some cases brought on by competitors. Of course, that fate could be in store for any company, including our portfolio companies, but it won't be because of Google+.

My vision for social media is:

every single human being posting their thoughts and experiences in any number of ways to the Internet

Not everyone wants a Facebook experience; default private, mutual follow, best for close friends and family. Not everyone wants a Twitter experience; default public, asymmetric follow, best for broadcasting short burts of information to large networks. Not everyone wants a Tumblr experience; totally public, asymmetric follow, best for posting microchunked media.

My dad, for example, doesn't want any of those experiences. He might like Google+. It's a lot like email. He can curate groups of friends; his friends from school, his friends from the army, his friends from the community he lives in, and share information with them quickly and easily. I can see The Gotham Gal's dad loving Google+ too. It's very utilitarian and functional and powerful for certain kinds of users.

I've never thought that there would be one social service to rule them all. I've never thought that there would be one social graph for the web. I believe we'll need a multitude of social services to satsify the needs and desires of all the users of the web. Google+ fills a void between public and private, it serves what is likely to be an older demo less interested in hooking up or hipstering out and more interested in the social utility it provides. That's a good thing. We'll get more people "posting their thoughts and experiences in any number of ways to the Internet."

And there's another reason I hope Google+ succeeds. Developers need more social platforms of scale. A friend on Twitter posted a link yesterday to the post I wrote on the USV blog when we first publicly acknowledged our investment in Zynga. We first invested in Zynga in the fall of 2007 and back then I was eager to see Zynga build a business on multiple social platforms. I wrote:

Currently all of Zynga's games run inside social networks, largely Facebook, but also Bebo and several others. And that list of social nets will grow longer in the next few weeks.

Developers like Zynga benefit from having multiple large social nets to build on top of. Tech blogs have noted that Google+ has hooks for social gaming built in. That is great. My dad would love some of the Zynga games. Maybe he'll join Google+ and play them with his friends (including me) there.

My line about "don't be a xyz bitch" is all about controlling your own destiny. These social platforms are awesome to build and launch on. They give you instant distribution, instant users, instant social identity. But in a perfect world you don't want to be dependent on any single one of them. The more social platforms of scale there are, and we have a bunch now, including Twitter, Tumblr, and Foursquare, the better world it will be for developers. And our business at USV is investing in and helping developers build companies. So I'm rooting for Google+. I think it will serve users who aren't being served well (or at all) on the social web right now. And I think it will be a strong new platform for developers. And both of those are great things for the web, our business, and entrepreneurs.

We arrived in Palm Springs really late last night and I woke up too early (I always have trouble adjusting to new time zones). So I got up and went out looking for a good espresso. I'm not a fan of Starbucks coffee and since I only have one cup of coffee a day, I try to make it a really good one.

So I pulled out my phone and launched Foursquare and selected the Explore tab and typed in espresso. It looks sort of like this (I pulled this image off the internet):

I was directed to a place called Just Java where I was able to get a very nice macchiato.

I don't use the explore tab when I'm in NYC because I know where I want to go. But whenever I find myself in a new place looking for something in particular, I've been using the explore tab in Foursquare. And it works pretty well.

And as I checkin more, my friends checkin more, and the places I like to frequent get more checkins, the explore tab will get better and better. This is the power of social metadata at work.

Paramendra wrote a post last night that got me thinking about a class of apps that I'll call "mobile first web second". He mentions Twitter and Foursquare and I would agree that both of them are mobile first web second.

Back in the early days of Twitter, I sent and read most of my tweets via SMS. I signed up a lot of users by telling them to text "follow fredwilson" to 40404.  Evan Williams said in a blog post yesterday, "46 percent of active users make mobile a regular part of their Twitter experience." I am surprised it is not higher. I use Twitter on the web and mobile every day, but I use it a lot more on mobile.

Foursquare's web app is not particularly useful, at least not yet. Most of the value from Foursquare is delivered in their mobile apps. I've used the Android and Blackberry apps. And my kids use the iPhone app. All three of these apps are high quality mobile experiences. Foursquare is most definitely a "mobile first web second" experience.

The thing I like about these kinds of apps is they are with you all the time and can be used in moments of downtime. As such they lead to higher levels of engagement. But because they are also web apps and connected to a web scale network, they can offer a lot of value that mobile only apps cannot.

I think we'll see a lot more of these kinds of apps going forward. I'm curious what other "mobile first web second" apps you all use.