4 ms·

Check-Ins are Coupons. Game Mechanics are Bullshit.

32 points by zpoley 17y ago

lrm242 17y ago
Dave's writing usually rubs me the wrong way, but this piece makes a ton of sense. Facebook has shown that they can execute well as the market changes so I suspect they will try to buy something, but will not pay the valuations most VCs expect.
- lsc 17y ago
  yeah, is this guy serious? Not that I have much room to criticize others on grammar, but I don't spell you as 'u' - I was almost expecting to see 'Sent from my iphone' at the bottom of the story.
  - davemc500hats 17y ago
    sorry about the lack of spelling or grammer [sic]. i'm an acquired [dis-]taste...
    - shadowsun7 17y ago
      Hi Dave, Your comments on HN are clear, simply written, and to-the-point. When you defend your arguments here, you make perfect sense. I'm not sure why you write the way you do on your blog. Could it be that you're just looking for attention/linkbait? Please, stop. You're famous enough in startup circles to be able to run on the strength of your ideas alone. I think people here are beginning to realize that - once we parse through your language we'll find some fantastic ideas. There are many more people who can't/won't get past the parsing (for instance, while I like your ideas, you're not in my feedreader). There's no reason not to write simply, and clearly, the way you write on HN now. Right?
      - davemc500hats 17y ago
        thanks for the kind words. (i think?) but really... i'm not trying to write for fame & fortune, i'm just having fun. (ok, yeah i'm pretty sure it's also somewhat effective but honestly i do it as much for personal enjoyment as for public linkbaiting) anyway, i appreciate the more straightforward way that folks like PG, Chris Dixon, and Fred Wilson write (all are among my favorites), but it just isn't quite my thing. apologies if i end up seeming a bit off the wall. maybe we can clear it up over a beer sometime. cheers,
        shadowsun7 17y ago
        Well I never - there's a good man behind that personality, after all. =) Alright, Dave, fair enough. I don't necessarily like the way you write, but I'm convinced enough to subscribe to you. Best of luck in your future writing.
    - lsc 17y ago
      why do you think ebay is going away? the only real threat to them I see is amazon, and ebay has some advantages to amazon. It's pretty much the only place to go for parts that are hard to find. (for example, most of the places that claimed to have my x60s battery in fact did not. the ebay seller, thanks to the ebay reputation system, did. I usually go to ebay over unknown resellers on the 'net simply because if an ebay seller says they have part X, they usually do.)
      - davemc500hats 17y ago
        i'm sure there will be room for auction-style services, but there's going to be innovation and competition there, and eBay just isn't moving very quickly these days. the other major trend is that both search and social distribution have substantially eroded eBay's original network effect as a destination for buyers & sellers... now both search (via SEM) and social (via FB & other networks) are also able to acquire & influence buyers. anyway, i probably rag on eBay a little too much since i used to work there (via PayPal), but they have slowed down on the innovation quite a bit. that used to be offset by them buying innovative services, but that has also slowed down in recent years.
        lsc 17y ago
        I agree they don't seem to be innovating, but heck, neither is craigslist, and I don't see them going anywhere. I think that until someone else would need to come along with something significantly better /and/ have significant advertising dollars to compete with ebay. (either that or ebay would need to screw up it's reputation system and badly.) I don't think that facebook or any of the other social networks will compete in that arena... the social networks may help in advertising, e.g. driving people to a particular purchase, but I go to ebay to /find/ something, and I don't think facebook is a useful model for that sort of thing. Sure, you can buy shit from your friends on facebook; I do that without an online social network, through mailing lists and other informal networks. But I don't think that really competes with ebay in any meaningful way.
        davemc500hats 17y ago
oldgregg 17y ago
Pretty interesting predictions, very thought provoking at least.
thiele 17y ago
Totally agree, Facebook will win location war hands down.
kadavy 17y ago
His prediction about Google buying Twitter and Yelp to take on Facebook made me laugh. Until he said they will "probably still [lose] due to no clue on social"
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
- davemc500hats 17y ago
  while the #'s are a guessing game, the observation that there's a shitload of customer acquisition cost here isn't. the main point is that lots of [mainstream] users + lots of [mostly offline] businesses are required to really make LBS services worth serious money. this in turn requires lots of money to scale, and it's my assertion that the current players are wildly under-financed currently to achieve the necessary scale. anyway, i might indeed be full of sh*t but the post isn't way out of bounds imho. your mileage may vary.
