The Friendslist Story [Chapter 5]
A recap: We came into Techstars convinced that our MVP (minimal viable product) was just a rebuild of Facebook Groups with the right messaging/landing page on top to fit the classifieds use case.
If Janelle’s List worked once, all we had to do was find a thousand “Janelles” to host lists on our platform and we’d quickly get to massive scale. The most beautiful part it that (in theory) it’d be viral! Connector-type people who want to play Craig would sign up and invite hundreds of friends into their list. “Why?!” people ask us. “Ego, pride, wanting to play God, wanting to help their friends, wanting to be a big deal”
It quickly became clear this wasn’t going to be easy. Nobody identifies themselves as a “connector” and few people want to do the heavy lifting of running their own marketplace. So, back to the drawing board…What are we building? And what are we trying to accomplish?
Several folks identify with the pain of playing 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 an 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. And it sounds clunky — is the medicine better than the disease?
One mentor wants a tool that lets him send opportunities to his portfolio companies. Right now, he’s created his own hack: he uses yahoo groups to send around resumes to 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 that for food photos, and plancast is that for plans, then our site is for opportunities! “I don’t know how it’s a business, but I’d use the product” the mentor says.
Another mentor wants us to automatically figure out who to forward inbound opportunities to (automatic friend groups). If he has to do any work or go to another place to manage these things in his inbox, that’s a deal breaker.
Yet another mentor 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…how the heck could that work? A double opt-in follow model?!
How were we going to build this ultimate product if we couldn’t satisfy everyone…
Somewhere along the way one of the investor mentors gets really excited too: “This is BIG guys..this is the opportunity graph.” 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.”
The subtlety was completely absurd in retrospect. But we were way too far down the rabbit hole to see that.
Weeks flew by and we were no closer to releasing a product or having a solution we were confident in. Eventually we meet with Nicole Giaros, who runs the adminstrative side of Techstars out of Boulder. It’s one of our most important meetings because she’s a “normal” (ie not an early adopter tech type). So she’ll certainly have a good perspective on all this we thought.
Nicole listens intently as we explain everything. And then she says the smartest thing we had heard in weeks: “It sounds to me like you’re making a something for somebody to do something.”
