Back of the Envelope | Jonathan Wegener's Technology/Marketing Blog » Analysis

Thoughts on SwipeGood

Jonathan — Thu, 12 May 2011 22:52:14 +0000

SwipeGood is a Y-combinator startup that rounds up your debit or credit card purchases to the nearest dollar and allows you to donate the difference to the charity of your choice. It’s a very simple but powerful concept and I’m excited to see where the team takes it.

Let’s run a few back of the envelope calculations, shall we?

The Swipegood FAQ says that people donate $15/month on average. The company keeps 5% of donations, which means they earn 75c every month. This works out annually to $9 per user.

Interestingly, there’s a strong first mover advantage to the business – it’s hard to see people signing up for multiple services that do this same exact thing and it’s hard to imagine a strong reason to *change* to a swipegood competitor. And it seems unlikely that a customer would cancel, which means the customer lifetime value is probably quite high.

And it means this is a total marketing/awareness game and a bit of a landgrab. At $9/year, the entire business rests on keeping customer acquisition costs low (and so far it looks like they’re doing a great job with incentivizing you to ‘invite a friend’) and getting to a scale that matters: if SwipeGood gets a million people signed up for their service, that would be $9M in annual revenue. It’s possible that they can go big and get 10x that number signed up..and that would be killer. But overall it seems like the ceiling is pretty low for the business.

It’s possible (and likely) that SwipeGood has much bigger plans for monetization. Just to riff on a few ideas: Perhaps charities could pay to be featured on the site to get more donations. Perhaps charities could pay swipegood for customer acquisition (a la care2.com, a giant charity-focused lead gen play). Or users could be upsold/cross-sold for a healthy commission.

Lastly, it’s worth mentioning that there’s a significant sign-up barrier to the service: you have to provide your bank login. That’s an uncomfortable experience that I’ve only done that two other times in my life, once for Mint and once for Blippy (yes, I’m crazy). But Mint proved once-and-for-all that privacy concerns/friction can be overcome by good design and messaging, so Swipegood can probably do the same.

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The Vision Behind BNTER

Jonathan — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 20:24:55 +0000

One of the most interesting early stage NYC startups on my radar right now is BNTER. The service lets easily capture and share conversations you’ve had. Here’s an example.

Is there a bigger vision for the product and company? I don’t know. But here’s my vision for them:

I think the company should focus primarily on making embeddable conversation widgets. Services now exist to embed nearly everything in the world: Videos (Youtube, Vimeo an a host of others), MP3s (NiftyPlayer), PDFs (Scribd), Slideshows (Google Presentations), Spreadsheets (Google Documents), Video transcripts (Speakertext). Even Twitter introduced Blackbird Pie to make tweets embeddable…you get the idea. Embeddable is hot.

But the one media type that isn’t embeddable and collectible in any structured way are text conversations themselves. Yet. BNTER will hopefully change that.

At first, the idea seems too simple to work. PDFs, Videos, MP3s etc have *technical* barriers to embedding them in a website. These services are valuable because they solving those issues, right? But conversations don’t have those barriers, they’re just simple text!

Flash back to 2002. I’m a web savvy high school student maintaining a section of my personal website dedicated exclusively to sharing the funny conversation tidbits: quotes.jwegener.com. Every few days, I would go edit the HTML of the site to add a few new quotes and then promote them in my AIM away message (with a link back to the site of course). It was fun and became popular but the site was a lot of trouble to maintain. And I never felt that my bright blue and green design did the conversations justice. Over time, I’ve started to share conversations on twitter but tweets are ephemeral and those conversations deserve to be archived.

You’re probably now starting to see why BNTER resonates with me. The site makes the task of capturing, archiving, and sharing conversations easier: BNTER is YouTube for conversations.

So BNTER’s embed strategy will hopefully lead them to widespread distribution and fame. There are several key elements they’ll need to concentrate on, the first of which I think is coming up with a distinctive visual style.

Imagine if BNTER successfully coins the de-facto style used to share conversations in the media. You’d be watching MTV and you’d see them showing a conversation in the BNTER style — and you’d see it gracing the pages of People Magazine. It’s already happened to twitter…

I also think BNTER should push the boundaries on what’s embeddable. Go deeper than a static image. Think creatively about what kinds of features can be built into a widget. Ever watch an embedded YouTube video and then find yourself watching three more? Those ‘related’ videos that cycle through afterwards = brilliant product design. Make the widget interactive and you’ll get more stickiness and user interaction.