  - lsc 17y ago
    why do you think this will take so much money to scale? you don't think getting businesses to put up 'coupons' can be largely automated? I'm not sure that it's all that much more complicated than selling other ads. Btw, I do think that you are correct in asserting that location based systems require coupon type discounts to be compelling long term. I'm just suggesting that might be cheaper than you think.
    - davemc500hats 17y ago
      if they were online businesses, maybe it would only be modestly expensive and take 3-5 years to scale... but the market is LOTS of OFFLINE and SMALL businesses, which will take for-fking-EVER to scale organically. thus, you either need to a) already have lots of users (FB,GOOG,AAPL,TWTR) to motivate businesses to participate, or b) you need to have enough cash to pay them to do so. ergo, shitload of capital rqd, and/or get bought by bigger player who has users, cash, or both.
      - lsc 17y ago
        how many small, offline businesses participate on Yelp? participating on some location based service seems like it wouldn't be any more difficult.
jkincaid 17y ago
Foursquare's game mechanics do get old, and they really haven't done much to change them since launch. I started playing Foursquare in March '09, was sick of the badges a month or two later, and haven't cared to check in much since. Granted, I know plenty of people who still play Foursquare religiously, but I suspect they'll burn out on the gameplay too eventually. It's very hard to keep a game engaging over multiple years. I have nothing against Foursquare, I just hope they have some plans to mix things up.
dannyr 17y ago
Lately, a number of my friends who are non-early adopters started signing up for Foursquare. Do they check-in? No. I bet the only reason they signed up was because of the coverage by the mainstream media which picked up the hype from blogs like Techcrunch (or more specifically MG Siegler).
hristov 17y ago
Dude, I know it feels like you are writing is brilliant when you are high on coke, but believe me it is just a bunch of incomprehensible drivel.
- davemc500hats 17y ago
  nah, i stopped doing the coke in college.. believe me crawling on the carpet looking for crack is really no fun. regardless, i appreciate that u despise me enough to waste time commenting on my "incomprehensible drivel". i'll translate 4 u: "LBS services cost money to scale." got it? (i can type slower if that helps)
  - justinY 17y ago
    Dave, you're right on.
  - Qu4Z 17y ago
    I doubt slower typing would help, but some capitals, consistent punctuation and less use of random colours and font resizing on your blog would go a long way towards making your point in an understandable way. I'm sure that post has interesting content, but so do many others, and they make their points in a much more readable way: for instance, try looking at the essays on paulgraham.com. A pleasure to read, and think about.
dshah 17y ago
Those are some awfully strong opinions. And, makes http://foursquare.grader.com http://foursquare.grader.com look kind of silly. Oh well, at least I had a good time with it and you just never know.
- davemc500hats 17y ago
  yeah, i'm probably smoking something on those predictions, but blodget seemed to enjoy the speculation ;)
  - dshah 17y ago
    I didn't say they were wrong opinions, just that they were strong. You made some good points. My one counter-argument is that folks would have likely argued similar things about twitter back when it first launched. Tiwtter was basically Facebook status updates -- only different.
    - davemc500hats 17y ago
      true, but twitter growth was notably substantial even before people understood why it was diff than FB status. not sure the popular LBS stuff is growing anywhere near as fast... but it should be.
kullar 17y ago
when we started our location based site launching soon :), we researched current and future competitors: key points we came out with: 1. Facebook absolutely will launch a friend finder (although they'll have privacy problems and they'll have to be careful) so most friend finders will get crushed. 2. most current sites are confusing- don't actually understand what they do within 10 to 30 seconds of looking at the site. Often they do too much that people care minimally about 3. Most location based sites have missed out on some very basic needs that people have. Many seem to be built by hard geeks for other hard geeks. Go out and talk to mainstream users, they just are like wtf? So dave has said what most people may have thought but were not willing to say because of what i think of as the 'twitter' effect'. Its the 'well, it could be another twitter, just that i don't get it yet' thought. However, the one advantage foursquare etc have got over some poor muppet like me with my $6,000 dollar savings invested in our idea is lots of money and an existing infrastructure. That said, these days, its amazing what you can do with $6,000.
- kullar 17y ago
  $6,000 dollars and blood, sweat and tears that is

