I’ve got exciting news to share. We’ve closed a seed round of investment to build Timehop into the ultimate digital history experience. 

You may already know (and love) timehop, a simple but deeply powerful daily email answering the question “what did you do this day last year?”

In a world focused on real time, we believe there’s an untapped opportunity in the past. We’re building timehop into the best way of recording, remembering, and reconnecting around our digital histories. The data exhaust of today’s services can tell your life story, but so far this data remains disaggregated and silo’d across devices and services. Timehop is a powerful product that brings together all your content into a single re-experience moment.

Timehop started as 4SquareAnd7YearsAgo, a fun hack that Benny and I built at foursquare’s first ever hackathon back in February. For several months, the product was on autopilot as Benny and I went through Techstars focused on our core product, Friendslist. But each morning I’d wake up and check the tweets and emails about 4SquareAnd7YearsAgo and curse myself at the money we were paying to send all the emails with no end in sight. Eventually, we started to realize there was something “big” in this “small” product.  Long before the internet existed, people have kept diaries and taken photographs. They do this to document their lives and acknowledge the passing of time. Timehop taps into that same powerful deeply human desire for self-documentation and the resulting nostalgia.

I’ll give more of the backstory of how this all came together at a later time, but for now let me just say how happy I am to be working with two of the best tech startup investors: Bryce Roberts from OATV and Andrew Parker from Spark Capital.

These two firms complement each other perefectly. OATV’s focus on data and self tracking is exemplified by its investments in Foursquare, RunKeeper, bitly and chartbeat. And Spark’s focus on content is exemplified by its investments in Twitter, Tumblr, and Foursquare.  Timehop is about both: content and data.

Bryce and Andrew are each amazing in their own ways. Bryce is super smart (and all that other good stuff) but what I truly love about Bryce is this: he’s a person first and an investor second. That’s a rarity and I sleep well knowing he’ll be by our side through thick and thin. Last but not least, Andrew is a razor sharp product thinker with a rare mix of academic intelligence and human intelligence. He’s truly a pleasure to work with.

We also have an incredible collection of angel investors: Dennis Crowley, Naveen Selvadurai, Alex Rainert, Steve Martocci, Jared Hecht, Rick Webb and Kevin Slavin.

I could write a novel about each of these guys and why they’re awesome. But for now I’ll leave it at this:  I couldn’t be more psyched about the amazing group of people backing us and the exciting opportunity that lies ahead.

Right now we have a small team of hotshots: Benny Wong (our CTO) came from Gilt Groupe where he single-handedly build the entire Gilt City product and then built the engineering team around it too. He’s a true Ruby on Rails master. Rachel Nash (our lead designer) came from The Barbarian Group and before that Big Spaceship. And then there’s me (handling business/press/product/taking out the trash etc) who was formerly doing product management for a bunch of awesome startups and launching awesome subway apps. 

With this funding, we’re looking to add two or three engineers to our team. If you’ve ever wanted to join a small and passionate team building a product that people love, let’s talk. Digital history hasn’t been done right and we’re the team to do it. We’ve got a knack for making awesome products, backing from all the right investors, and a giant opportunity in front of us: a chance to define an entirely new product category.  Let’s blow this out of the water. Get in touch:  jwegener@gmail.com

Possibly Related Posts:

• The Friendslist Story [Chapter 5]
• The Friendslist Story [Chapter 4]
• The Friendslist Story [Chapter 3]
• All accelerator programs are not the same
• The Three Types of ‘Computer’ People

NOTE: Applications for TechStar’s next NYC program are coming up very soon: January 23rd. Apply here!

[continued from chapter 4]

A recap: We came into Techstars convinced that our MVP (minimal viable product) was just a rebuild of Facebook’s Group feature with the right messaging/landing page on top of it to make it fit the classifieds use case.  If Janelle’s List worked once, all we had to do was find a thousand Janelle’s to host their own list on our platform and we’d quickly be at a massive scale.

And in theory the most beautiful part about the product is that it should be viral! Connector type people who want to play Craig will sign up and invite hundreds of friends into their list.  ”Why will they do this?” people asks.  ”Ego, pride, wanting to play God, wanting to help their friends, wanting to be a big deal”

But it quickly becomes clear this wasn’t going to be as easy as it seemed. Nobody identifies themselves as a “connector” and few people seem interested in doing the heavy lifting of running their own marketplace site. So it’s back to the drawing board. What are we building, and what are we trying to accomplish?