Maybe even make the embeds animated — subtly of course. Think about the “Jonathan is typing a message…” animation we’re all familiar with from IM. Imagine incorporating that and slowly bouncing the visual focus between the conversation bubbles.

So far I’m really enjoying BNTER. I find myself visiting the website daily to see an entertaining stream of witty conversations. And I’m excited to watch as their bigger vision unfolds with time.

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Young Entrepreneurs and B2B Startups: Doomed to Fail?

Jonathan — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 21:13:22 +0000

I propose the following hypothesis for discussion: young entrepreneurs should focus on building B2C companies since they lack the deep industry experience needed to build successful B2B companies.

Allow me to explain my thinking. Young people in their 20′s trying to start a business-to-business face an uphill battle for several reasons:

1) Identifying Opportunities is Hard
The best companies are started by people solving their own problems — or so goes the classic logic. But for young entrepreneurs without any deep industry experience, there aren’t any obvious problem for them to solve.

2) Building the Right Product is Hard
When you haven’t experienced the pain point you’re solving, you don’t truly understand customer needs. You can try to put yourself in their shoes, listen closely to their problems, and design a solution. But ultimately, it’s tough to get product-market fit from the position of an outside observer. A related issue: anytime you’re solving someone else’s problem, staying motivated becomes tough. Will focusing on the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow sustain the necessary passion to succeed?

3) Sales, Marketing, and Business Development are Hard
Without industry experience, you won’t have the personal relationships to get your food in the door and close deals and you won’t know the right distribution channels. You’ll struggle to craft your marketing message in a language that speaks to your customer’s needs. Furthermore, you won’t have existing relationships with the other players in the industry which could be your partners.

Your Responses

Here’s a few of the fantastic responses I’ve already gotten in response to “entrepreneurs in their 20s should focus on B2C products since they lack any true ‘industry’ experience needed to build B2B products”:

@jwegener That would only be true if entrepreneurs were static. Successful ones become domain experts quickly by talking to their customers.

August 18, 2010 1:43 pm via Twitter for iPhone ReplyRetweetFavorite

@nicholasbs

Nick Bergson-Shilcoc

^^^So the measure of a good entrepreneur is the ability to overcome all of those obstacles?

@nicholasbs @jwegener w/o have domain experience, it often won't be "quickly" even with custdev. Not insurmountable tho. Trilogy is example

August 18, 2010 2:04 pm via webReply RetweetFavorite

@giffconstable

Giff Constable

^^^It’s definitely an uphill battle…

@jwegener Not true! A good idea is a good idea. Couple it with right team and you can execute. Learning curve might be more steep. So what?

August 18, 2010 1:43 pm via webReply RetweetFavorite

@mikeyavo

Michael Yavonditte

^^^Isn’t it extremely difficult to find a “good” B2B idea? I like the idea that it’s simply a steeper learning curve and you can build a team with actual industry experience.

@jwegener A smart, motivated person can acquire 95% of useful expertise in 6 wks, without the biases inherent in personal experience.

August 18, 2010 2:58 pm via Twitter for BlackBerry®ReplyRetweetFavorite

@birsic

Bryan Birsic

^^^What does that look like in practice? Picking a bunch of random industries (say…architecture!) and getting internships in them so you can look for problems that need solving?

@jwegener industries that are really young (e.g. conversational media) put young entrepreneurs on more level playing field re: experience

August 18, 2010 1:37 pm via TweetDeck ReplyRetweetFavorite

@gregoryhills

Greg Hills

^^^This is interesting, and it’s what many young entrepreneurs do — they spot brand new opportunities that simply didn’t exist earlier.

@jwegener I would argue you need just as much experience to do B2C as B2B tech. That being said, any age is good for starting a company.

August 18, 2010 2:21 pm via ÜberSocialOrig ReplyRetweetFavorite

@marksbirch

Mark Birch

^^^Nice happy medium.

@jwegener do B2B products require more capital to get to launch? Maybe not because of coding complexity but a result of the other factors...

August 18, 2010 2:18 pm via Twitter for iPhone ReplyRetweetFavorite

@jlopezvalcarcel

Juan Lopez-Valcarcel

^^^Perhaps I’ll do a whole other blog post on this — is there a higher barrier to entry for a B2B idea than a B2C idea, which makes B2C more ripe for first-time entrepreneurs? My feeling is yes.