32 points by zpoley 17y ago

Dave's writing usually rubs me the wrong way, but this piece makes a ton of sense. Facebook has shown that they can execute well as the market changes so I suspect they will try to buy something, but will not pay the valuations most VCs expect.

lsc 17y ago
yeah, is this guy serious? Not that I have much room to criticize others on grammar, but I don't spell you as 'u' - I was almost expecting to see 'Sent from my iphone' at the bottom of the story.
- davemc500hats 17y ago
  sorry about the lack of spelling or grammer [sic]. i'm an acquired [dis-]taste...
  - shadowsun7 17y ago
    Hi Dave, Your comments on HN are clear, simply written, and to-the-point. When you defend your arguments here, you make perfect sense. I'm not sure why you write the way you do on your blog. Could it be that you're just looking for attention/linkbait? Please, stop. You're famous enough in startup circles to be able to run on the strength of your ideas alone. I think people here are beginning to realize that - once we parse through your language we'll find some fantastic ideas. There are many more people who can't/won't get past the parsing (for instance, while I like your ideas, you're not in my feedreader). There's no reason not to write simply, and clearly, the way you write on HN now. Right?
    - davemc500hats 17y ago
      thanks for the kind words. (i think?) but really... i'm not trying to write for fame & fortune, i'm just having fun. (ok, yeah i'm pretty sure it's also somewhat effective but honestly i do it as much for personal enjoyment as for public linkbaiting) anyway, i appreciate the more straightforward way that folks like PG, Chris Dixon, and Fred Wilson write (all are among my favorites), but it just isn't quite my thing. apologies if i end up seeming a bit off the wall. maybe we can clear it up over a beer sometime. cheers,
      - shadowsun7 17y ago
        Well I never - there's a good man behind that personality, after all. =) Alright, Dave, fair enough. I don't necessarily like the way you write, but I'm convinced enough to subscribe to you. Best of luck in your future writing.
  - lsc 17y ago
    why do you think ebay is going away? the only real threat to them I see is amazon, and ebay has some advantages to amazon. It's pretty much the only place to go for parts that are hard to find. (for example, most of the places that claimed to have my x60s battery in fact did not. the ebay seller, thanks to the ebay reputation system, did. I usually go to ebay over unknown resellers on the 'net simply because if an ebay seller says they have part X, they usually do.)
    - davemc500hats 17y ago
      i'm sure there will be room for auction-style services, but there's going to be innovation and competition there, and eBay just isn't moving very quickly these days. the other major trend is that both search and social distribution have substantially eroded eBay's original network effect as a destination for buyers & sellers... now both search (via SEM) and social (via FB & other networks) are also able to acquire & influence buyers. anyway, i probably rag on eBay a little too much since i used to work there (via PayPal), but they have slowed down on the innovation quite a bit. that used to be offset by them buying innovative services, but that has also slowed down in recent years.
      - lsc 17y ago
        I agree they don't seem to be innovating, but heck, neither is craigslist, and I don't see them going anywhere. I think that until someone else would need to come along with something significantly better /and/ have significant advertising dollars to compete with ebay. (either that or ebay would need to screw up it's reputation system and badly.) I don't think that facebook or any of the other social networks will compete in that arena... the social networks may help in advertising, e.g. driving people to a particular purchase, but I go to ebay to /find/ something, and I don't think facebook is a useful model for that sort of thing. Sure, you can buy shit from your friends on facebook; I do that without an online social network, through mailing lists and other informal networks. But I don't think that really competes with ebay in any meaningful way.
        davemc500hats 17y ago

oldgregg 17y ago

Pretty interesting predictions, very thought provoking at least.

thiele 17y ago

Totally agree, Facebook will win location war hands down.

kadavy 17y ago

His prediction about Google buying Twitter and Yelp to take on Facebook made me laugh. Until he said they will "probably still [lose] due to no clue on social"