Several folks identify with the pain of playing the middleman. We hear the same thing over and over “I get so many inbound opportunities and emails for people…i’m constantly playing middleman, I’d love a tool to help me with that”

Which brings us to chapter five.  We start sketching out that tool — a tool to help middleman better connect their friends and solve crowded inbox syndrome.

Maybe we build the “tripit for opportunities” — you forward things to another email address and they sit on your “shelf” where you can figure out what to do with them next. Of course this means we’re building a workflow enhancement tool, which isn’t really exciting or clunky. And it seems clunky — I’m not sure the medicine is better than the disease.

Another mentor wants a tool that lets him send opportunities to his portfolio companies.  Right now, he is using a hack. He’s using several different yahoo groups to send around resumes/jobs to different groups of people.  Friendslist should be the “platform for sharing opportunities” => well that sounds compelling!  If foursquare is a vertical social network for location, and foodspotting is the same for food photos, and plancast is for plans, then our site is for opportunities!  ”I don’t know how it’s a business, but I’d use the product” he says.

A third mentor wants us to automatically figure out who to send inbound opportunities to (automatic friend groups) and says if he has to do any work or go to another site, that’s not useful.  Yet another wants to define his audiences carefully when sharing opportunities — essentially google circles. And another mentor wants to opt-in to hearing about certain people’s opportunities (a la twitter follow), not have information thrust at him like email today…so how the heck could that work?  A double opt-in follow model?!

Somewhere along the way one of the investor mentors gets really excited too: “This is BIG guys..this is the opportunity graph”. And we spend hours discussing whether the headline for the site should be “We help you share great opportunities” or “We help you find great opportunities.” It sounds completely absurd in retrospect, but we were too far down the rabbit hole to see it.

Weeks fly by and we’re no closer to releasing a product or having a solution we’re confident in. We meet with Nicole Giaros, who runs the adminstrative side of Techstars out of Boulder. It’s one of our most important meetings because we know she’s a down to earth “normal” (ie not an early adopter) which means she’ll have a good perspective.

Nicole listens intently as we explain everything. And then she says the smartest thing we’ve heard in weeks: ”It sounds to me like you’re making a something for somebody to do something.” 

Possibly Related Posts:

• The Next Chapter: All Eyes on the Future (err, the past)
• The Friendslist Story [Chapter 4]
• The Friendslist Story [Chapter 3]
• All accelerator programs are not the same
• The Three Types of ‘Computer’ People

[continued from chapter 3]

When we last left off, our protagonist’s existential crisis had taken a turn for the wor… oops, wrong story.

To recap: conversations with Techstars were going strong. I was more excited than ever about Friendslist (the build-your-own craigslist that would kill craigslist). And also about the Techstars program thanks to an inspiring conversation with an alum.

In early December, Benny and I got invited in for our final Techstars interview with David Cohen and David Tisch. We met at the Empire Hotel in midtown on their enclosed rooftop which proved to be, um, rather chilly. As we gathered in a small circle to chat with the Davids, Bloomberg TV’s lights shone brightly on us and the boom mics hovered intrusively from above. WE did my best to ignore them as we laid out everything about Friendslist — the inspiration, the concept, the execution, the someday press headlines announcing the product launch.

At some point, the Davids excused themselves to hold a private huddle in the back. When they returned, the conversation drew to a close and Tisch asked nonchalantly “Do you want to do TechStars?” “Yeah, of course.” And then Tisch shot back “Well then you’re in!”

HOLY S***. YES! The next few weeks were a blur as Benny and I wrapped up our previous engagements and prepared for the start of the program. Benny gave his two weeks at Gilt Groupe, and I let GroupMe know that I’d be finishing my contract work with them at the end of the month. Benny and I were super excited, especially following a conference call with all the other teams.

TechStars began in January and things quickly got busy. Each day was packed with mentors meetings, lectures, Bloomberg interviews, and group dinners. And lots and lots of pitching. TechStars puts a massive emphasis on delivering a good pitch, a concise explanation of what your product and company does. Mine started as something like this: “Friendslist helps connector types build their own craigslist to let their friends share jobs, employees, apartments and more.” After my first pitch, Tisch stopped me and said “How many people in here are connectors?” Zero hands went up. “There are people in this audience who are your target market. And none of them are identifying with your pitch” he said bluntly. It was a harsh, but necessary grounding.