Start With What You Know?

So what do most young B2B entrepreneurs do? Many start with what they know…local! The business on the corner seems like a good place to start. And of course the market is now flooded with these hyperlocal advertising ideas — “a text message couponing solution for restaurants” (see my earlier post on that subject).

I can’t think of too many young entrepreneurs that have successfully started B2B ventures. In fact, the only person that comes to mind is Darren Herman. Most young entrepreneurs stick to B2C, creating slightly better products to expose undiscovered product opportunities (Tumblr, Box.net Facebook, and Plancast come to mind). Are there tons of unsexy B2B ventures from young entrepreneurs that have simply flown under the radar?

Your turn: what’s a 20-something to do?

I’m done talking — now it’s your turn. Any young successful B2B entrepreneurs flying under the radar? How did you do it?

Investors/VCs — do you find most B2B companies started by someone with deep experience in that industry? Are there outliers? How much industry experience is typical. Weeks? Years? Enough to rule out 20-somethings?

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Building a Broken Product

Jonathan — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 20:16:07 +0000

“More expensive and less functional.”

That was the recommendation I had for a friend’s startup. Why? The free version of the company’s product works too damn well.

You’ve probably heard of Freemium. There’s also Previum and a dozen other variations I’m sure. The exact differences aren’t really worth getting into because all share the same truth: Something’s gotta break. And someone’s gotta pay to fix it.

But breaking a product is harder than it sounds. Products can break to different degrees and along many different dimensions. Time is one such dimension. With trial software, the user is given a few weeks to use the product. If they like it, they continue using it. Rdio gave users three days to try it out. Balslamiq gives seven days. Basecamp gives 30 days. As you can see the degree of this breakage varies widely.

Another related dimension is usage in which the product breaks after being used a certain number of times. Or when a certain amount of use is reached. For example, Pandora breaks after 40 hours of usage in a month.

But most products are broken along some feature dimension. AirVideo converted me into a paying user in (a ridiculously fast) five minutes by making the product so broken that it demonstrated that the technology worked and was awesome, but I couldn’t browse all my videos making the product essentially unusable. And sometimes products are entirely broken, which is to say they exist entirely behind a paywall. Many dating websites continue to operate like this.

There’s a dizzying number of dimensions along with products can break. It’s limited only by a product’s feature set, a product’s complexity, and your creativity. Most products are simultaneously broken along several different dimensions, to varying degrees of breakage, and at different price points.

Building a product that’s correctly broken requires a strong product sense, and a willingness to experiment and charge money. Limit the free version too much and you lose users which could potentially be great sources of word of mouth marketing. Give too much away, and you’re cannibalizing your own business and shooting yourself in the foot. It’s a fine balancing act for sure!

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Five Pre-Funded NYC Startups To Watch

Jonathan — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 01:40:38 +0000

When a VC friend asked which young NYC startups I find exciting, I sent him a list of pre-funded companies that I’ve been watching. Afterwards I started writing them into a blog post. Well, I should have pressed publish sooner because as the post sat unfinished for the last week, several have since been funded! I’m including them anyway. Good times!

Here’s my short list of NYC startups I’m keeping my eye on:

JumpPost

Apartment hunting is broken. JumpPost could be the fix.

JumpPost gives apartment hunters ‘first dibs’ on the best apartments. How do they get the best apartments? JumpPost pays apartment dwellers $500 to add a listing to the site several months ahead of their actual move out date. Sometimes it pays to plan ahead.

Jordan and his team is onto something big and they’ve already generated some good press (getting paid $500 for doing nothing is especially buzzable!). I imagine they’ll need some product pivots before JumpPost truly takes off, but this one’s got potential. Personally I would add a social layer to the product and emulate AirBnB which has made finding places to stay fun, easy, and safe. JumpPost can potentially bring that same user experience to apartment hunting.

SinglePlatform

SinglePlatform gives bars and restaurants a centralized tool to easily update multiple social media profiles: Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Citysearch, Myspace, and their own website. It’s the same core concept as Postling, except SinglePlatform seems to be executing better. The founder, Wiley Cerilli, spent the last 10 years running sales at SeamlessWeb so the company clearly understands the market they’re serving — a point that becomes immediately clear browsing their site: “One of the most frequent phone calls to establishments is regarding what games they are playing. SinglePlatform allows you to select which TV packages and team affiliations you have and then posts those games automatically.”

