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

FriendsList is dead (but we’re very much alive!)

Jonathan — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 15:48:27 +0000

As you may know, Benny and I have killed off Friendslist and refocused our efforts elsewhere. The Friendslist product was live for about 6 months. In that time we disproved our core hypothesis: that we can compel people to build and run their own thriving marketplace.

Few people used the product. Even fewer loved it. And Benny and I thrive when making things people love.

The idea: In the same way that the original Craigslist had a trusted person at the center (Craig Newmark), our product empowered people to build and run their own private marketplace where their friends could trade apartments, jobs, employees etc. The product promised to help “connector type” people solve their friends’ needs and make them more helpful.

Let’s start at the beginning: July 2010. I was trying to help a friend find an apartment and I turned to the legendary Nick Gray for help. Nick pointed me to something called Janelle’s list. “It’s like a smaller version of craigslist — my friend Janelle runs it” he said.

Janelle’s list is amazing — it’s a 2000 person private facebook group that is “craigslist without the creeps, linkedin without the lame.” Everyone in the group is a friend or friend-of-friend of Janelle and it’s one of the best places to find an apartment, roommate, or upload your resume for hire. The community is awesomely active and the listings are all 100% genuine and scam-free. Discovering Janelle’s list felt like I had discovered a little hidden island of awesomeness: a private product with high user engagement.

The group was started by Janelle Gunther, a popular Williamburg socialite, and inspired by Lawrence Lewitinn‘s “Lawrence’s List.” People have successfully used these lists for apartments, roommates, job searches, employee searches, selling products and dozens of other use cases.

Both groups started the same way — Lawrence and Janelle were overwhelmed by the number of inbound emails from friends looking for things. They wanted to be helpful and their lists were a way of letting their friends connect while eliminating their exhausting roles as middleman matchmaker.

This was a pain point I personally felt. The more I researched, the more similar products I found: Barney Pell (Powerset/Microsoft) runs something called BarneyJobs – a yahoo group that helps connect people to jobs. Mollie Chen (birchbox) runs a summer mailing list to help connect her friends to each other. There’s even a private community marketplace site called Quentin’s Friends run by, you guessed it, Quentin.

All of these products had one thing in common. They were hacks.

BarneyJobs is a Yahoo group. Janelle’s list is a Facebook group. The wall posts are being used as a classifieds board…a Facebook group isn’t supposed to be a marketplace! Entrepreneurs are trained to look for hacks: makeshift solutions to pain points. Hacks represent an opportunity to build a killer product.

Friendslist would be that killer product. We would be the platform to enable people to build their own craigslists, fitting that use case like a glove. And we’d lower the barrier thereby turning an early adopter action into a mainstream action.

Janelle’s list was the first time I had ever seen anything rival Craigslist. All we had to do was replicate that action a few thousand times. Our big vision was that if we could build a bunch of small Craigslists on a unified platform, we could eventually combine these to get to massive scale and be THE Craigslist killer. We believed we had a unique approach to building market liquidity: tapping superconnectors who would want to run their own craigslists.

Friendlist was going to be BIG!!! And the thought of someone playing ‘craig’ fit into my personal wheelhouse of quirky, slightly absurdist products that are pressworthy. I could see the headlines already: ’The story of FriendsList: how Jim’s list, Jane’s list, and Jon’s list beat Craigslist!’

The prototype

The first step was a prototype — a simple Facebook group called Wegslist. People GOT it and instantly it filled with postings. Over the next few days, the users of Wegslist basically invented the service themselves. Jesse Middleton wrote:

As I thought about this idea the other day, it really resonated with me. I’m not sure if you’re on to something but it would be worth exploring some manner of allowing people to replicate this easily — jmiddleton.wegslist.com for example — and then offering a bit more categorization. I love the idea of building it on top of Facebook as the connections are already there.

And Peter Dixon-Moses wrote

So I like the idea of having personalized wegslist pages. Draw a parallel between the model for real-estate (typically rentals) from a big outfit like Corcoran where every realtor has their own listings page. And even though listings may be duplicated, each realtor can present the opportunity in their own words (for their particular audience).

At that point I was 100% sold on pursuing this product:

1) I had identified an early adopter hack — people building their own marketplace and playing Craig.
2) The members and owners of these marketplaces are normals (read: not early adopter tech community geeks) which means mass adoption is possible.
3) Using a Facebook group as a prototype, I confirmed that this messaging works and my friends are using the product.

Everything should be smooth sailing from here on, right?

Continued on part 2…

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AirBnB hosts = UX designers

Jonathan — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 22:33:18 +0000

A friend recently pitched me on an airbnb-for-meals concept As I listened to him list reason after reason why the business would work (“You save money by sharing food…You get to eat home cooked meals more often…You make new friends”), I couldn’t help but feel he was missing the point.

