The Friendslist Story [Chapter 4]
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 was there filming the whole thing for their TV series. Bloomberg’s lights shone brightly on us and the boom mics hovered intrusively from above. We did our best to ignore them and focus on describing 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?
Well, “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!”
Still nobody 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.
After delivering the build-your-own-Craigslist pitch to probably 60 different mentors and receiving blank stares from most of them, we realized it was time to re-evaluate our product and approach.
We retraced our steps and went back to the basics: we all gets ‘requests’ from friends for help looking for apartments, roommates, jobs, and employees. Many people, like Tisch and Cohen, were just so overwhelmed by the sheer amount of requests they receive, they couldn’t keep track of them all. There were missed connections all over the place because people didn’t have a good system of organizing their inbound requests. Some people had crafted their own peculiar solutions — like a dedicated folder in their inbox. But it was still a major hassle to organize your friends needs and help them out. This was the problem that Friendslist was trying to fix. But how?