SinglePlatform also seem to be quite good at selling their product at a comfortable price: $450 for a year. That upfront payment (versus a monthly fee) should help the young company with cash flow issues and also make paying commissioned sales staff easier. This six month old company seems to be quietly staffing up - LinkedIn already shows 11 employees. Their aggressive sales force is hitting the pavement hard and closing deals left and right and the product is already being embraced by their customers. And to top it off, the company is profitable. This ones gonna be big…

ChallengePost

ChallengePost is a self-described “marketplace for challenges.” Essentially, ChallengePost is home to dozens of competitions such as NYC’s BigApps which gave $20,000 to developers who built the best mobile apps using NYC datasets. Creative challenges help organizations harness the creativity of the masses to solve tough problems and generate ideas. It’s a powerful concept that will increasingly become the norm among large organizations struggling to be innovative (also check out Hypios). Recently, ChallengePost was named the official challenge platform of the US Government.

UPDATE: Sharp-eyed Danny Moon points out that in June 2009, ChallengePost raised an angel round of $500,000.

Kickstarter

Kickstarter is a funding platform for artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians etc. Essentially, it helps people raise funding to accomplish cool things. Kickstarter handles the headache of accepting donations and also drives eyeballs to your project. It also imposes some business logic to the process: like a Groupon deal, buyers (donors) are only charged if the project raises the target amount of money. And fundraisers can associate rewards for different donation tiers (ie T-shirt if you donate $50)

Kickstarter benefitted from the PR buzz stirred up by Diaspora, an attempt by four NYU students to build a private decentralized Facebook. In Diaspora’s efforts to raise $10,000 on the Kickstarter site, they unintentionally found themselves with $200,000 of donations - effectively an angel round of financing.

Yipit

Yipit makes it easy to find the best deals in your city. Local daily deals sites like Groupon are hot right now. But there are literally hundreds of them. Who wants to subscribe to a hundred email newsletters?! Yipit sits above them all, aggregating the fragmented marketplace into a single customized daily deal newsletter with the categories the user wishes to receive. This puts Yipit in a position to charge a referral/lead-gen fee for each sale it drives to the deal sites. Brilliant.

UPDATE: On June 30, Yipit raised $1.3M.

Other honorable mentions:

-Shoutworthy: A social recommendation system built on Facebook. Think Linkedin’s recommendation tool. Now imagine a much better version!

-TopGuest: A loyalty reward system built on top of foursquare/gowalla etc. Formerly known as UDorse.

-Endor.se: A way to find talented freelancers, gauge availability, and built a portfolio of people whose work you endorse.

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Do You Speak the Language of Visual Design?

Jonathan — Tue, 18 May 2010 18:19:15 +0000

…or “Why You Need a Graphic Designer”

The book’s title caught my eye instantly. ”Visual Literacy” Intriguing. I took it home, and over the next few days, I learned just how blind I was to the art of visual communication. Completely illiterate.

The book begins with exercises: “By using four black squares of the same dimension, create a graphic image that best expresses the meanings of each of the following words:

order

increase

bold

congested

tension

playful

I gave it my best shot and then flipped the page, revealing sample answers from students at New York’s School of Visual Arts. Suddenly I realized just how illiterate I was.

I’ve since appreciated design more. To further explore the importance of graphic design and visual communications, I dug up a few Exit Strategy NYC graphics. I show our initial design attempts (done by yours truly). At heart I’m a science/tech geek, so I’ll explain my inherently scientific thought process. And then I show how a professional designer approached the same problem.

Exit Strategy Fans: enjoy this behind the scenes look!

Train Illustration. How I approached the problem: Exit Strategy NYC shows subway riders which train door to use. So each door needs an ‘on’ or ‘off’ state. The MTA’s trains can be 10 cars, with 4 doors in each car. That means 40 doors in a train. We want the train to run vertically on the iPhone screen which is 460px high (it’s 480px minus 20px used by the time/battery/service strip at the top). So dividing 460px by 40 doors means each door gets about 11px of space to indicate on or off. With padding, there’s probably 5px of height for each door and 5px in between the doors.

Where I got stuck: 5px for a door isn’t large enough to stand out, even if it’s red and a few extra pixels wide.

How a graphic designer solved it: By making the train have a ‘slant’ to the side which increased the swatch of the door, allowing the red color to ‘pop’. Also she made it 3D and beautiful.