Finally I had to interrupt: “I’ve been an AirBnB host since my roommate left months ago, Do you know why AirBnB **really** works? Because designing an experience for a traveller is a fun experience. It’s thrilling and it taps into a universal motherly caretaker instinct.”

Ask yourself this: What makes the Sims fun? Or Tiny Tower? Or dolls or action figures?

These things are fun because you’re building a user experience. You’re playing god and customizing YOUR piece of the world where other people (whether real or virtual) will live and interact.

AirBnB gives you that same control. From the moment an AirBnB user books your property, you’re in control of their entire experience. Your performance will forever color a person’s opinion of AirBnB, New York City, and possibly America. That’s a lot of responsibility. ”What restaurants do I recommend? What paintings do I put on the walls? What color sheets do I get? Should I leave hershey kisses on the pillows?”

It’s no surprise that the level of care and attention on most of the site’s listings is remarkable. And once AirBnB sends a professional to take photographs and people start reviewing YOU as a host, there’s even more pride attached. It becomes like an about.me for your apartment!

I distinctly remember the process of adding my listing. I took dozens of photos of my apartment and uploaded the best ones. Then I wrote a description and headline. Then I rewrote it 50 times more. Finally it went live and there was nothing to do but wait.

It was brutal.

For days I kept coming back to the AirBnB website wanting to *do* something. If this were the Sims, there’d be another room to lay out, another skill set to build, or another trashcan to empty. But the AirBnB host process had a finite end to it — and it was this longing for *more* that made me realize how special the site is.

AirBnB puts hosts in complete control of a traveller’s experience. And that’s a thrilling and addictive proposition.

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Behind The Scenes: The Foursquare/GroupMe/Venmo/Twilio Mashup

Jonathan — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 05:19:18 +0000

Last week I launched FourGroupTwilVen, a fun mashup of Foursquare, GroupMe, Venmo and Twilio designed to entertain my bored friends on Christmas. When my Foursquare friends checked in at a Chinese food restaurant, they unlocked a little surprise:

1) First, they would get a phone call wishing them a Happy Jewish Christmas and playing them Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You.”

2) They were also sent a small holiday gift ($1.80) via Venmo from “The Bank of JWeg” (Venmo is a mobile payment service)

3) They were also added to a GroupMe called “Awesome Jews Eating Chinese Food” (GroupMe is a free group texting service)

Below is a diagram explaining how the system worked. Keep in mind that GroupMe and Venmo don’t have APIs to accomplish these things, but by registering new accounts for each service and associating them to a Twilio phone number, I was able to use outgoing text messages as a trigger to control Venmo and GroupMe.

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A Christmas Present For The Rest Of Us: Foursquare/GroupMe/Venmo/Twilio Mashup

Jonathan — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 18:49:24 +0000

Christmas day can be depressing. It seems like the entire world is decorating trees, opening presents and feasting with family. Meanwhile, we Jews are lonely, bored and hungry. We’re left to scour the town looking for entertainment and food. And we always end up at a chinese restaurant and a movie theater.

Well, my fellow Jews, I’m making this year super special for you all! I’ve hacked together a fun mashup of the APIs from four of my favorite startups: Foursquare, GroupMe, Venmo and Twilio. For short let’s just call it FourGroupTwilVen – or something like that…

Here’s how to participate:

If you’re one of my lucky Foursquare friends, simply visit a Chinese restaurant on Christmas and your check-in will unlock a bit of magic!

I don’t want to give away too much but let’s just say that it will involve a small monetary gift, the company of other awesome Jews, and Mariah Carey. It’s gonna make you smile and cheer up your Christmas.

Let the fun begin!

P.S. My friends who do celebrate Christmas are of course invited to participate too And you don’t have to be in NYC — this will work anywhere.

P.P.S. Make sure your Foursquare account has your phone number entered (most do!) — you can check under ‘Account Settings’ on http://foursquare.com/settings

P.P.P.S. If we’re not Foursquare friends, feel free to add me. Be aware I’m pretty selective about who I share my location with so you might want to follow up with an email of why you’re worthy :-p

P.P.P.P.S. I’ll write a post soon about what’s going on behind-the-scenes.

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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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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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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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Framework For Thought: Aggregators

Jonathan — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 04:18:36 +0000

This post about competitive dynamics has been stewing in my mind for months now and it’s still a work in progress. At its heart is a framework for thinking about a common type of tech company: the aggregator. The aggregator takes disparate items, gathers them, and presents them as a unified front.