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

davemc500hats 17y ago
while the #'s are a guessing game, the observation that there's a shitload of customer acquisition cost here isn't. the main point is that lots of [mainstream] users + lots of [mostly offline] businesses are required to really make LBS services worth serious money. this in turn requires lots of money to scale, and it's my assertion that the current players are wildly under-financed currently to achieve the necessary scale. anyway, i might indeed be full of sh*t but the post isn't way out of bounds imho. your mileage may vary.
- lsc 17y ago
  why do you think this will take so much money to scale? you don't think getting businesses to put up 'coupons' can be largely automated? I'm not sure that it's all that much more complicated than selling other ads. Btw, I do think that you are correct in asserting that location based systems require coupon type discounts to be compelling long term. I'm just suggesting that might be cheaper than you think.
  - davemc500hats 17y ago
    if they were online businesses, maybe it would only be modestly expensive and take 3-5 years to scale... but the market is LOTS of OFFLINE and SMALL businesses, which will take for-fking-EVER to scale organically. thus, you either need to a) already have lots of users (FB,GOOG,AAPL,TWTR) to motivate businesses to participate, or b) you need to have enough cash to pay them to do so. ergo, shitload of capital rqd, and/or get bought by bigger player who has users, cash, or both.
    - lsc 17y ago
      how many small, offline businesses participate on Yelp? participating on some location based service seems like it wouldn't be any more difficult.

jkincaid 17y ago

Foursquare's game mechanics do get old, and they really haven't done much to change them since launch. I started playing Foursquare in March '09, was sick of the badges a month or two later, and haven't cared to check in much since. Granted, I know plenty of people who still play Foursquare religiously, but I suspect they'll burn out on the gameplay too eventually. It's very hard to keep a game engaging over multiple years. I have nothing against Foursquare, I just hope they have some plans to mix things up.

dannyr 17y ago

Lately, a number of my friends who are non-early adopters started signing up for Foursquare. Do they check-in? No. I bet the only reason they signed up was because of the coverage by the mainstream media which picked up the hype from blogs like Techcrunch (or more specifically MG Siegler).

hristov 17y ago

Dude, I know it feels like you are writing is brilliant when you are high on coke, but believe me it is just a bunch of incomprehensible drivel.

davemc500hats 17y ago
nah, i stopped doing the coke in college.. believe me crawling on the carpet looking for crack is really no fun. regardless, i appreciate that u despise me enough to waste time commenting on my "incomprehensible drivel". i'll translate 4 u: "LBS services cost money to scale." got it? (i can type slower if that helps)
- justinY 17y ago
  Dave, you're right on.
- Qu4Z 17y ago
  I doubt slower typing would help, but some capitals, consistent punctuation and less use of random colours and font resizing on your blog would go a long way towards making your point in an understandable way. I'm sure that post has interesting content, but so do many others, and they make their points in a much more readable way: for instance, try looking at the essays on paulgraham.com. A pleasure to read, and think about.

dshah 17y ago

Those are some awfully strong opinions. And, makes http://foursquare.grader.com http://foursquare.grader.com look kind of silly. Oh well, at least I had a good time with it and you just never know.

davemc500hats 17y ago
yeah, i'm probably smoking something on those predictions, but blodget seemed to enjoy the speculation ;)
- dshah 17y ago
  I didn't say they were wrong opinions, just that they were strong. You made some good points. My one counter-argument is that folks would have likely argued similar things about twitter back when it first launched. Tiwtter was basically Facebook status updates -- only different.
  - davemc500hats 17y ago
    true, but twitter growth was notably substantial even before people understood why it was diff than FB status. not sure the popular LBS stuff is growing anywhere near as fast... but it should be.

kullar 17y ago

when we started our location based site launching soon :), we researched current and future competitors: key points we came out with: 1. Facebook absolutely will launch a friend finder (although they'll have privacy problems and they'll have to be careful) so most friend finders will get crushed. 2. most current sites are confusing- don't actually understand what they do within 10 to 30 seconds of looking at the site. Often they do too much that people care minimally about 3. Most location based sites have missed out on some very basic needs that people have. Many seem to be built by hard geeks for other hard geeks. Go out and talk to mainstream users, they just are like wtf? So dave has said what most people may have thought but were not willing to say because of what i think of as the 'twitter' effect'. Its the 'well, it could be another twitter, just that i don't get it yet' thought. However, the one advantage foursquare etc have got over some poor muppet like me with my $6,000 dollar savings invested in our idea is lots of money and an existing infrastructure. That said, these days, its amazing what you can do with $6,000.

kullar 17y ago
$6,000 dollars and blood, sweat and tears that is