The Friendslist Story [Chapter 7]
My phone rings and before I even answer, I know. It’s my roommate letting me know that he’s moving in with his girlfriend and i’ll need to find a new roommate. Great, just the distraction I need as we go through Techstars.
I really don’t want to interview a bunch of creeps off Craigslist to be my new roommate. A Techstars mentor asks how we’d solve this problem if craigslist didn’t exist. “I’d post it somewhere and tweet it and ask people to please retweet it.” “Ok guys, stop overthinking this stuff and just build that. Get it done as fast as possible”
So we build http://plzrt.it/ (ie PlZ RT it= Please Retweet It. Yes, that’s an italian domain name)
As we present PLZRT.IT to the Techstars teams, Jason Baptiste shouts “Pleasure tit!” We still joke about that name years later.
The basic idea of Pleasure Tit, err PlzRT, was to separate Craigslist into its two halves, the CMS and the distribution network. We created our own simple CMS to host your description and photos. And you would use your twitter network as the distribution. Later we planned to overlay a separate follower model on top of the site.
I post my roommate search on plzrt.it and it gets a few retweets, but no real leads. A mentor posts an old TV and a Drobo and has even less success. Nobody is impressed. There’s no spark and no magic.
Even if it had succeeded, there was one big problem we saw. PlzRT doesn’t solve an actual search problem, it just rebroadcasts everything to everyone which doesn’t scale very well. “If this product becomes widely used, you’ll very quickly have noise decay” points out Brad Feld.
A few days later Gary Vaynerchuk (another techstars mentor) uses PlzRT to distribute a poll or something. We’re not really sure why. But because of his following it gets 50 retweets. And then Twitter emails us to let us know we’ve been banned for an API violation (i believe related to the “RT request” inherent in the service name). It’s the final nail in the coffin for PlzRT and we pull the plug on the experiment.