Aggregators can exist for both content, products, or services and there are thousands of examples across every category: Google News (news content), OpenTable (restaurants), Expedia (airlines and hotels), Lendingtree (loans), SeamlessWeb (restaurant delivery), Digg (web content), Servicemagic (service contractors), Zocdoc (doctors), Admob (mobile ad units), AdWhirl (mobile ad networks), Pontiflex (marketing leads), GymTicket (gyms).

There’s often one key value that these aggregators offer: convenience. They provide a one-stop shop for customers to find what they’re looking for without going to dozens of different places. The ability to sort and compare items is also an important feature present in most aggregators.

In almost every case there’s an interesting tension between these ‘aggregators’ and their ‘constituents.’ Let’s consider Google News. Google news is increasingly the starting point for people looking for news on the internet. Newspapers hate that Google News is scraping their content and eroding their brand value — but at the same time, Google News drives a significant proportion of their web traffic. They’d be stupid not to want that. As a member of an aggregator, they’re ensuring they get web traffic. Unfortunately they’re helping build the Google News brand rather than their own.

Are they shooting themselves in the foot?

This issue arose in my post about Opentable. One commenter wrote that restaurants participating in OpenTable build the OpenTable brand rather than the restaurant’s own brand. It’s very true, but what can be done when the aggregator has gained a critical mass?

Once established, the aggregator has the upper hand. All the individual entities/constituents act in their own self-interest and therefore will remain part of the network. No single constituent can defect without suffering harm. And widespread mutiny is unlikely — it’s unlikely that all the restaurants are going to band together and start their own version of OpenTable. It’s a tragedy of the commons, and the aggregators benefit handsomely from the resulting lock-in network effect.

As an established aggregator, risk can come from only a few places:

1) Competition in the form of another aggregator

2) One or more constituents decide to sidestep you.

#1 is hard to avoid — dozens of flight and hotel planners compete for attention of the same travelers. #2 is rare, but extremely interesting when it does happen. One example of this is Southwest Airlines, which isn’t listed on any of the travel booking sites. Similarly, Admob refused to serve ads through AdWhirl which was an ad network aggregator (and when that didn’t work AdMob bought ‘em!)

Occasionally the constituents themselves will ally: One example is Hulu, a joint venture between NBC, FOX and ABC, which aggregates all their content into a single place.

And once in a blue moon a constituent will creatively embrace aggregation in their attempt to fight the aggregators. For example, Progressive Auto Insurance proudly shows you the prices of their competitors alongside their own prices. Fascinating strategy.

The more fractured and crowded the marketplace, the less likely a mutiny or rebellion. Are the tens of thousands of restaurants on Seamlessweb suddenly going to unite to form their own online ordering system and destroy Seamlessweb? Not likely. But are the dozen or so large newspapers going to unite to rally against google news and demand to be de-listed or compensated better? Absolutely.

As the number of constituents increases, the dependency on any one constituent decreases. And as an aggregator grows its brand, it becomes extremely difficult for a constituent to break away. Doing so requires an extremely strong brand and unique offering (like Southwest Airlines) and an alternative sales/delivery channel.

This is most important in the context of a offline company: Consider that Brick and Mortar stores like Walmart are essentially product aggregators. Shoppers go to Walmart because they know it has a wide selection at great prices. Suppliers don’t want to miss out on the huge volume that the Walmart sales channel delivers. The more Walmart grows, the more crucial they become to their suppliers’ businesses. And the more suppliers they gain, the more crucial they become to consumers. At the end of the day, Walmart has incredible negotiation power in the form of pricing leverage over its constituent suppliers. There simply aren’t many alternative channels. Suppliers are trapped.

I’m going to end the post here because it’s already way too long. But please leave your thoughts and help me push this topic further. Thank you!

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The Launch of Exit Strategy NYC

Jonathan — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 03:18:55 +0000

Benny and Ashley and I officially launched Exit Strategy NYC last night at the NY Tech Meetup!

Exit Strategy NYC is an iPhone, Blackberry, and Android app that answers the quintessential New Yorker’s question: “Where should I stand on the subway platform?” After months of full-time subway riding, we’ve created detailed diagrams for hundreds of NYC stations, eliminating the guesswork and frustration from subway riding.

The project launched with an article from the New York Times and quickly got covered by Wired Magazine, NY Post, NY Mag etc (full list of press here).

The locations of the subway exits and transfer points have never before been collected on a large scale in NYC. Similar projects have been done in Toronto and Tokyo. We’re extremely excited to introduce this to New York City.

Soon i’ll be writing more about the thinking behind this app and the experience developing across three different mobile platforms. But for now, buy it and let us know what you think…we hope you love it!

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