Splash screen. How I approached the problem: We wanted to communicate subway transit combined with the notion of exiting quickly. Inspired by an ‘exit’ sign, I attempted to overlay a transit like system on top of it. It’s hideous.

Where I got stuck: Everywhere! How could we possibly communicate something as intangible as “Which is the correct train door?” while keeping a transit theme. Time to call in an expert.

How a graphic designer solved it: Sheer brilliance. The zig-zag of the colored lines communicates subway lines. These lines dump out at a subway door. The ‘correct’ door is open with a silhouette of a running guy. An arrow helps indicate that this is the right door. The entire image is done with bright and bold colors.

So if you’re wondering whether you really *need* that graphic designer — always lean towards ‘yes.’ They’ll bring a perspective to the product and the messaging that will pay for itself many times over.

Readers — have any embarrassing early design of your products you wish to share?

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Comparing Android, Blackberry, and iPhone App Sales

Jonathan — Wed, 12 May 2010 23:16:48 +0000

One way to compare how different mobile platforms are doing is to look at the usage numbers from a popular app. Facebook reports their usage numbers alongside other apps (see here here here & here). I went and graphed the usage figures a few weeks ago and present them below [no guarantee they're 100% up-to-date...in fact it looks like the Android and Palm figures that Facebook lists have changed drastically since the time I originally started writing this post]:

Wow. It’s easy to see that the Facebook app usage on the iPhone platform trumps all the others. From what I’ve gathered talking to other cross-platform mobile developers, these results are generally in line (at least for free applications): Blackberry generally has half the install base of iPhone, and Android and all the others continue to lag far behind. Let’s look at another free app: Foursquare, which shared their platform breakdown via a tweet.

Android has an impressive showing, which could make sense given the application’s early adoption by techie types. Unlike Facebook, it hasn’t (yet) gained mainstream adoption. The differences across platforms become even more stark when we focus on paid apps. Here’s what the breakdown looks like for Exit Strategy NYC:

Exit Strategy NYC launched across all the platforms on the same day. As you can see, nothing holds a candle to the Apple platform. What’s especially interesting is how poor the sales are for Android despite all the hype and press it gets. And it looks like we’re not the only ones who have been disappointed: Gameloft (a mobile game company) announced in November they’re going to focus less on Android because they’ve sold “400 times more games on iPhone than on Android.” And Larva Labs discusses “The well known game Trism, which sold over $250,000 in it’s first two months on the iPhone. On Android it has sold, to date, less than 500 copies. That’s $1,046 total earnings, max.” How can we explain the massive difference? Lots of ways: different market sizes, different app store user experiences, different user expectations. In fact, I could probably write a book on the subject (Pssst, O’Reilly: my contact info is along the right sidebar…). But instead, I’ll try to focus on what I think are the main drivers:

Apple’s app-focused marketing. Apple’s marketing focused strongly on apps. People buy the devices with the intention to purchase lots of apps! In fact, the average user has downloaded about 50 apps (over 4 billion apps have been downloaded and 85 million devices have been sold). Wowza!
Lack of an Android Touch. The iPod touch nearly doubles the amount of devices with access to the app store (from 50M to over 85M). No equivalent device exists on Blackberry or Android. There simply aren’t that many Android devices yet.
Lack of awareness among BlackBerry users. Most Blackberry users don’t know they can download apps. (I’ll go out on a limb here and say that Facebook has done a great deal to help, but awareness is still lagging.)
Poor penetration of Blackberry App World. Blackberry is a late comer to the app store game. Blackberry App World only launched a year ago in April 2009. Blackberry App World doesn’t come preinstalled on new Blackberry phones! Users have to manually install the software to access the store. This is ridiculous.
Blackberry’s App World’s bias away from paid apps. Blackberry doesn’t make you setup a payment method to access App World or download free apps. This creates a roadblock for paid apps and creates a huge bias towards free applications. Paid apps require Paypal which many users hate.
Poor Android app store experience. Best explained here. And for paid apps, Google checkout is required which hasn’t really hit widespread adoption. So it’s not surprising that Admob reports 63% more app purchases for each iPhone user vs Android users (1.8 vs 1.1 monthly paid apps). Even most Googlers can’t purchase paid apps because of weird restrictions on their employee unlocked handsets.

