Friendslist Chapter 8
Our next shot is a product called OpportunityInbox and it’s essentially twitter for opportunities.
We invite about 20 people to try it, but most just don’t have anything to post. One of the funded TechStars teams posts a developer job listing. He has just two followers on the service.
I saw politely “Ummm, Eli, you realize that two people will see this posting, right? It’s not craigslist. We haven’t build the audience for you…you have to go and do that” “Oh, hmm” and then tweeted it.
It’s quickly becoming clear that a ‘twitter for opportunities’ is not compelling. Are we really going to build a whole other service and ask users to port their entire social graphs to it JUST for the once-a-year when they need to ask for an apartment/roommate/job/employee? People already have hundreds of followers on twitter. It just doesn’t seem like they’d rebuild their followers on yet another service.
But if people aren’t going to do that (bring their friends onto our network), how would the service grow?
Finally it’s back to our original model: the craigs and janelles will add all their friends and they’ll define the audience for everyone that’s part of the group. We’ll call it friendslist, a build your own Craigslist.
Ok, well if people have their own craigslist, who can post to it? The idea that your “list” is a place where other people can post and write seemed crazy to some people: “it should be like my tumblr where only I can curate it. And I should be able to make it private.” Somehow this leads to week long discussions of different read/write settings a la -rwxr-xr-x
One mentor says “but if you rebuild 1000 Janelle’s lists, you’ve just rebuild Craigslist” — “YES” I say! — “But that sucks because everything has equal weight/attention. Isn’t that the problem with Craigslist? The good gets lost among the bad?” Hmm, he’s got a point.
Suddenly the conversations all become about the ‘public’ versus ‘private’ nature of opportunities. If I know of an available position at a startup, is that public or private? How about if I know my friend bob is looking for a roommate? What % of opportunities are private and could never be shared publicly, but instead must only be seen by a select group of people. Most resumes that arrive in the inboxes of these “middlemen” are private opportunities. Similarly a lot of startup positions get filled before any kind of public job post is written. Even the opportunity to take over a great lease on an apartment should be private, because otherwise you’re telling the world how much you paid.
The problem with Wegslist therefore, is if I’m running the group then I’ve defined the audience FOR you. Rather than letting you define the audience for the opportunities. Which means I’m only going to share bottom of the barrel opportunities that are fit for consumption by all.
If this sounds like a mess, that’s because it was.
Time has flown by. Demo day is coming up rapidly and we’ve over-thought and over-discussed the heck out of the problem yet built very little. I’m pretty sure we re-invented email, meetup, tinyletter, yahoo groups, and about a hundred other communication platforms — all in our heads…all in the course of a few weeks.
In preparation for demo day we throw together a quick landing page. I get on stage and pitch the original product vision: “we give well-connected people the tools to help them be more helpful. It’s just like Craigslist itself — the guy Craig tried to help his friends. That product worked once…why wouldn’t it work again? And we do it all on a unified platform which lets us get to a massive scale. We empower an army of users and when it gets to scale, we’ve build a Craigslist killer.”
We mock up the product:
step 1: “name your list”.
step 2: “invite your 942 friends.”
— -
What happened next? We stopped. We quit. We quit doing “thesis testing” and trying to “solve a big hairy audacious problem” and all that other Silicon Valley bullshit.
Instead, we started to build from our hearts instead of our head.
And that meant returning to our little side project…4SquareAnd7YearsAgo…which became Timehop.
[Continue: The Next Chapter: All Eyes on the Future (err, the past)]
