The Friendslist Story [Chapter 6]
She nailed it. Our product offering was vague and had been massively diluted by our attempt to satisfy everyone.
“Let’s start here,” Nicole suggested, “what do you and Benny like to do on the weekends?” “We bike a lot” “Ok, so start by building a bike-parts marketplace.”
It was a perfectly reasonable suggestion. Yet it felt incredibly unambitious and uninteresting. “How is that supposed to conquer the world?” we were both asking ourselves.
We desperately needed a break and to get out of our own heads. That weekend was Foursquare’s first ever hackathon (hint: foreshadowing). We took our first day off from working on Friendslist in over two months.
The night before, at Lolita in the Lower East Side, Benny and I had settled on building a foursquare app that replays your checkins from a year prior. It would be a “mario-kart ghost for the real world” — you’d become friends with a second foursquare account (aka “Jonathan’s Ghost”) and you’d watch as your ghost checked in across the city. At lunchtime you’d see your ghost checking in for lunch a year ago that same time. At dinnertime, you’d see dinnertime checkins. And perhaps once in a while your ghost would be where you were!
“What’s that saying ‘Four score and something something ago?’” I asked Benny. “Four Score and Seven Years Ago — it’s from Abe Lincoln’s Gettysburg address.” “Oh right! So let’s call it Four SQUARE and Seven Years.”
Benny and I had a blast the next day. With some remote help from Designer Matt Raoul (too hungover to make it to the hackathon in person) we quickly pulled together a first version in under 8 hours work. We even dreamt up an Abe Lincoln themed foursquare mascot.
“Well that was fun!” we said walking home that night…what an awesome little product we had just invented — wouldn’t it be great if we could just work on that? Ah, but 4SquareAnd7YearsAgo is just…a hill. Not a mountain. It was merely a fun little project but hardly ambitious enough. Or so we thought at the time.
“We need to climb a mountain” we both agreed. And the mountain we had firmly set our sights on was Friendslist.