Now, TechStars does a great job of helping refine a pitch to focus on two main things: the value you’re promising, and how that value is delivered. For example OnSwipe’s pitch might be “OnSwipe makes content look beautiful on the iPad. We do so by giving powerful tablet friendly publishing tools to publishers of all sizes.”

Our pitch eventually evolved to “Friends come to you looking for things: jobs, employees, apartments and more. Friendslist helps you help them.”  People identified much better with this messaging. Although nobody self-identified as a connector, everyone had experienced the friend asking about an apartment. Or sending them the resume of a friend looking a new position.

But our refined pitch still avoided the real issue at heart: what is the product that delivers on that promise??

“Friendslist is a platform that lets you build and run your own classifieds site. Your friends will join your online community and post their needs there! It’s like a private Craigslist where you play Craig!”  But nobody really understood why they would want to do that. “It’s just like running a meetup group” we’d explain, “and just like meetup, 1% of our users will be superusers and run groups that help the other 99%. They’ll do it for ego, pride, a desire to play God and own a corner of the internet, and of course a desire to help their friends!”

It was still a tough sell. “How can I use this to sell a couch?” asked Naveen from foursquare. “Well, um, you’ll create your own marketplace list and you’ll invite all your friends to it, and um, then you’ll post about the couch and then someone who wants a couch will see it.” It felt like a terrible explanation.

[to be continued]

Possibly Related Posts:

• The Next Chapter: All Eyes on the Future (err, the past)
• The Friendslist Story [Chapter 5]
• The Friendslist Story [Chapter 3]
• All accelerator programs are not the same
• The Three Types of ‘Computer’ People

[continued from chapter 2]

“Sa-ke Bomb!  Sa-ke Bomb!” shouted the coeds at Miyake, the popular Stanford hangout.  I poked at my sushi and tried to not think about the news that would arrive any second. Finally my pocket vibrated.  ”I’m sorry to say we decided not to fund you guys.” read the email.  ”Ultimately what put us off was that it seemed to us that the functionality of this app wouldn’t be different enough from Facebook to overcome the advantage Facebook has in having all the users, already on the site.”

The rejection was painful but expected. To be honest, ‘painful’ isn’t even the right word.  Frustrating. YC claims to pick teams over ideas. But this decision certainly didn’t feel like it aligned with that mantra.  It felt like ten minutes simply wasn’t enough time to explain the concept fully and they rejected us based on the concept — and that was frustrating.

I feel asleep that night in a bad mood and woke up a few hours later and pecked out a lengthy rebuttal to Paul Graham.  I knew the decision was final, but I couldn’t resist. I flew back home a few days later and celebrated Thanksgiving with the family.

Meanwhile all hope was not lost, as conversations with David Tisch, the managing director of TechStars NYC, seemed to be going well.  We first met in September at Grey Dog, his usual coffee shop in Union Square. I told him I was considering applying to TechStars and had an idea I was excited about — and he got excited.  I described the idea for FriendsList as best I could — I think I described it as somewhere between an Aardvark and a Craigslist and walked him through an early deck [below]

“Great Team, Solid idea, Big market.  I like you guys.” he said as we parted ways.  And I liked him.

We sat down again with Tisch in December at Joe the Art of Coffee.  Walking into that meeting, I wasn’t sure TechStars would add much value for us. I personally didn’t feel like I needed the validation from an accelerator program. And besides, I already knew a lot of the advisors in the program, so would the ‘network’ really benefit me all that much?

The most compelling part, for me personally, was the structure — the 13 weeks of intense focused work and progress.  I also liked the idea of a class of peers all working out of a shared office to get their startups off the ground.  And I recognized that the program’s structure would provide the cushion and encouragement that Benny needed to quit his job at Gilt Groupe — and that was really important.

Tisch sold us hard on the value of TechStars — and he did a fantastic job.  We came out of that meeting more pumped than ever before — both about TechStars and about FriendsList.

To understand what happened next, you’ll need to know that at the time, I was working with the GroupMe team helping design their version 2.0 iPhone app.  Two things are special about GroupMe. First, GroupMe’s founder Steve Martocci, was formerly at Gilt Groupe with Benny. Second, David Tisch is an investor in the company. That meant Steve had a unique vantage point on both me and Benny. And equally important Tisch greatly trusted his opinion.