So those you have it — a few potential reasons for the differences. At the end of the day I believe small developers are best advised to put their energy into developing for the Apple platform. Building products for the other platforms probably doesn’t make sense at present time unless you have a game-changing mobile vision for a product that’ll take years to complete and needs the openness that Android provides. Or if you’re a startup showing traction that relies on a strong network effect to take over the world (ie Foursquare). Or if you’re a big company with tons of cash to build out your branded app — like Facebook, which tries to have versions available for every phone possible! But gosh, I’d hate to be that engineer locked in a basement building for all six users of the Sony q7d3m1p$9!&9b7u64gph model phone.

(Notes on the fairness of the Exit Strategy NYC cross platform comparisons. The iPhone version was a ‘featured app’ on the app store for a week after launch. It’s also the one that received the majority of the attention from press. It also received a significant overhaul and feature set upgrade in version 2.0 which launched in November ’09. I believe these differences account for some of the variation in sales, but certainly can’t account for orders of magnitude differences.)

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Golden Skyscrapers and Minimal Viable Products

Jonathan — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 21:42:02 +0000

I recently had the pleasure of meeting two MBA students with big ambitions: they want to redefine online shopping. I sat back in my chair and listened closely as they pitched their ideas for an entirely new online shopping experience. 3D this, interactive that, Web 2.0 the other thing.

As they laid out the extensive feature set they envisioned and the millions of dollars in venture capital they were hoping to raise to build this product, I was struck by an interesting realization: the concept of a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) is actually quite counterintuitive. Don’t you want your product to be as awesome as possible? Features are good, so how could fewer be better?

Manhattan is full of gorgeous skyscrapers. No self-respecting person walks around thinking to themselves “Gosh, if I were going to build a skyscraper, I’d want mine to look like shit.” That just doesn’t happen! Instead, we have a natural tendency to want to ‘one up’ the status quo: “I’m going to build a skyscraper out of gold!”

But in software, version 1.0 of your product should look like shit! Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn famously said: “If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”

The heart of the issue is that very few of these minimal viable products exist in the real world. Why? They rarely stick around! Customer feedback quickly drives additional improvements and features. Soon, memories of the mediocre original product completely fade away! How many of us realize that the original iPhone didn’t have apps?! It wasn’t until July 2008, an entire year after the iPhone debuted, that the app store launched. But today we only see the final product.

In a world of beautiful skyscrapers and impressive technologies, thinking small seems futile. But in this economic environment, a minimal viable product is more than just a nice concept. It’s a requirement.

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Economy of Taps and Smart iPhone App Design

Jonathan — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 19:05:26 +0000

Good interfaces should be designed around an economy of clicks. Or in the case of the iPhone, an economy of taps. Put simply: apps should allow users to achieve key goals with as few finger taps as possible.

Exit Strategy NYC’s extremely simple interface asks only three key pieces of information:
1) What subway line are you riding? (tap the line’s icon)
2) What subway station are you going to? (tap the station)
3) What is your direction of travel? (tap ‘uptown’ or ‘downtown’)

The app then shows the platform diagram for this station. Three taps — that’s it! In and out in fewer than ten seconds. Compare this to the Tube Exits interface design (Tube Exits is the London equivalent of Exit Strategy NYC.) The user has to tap over a dozen times just to get the same information!

One of my favorite apps, Foursquare, took a step backwards in their latest update. Previously you could check in with two taps: once on the venue, and once on the ‘check-in’ button. Easy Peasy. But the latest update added an additional step after the ‘check in’ button. This change added no functionality, only friction.

If you’ve ever played the Settlers of Catan iPhone app, you’ve seen another worst case scenario. Users must tap a tiny “Continue” button every time the next player’s turn comes up. It’s unnecessary and it’s frustrating.

Using an app with poor tap economy is like trying to run a marathon in the ocean. You exert much more effort and get nowhere fast. There’s too much friction. Tapping is mentally taxing, especially when it lands users on an entirely new screen. The user must review this new screen, then figure out which elements are interactive, then decide which one will help achieve their goal, and then tap again! Each additional screen/tap shoves one more roadblock between the user and their end goal.

The best services let users do more by doing less. This makes users feel powerful. Have you ever used Amazon’s one-click checkout to place an order? If not, please try it. It’s thrilling to use! Similarly, Griffin’s iTalk app features a giant ‘record’ button that feels magical. With a single tap, the user can start recording because the app picks smart defaults and stays out of the way.