When I arrived back at the GroupMe office following our coffee meeting, I found Steve on the phone with…you guessed it, David Tisch.  Steve happily gave his opinion on Benny and me. I believe his words were “You can’t pick a better team”

Over the next few weeks, I found myself continually bumping into TechStars mentors like Eric Litman and Steve Cheney.  I was impressed by the reach of the program and the loyalty and excitement of the mentors.  But to be honest, what really tipped me over the edge was a brief interaction with an alum.

At the time there were only two TechStars companies in New York. So when I noticed someone with a TechStars sticker at Nightowls, I introduced myself.  Sam Herbert is the CTO of ADstruc which had been part of the Boulder TechStars program. Sam and I talked for a while and he had truly great things to say about the program. But I’ll never forget the last thing he said as we parted ways that evening: “TechStars is just really, really fun” — and a mile-wide grin spread across his face.

I was sold.

[to be continued]

Possibly Related Posts:

• The Next Chapter: All Eyes on the Future (err, the past)
• The Friendslist Story [Chapter 5]
• The Friendslist Story [Chapter 4]
• All accelerator programs are not the same
• The Three Types of ‘Computer’ People

[continued from chapter 1] …so we had a concept for a ‘build your own craigslist’ that was going to take over the world. After talking through the concept in detail with a few trusted friends and advisors, there was only one thing left to do: build something.

September 1 rolled around and the news broke that TechStars was coming to NYC.  ”eh? eh?” Benny prodded.

We decided to apply to both TechStars and Y Combinator. We were able to score an interview with Y Combinator and threw together a rough Friendslist prototype to demonstrate messaging and basic functionality.  Then we did a ridiculous thing…

We flew across the entire country for a 10 minute meeting.

The barrage of questions began as soon as we sat down. “So you’re building a build your own marketplace.  Who is this for?” asked Paul Graham. Benny explained that it’s designed for connectors.  ”What makes you think anyone will want to use this?” shot back Paul.

Our YC alum friends had given us lots of advice and warnings: “Just hold on as best you can.  Stop the train from getting entirely derailed.”

It was an impossible task. In a room with six people (Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Paul Buchheit, Robert Morris, Trevor Blackwell, and Harjeet Taggar), there seemed to be at least ten lines of thought. Our pitch quickly got derailed around email. “Why can’t you just use an email mailing list to do this?” Benny replied “well you can’t browse it in an easy way”  ”Of course you can.”

Finally Paul Graham, who seemed utterly confused asked bluntly “Where did this idea come from!?”  I offered my personal  anecdote:  “A LOT of people come to me looking for stuff — jobs, apartments, etc.  I wanted a place to put this.  I started Wegslist.”

Paul finally got it!  ”Ohhhhh, you’re one of these connectors.”  And then the meeting slipped back into confusion and objections. Paul Buchheit didn’t understand why it’s better than email.  Trevor didn’t understand why it’s better than a Google group.  Harj was concerned about how we would get liquidity in the marketplace.

Paul pushed us to consider whether a the Hacker News community (or a Porsche website) could use this to power a classifieds site.  We gave in a bit and said “We’re not committed to centering this around a person, but it’s going to be our first approach.  I think there are a few different ways this can go: 1) It becomes a craigslist competitor at scale 2) it becomes best of class platform (like stackoverflow) that you license to people or companies 3) We pick a vertical and kill it — jobs, apts, or roommmates

Finally Paul asked “Benny, you work at Gilt Groupe.  Why not do something in the daily deal space?” “That space doesn’t interest me that much.”

Paul followed up: “What’s your guys’ expertise?” Me: “Mobile. [long pause] I’m not going to sit here and tell you there’s some trajectory between exit strategy and this project. But this is something we’re passionate about and want to try.”

The group gathered around our laptop to look at the rough Friendslist prototype “That guy look like he’s about to be attacked by a mob surrounding him.” “That’s a really scary logo!” “You guys aren’t graphic designers, but that’s exactly the right messaging.”  The timer went off and the 10 minutes was up.  We filed out of the room speechless.

Benny was the first to break the silence.
“I thought that went pretty well.”

“Are you kidding? We just got crucified”

[continue to the next chapter]

Possibly Related Posts:

• FriendsList is dead (but we’re very much alive!)
• Idea, team, or network?
• DoubleDub: A Dream Come True
• Golden Skyscrapers and Minimal Viable Products
• Location, Location, Location: The Hyperlocal ‘Moment’ of Awe