The only time having an extra tap makes sense is when the alternative is worse: a cluttered user interface. Good UIs balance which elements are shown and which are hidden. Consider Facebook’s decision to add the grid button in the upper left corner:

Economy [of taps] is always a motivating factor, but the grid adds an extra tap [because you need to press the grid button] versus the full-time tab bar. This was a compromise I felt was necessary. There’s always that balance between screen clutter–adding tabs–and the number of taps.

-Joe Hewitt Quoted in Chris Dannen’s iPhone Design – Award Winning Projects

At the heart of many apps is a single core goal that your users hope to achieve — repeatedly. For Exit Strategy NYC it’s retrieving information. For iTalk it’s recording audio. For Foursquare it’s checking in. For Amazon it’s purchasing items. Don’t make your users run in the ocean. Remove as much friction as possible. Let them fly in the sky! The quicker the user can perform their goal, the better they feel about themselves. And the better your product makes them feel, the more they’ll fall in love.

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Location, Location, Location: The Hyperlocal ‘Moment’ of Awe

Jonathan — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 19:45:45 +0000

Every week the New York Times seems to run an article about Foursquare, the redhot mobile game. Most has been technology press, but one NY/Region piece stood out as especially interesting. Beyond Twitter: An App That Lets You Truly See City is written by a non-technology columnist and describes how the ‘tips’ feature of foursquare opened the writer’s eyes to the world around her:

…staring at my iPhone, the city right outside the window suddenly had voice, personality, opinion. Notes started pouring in, bite-size songs of praise about people and places…”

Minh Uong/The New York Times

I love it! What a perfect description of that magical moment many of us have experienced — when you suddenly ‘get’ hyperlocal and realize that these nerdy webpages and mobile apps can literally change the way you interact with your own neighborhood, transforming the cement jungle into a friendly playground ripe for exploration. The author elaborates on the feeling:

“…crack doors open that might otherwise be passed by, giving personality and accessibility to the surrounding blocks. To walk through the city eyeing your Foursquare tips is to realize just how little of it you ordinarily see.”

My moment of awe came during a visit to San Francisco in 2007. With my WAP enabled phone in hand, I walked down the street googling the names of every restaurant I passed — my obsessive-compulsive way of picking a good one. A website called Yelp.com consistently popped up at the top of the google searches, and although I had never heard of it, I found their information and reviews extremely valuable. I suddenly realized the power of this technology: I could get more insight about a restaurant by Googling it than stepping foot inside.

Back in New York, I graduated college and waved goodbye to Morningside Heights and moved into to a completely new neighborhood: Hells Kitchen. Again, I suddenly I found myself overwhelmed with choice! I distinctly remember running cost-calculations in my head: “How much it would cost to try out every single restaurant on 9th Avenue?” The answer? Too much.

And here’s where Yelp really shined. Yelp was my insider guide for my new neighborhood. I could literally zoom into a city-block and see every single business on the block listed — alongside details, reviews, and tips. Suddenly I had a way to learn about those ‘off the beaten track’ spots. Empire Tea and Coffee? If it weren’t for Yelp, I’d have overlooked one of the best coffee places in the city.

Why are hyperlocal services so powerful? Because there’s a high personal relevancy to the information they offer. Steven Berlin Johnson (author and co-founder of outside.in) sums it up well:

Say you’ve got a particularly nasty pothole on your street that you’ve been scraping the undercarriage of your car against for a year. When the town or city finally decides to fix the pothole, that event is genuinely news in your world.

It’s news in your world and only your world! By the way, If you’re not already getting a daily everyblock.com newsletter, you should sign up. The information you’ll learn is incredible.

Perhaps what’s most exciting is that existing news sites and reviews guides are just scratching the surface of what’s possible with hyperlocal information. Friend-finders like Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt are finally starting to take off. But cool startups are working on defining whole new hyperlocal categories too: Deals, Nightlife, and even Casual Encounters!

In the deals category for example, Spotter by Yipit uses the foursquare API to find deals at the places you visit! The result is an incredible daily deal newsletter that’s custom-tailored to where you live, work, and hang out. In a different category, Buzzd and Citysense are trying to track nightlife activity and tell you what’s ‘hot’ around you. And let’s not forget Grindr, an iPhone app which facilitate sexual encounters between gay men. The service has over 500,000 users and on a given day 30% log on. Incredible traction.

Hyperlocal has finally come of age. And seeing it go mainstream is going to be really fun.

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