4 ms·

I'm still astounded by this. They had a #&$%ing verb. That is the #&$%ing gold standard of presence. "I'm going to foursquare this." I actually heard real human

I'm still astounded by this. They had a #&$%ing verb. That is the #&$%ing gold standard of presence. "I'm going to foursquare this." I actually heard real human beings say this. If your app name has become a verb the last thing you ever want to do is refocus. If you want to go to a ratings app like they apparently did (because... uh... that's not a saturated space or anything?...) then you make another app and leave your wildly successful app alone.

roel_v 12y ago
"If your app name has become a verb the last thing you ever want to do is refocus." What? If you don't make money, you will go bankrupt. You can be a verb all you want, if it doesn't make money, it doesn't matter.
- josephmx 12y ago
  If your monetisation attempt kills your app, you will go bankrupt and it is a failure.
  - dagw 12y ago
    You have two options. One will leave you bankrupt within a year or two with probability 1.0 and one will leave you bankrupt within year or two with probability 0.8. Which would you chose?
    - josephmx 12y ago
      Except if they had monetised in a way that isn't changing their entire app then they would have been more likely to stay successful. This change was poorly thought out and probably wasn't going to be successful, same as if Twitter spun their micro-blogging to another app, it wouldn't end well.
      - und3rw4t3rp00ps 12y ago
        IMHO - Dens is a romantic dude. He has just as many conceptual aspirations as he does commercial ones. Power users of 4sq. turn their worlds into farmville - mindlessly checking in everywhere they go (i.e. "home", "gym", "home" etc.). He wanted to disassociate the brand from that activity, and emphasize the utility of check ins (i.e. who else is here, how popular is that etc.). Could he have done this in a more elegant way? Maybe. But either way, the data he has compiled to entice advertisers is already quite substantial. If he successfully rebrands 4sq. as a resource and swarm as a tool, he's done exactly what he wanted to do.. as opposed to something close/safer.
      - wpietri 12y ago
        > This change was poorly thought out What's your evidence for that? I could entirely believe they thought it through very carefully, knew that this was a likely outcome, and did it anyhow because it was the best chance they saw for success. Remember, this is the third checkin app in this series. It started life as a student project. The first commercial version was Dodgeball [1], which was created, grown, and purchased by Google before the iPhone even existed. Google wasted the opportunity, so Crowley started Foursquare and did it again. Personally, I suspect they discovered that the whole check-in dynamic was fading. E.g., it's something people did for a while out of novelty and they expected its true long-term audience to be small. Once you take VC money, it's "go big or go home". A small, modestly profitable company is not something your investors are interested in; they would rather you gamble and lose. And Foursquare took $162 million [2] so they had to go very big indeed. The "success" period of the article's graph looks like VC-failure to me. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodgeball_%28service%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodgeball_%28service%29 [2] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/foursquare https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/foursquare
        furyg3 12y ago
        This logic blows my mind. Winning back your penny at the penny slots isn't the result you're playing for, but it's a better result than losing the penny. I don't know the details of the FourSquare pivot, and hindsight is 20/20, but if I had even a small chance at medium-to-long term profitability (good brand, loyal followers, but flat growth), and a minuscule chance at riches by burning down the building, I wouldn't light the match.
  - codingdave 12y ago
    If you grow so big that you are verb, and yet still have not monetized, then you had a deep flaw in your business plan from day one.
    - aioprisan 12y ago
      Many apps try to just get traction instead and grow on that front, that they're as big as possible, then worry about monetization.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- bandrami 12y ago
  Ah, you fell for it too. How much does it actually cost to run the foursquare that millions of users liked? Hint: not very much. If you can't make that "not very much" back from ads, you should sell to someone who can.
  - wpietri 12y ago
    If you settle for barely breaking even, your investors will replace you with somebody who believes they can take your company and have a chance of making ridiculous money. They will do that even if it is a 20% of wild success and an 80% chance that you will drive away the millions of users. Why? Because merely covering core operational costs doesn't do anything to pay back the investors who put in $160 million.
    - bandrami 12y ago
      Why do you have "investors" with a low-margin, low-cost business model?
      - wpietri 12y ago
        I'm having trouble understanding what you want to know here. Is this whole VC funding thing new to you? Assuming so, the short answer is that the venture capital ecosystem is about investing in businesses before we know what kind of businesses they'll turn out to be. This was especially true for free-to-use social apps like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare. Those only make sufficient money if their scale is very large. It's also hard to know what their true monetization opportunities are until they reach scale, which is why Twitter and Facebook didn't really bother with pursuing revenue until they were huge. This worked out pretty well for the winners. But it has a known failure mode for the losers: things that might have been good small businesses end up getting totally destroyed in the rush for glory and riches.
      - bdcravens 12y ago
        You're describing pretty much every B2C startup ever. Many of which I promise you're using today.
DevX101 12y ago
> wildly successful app Foursquare didn't agree. They didn't pivot just because it's the cool thing to do.
- raverbashing 12y ago
  > Foursquare didn't agree Maybe the millions of users actively making check-ins every day weren't too big of a clue for them? They needed a monetization strategy, you pivot when your product is not being used.
  - untog 12y ago
    It's funny how everyone in this thread is saying they needed a monetisation strategy but no one has suggested one. Maybe there just isn't a business in check ins.
    - emodendroket 12y ago
      How about "be acquired by Google."
      - untog 12y ago
        There are rumours today about them being acquired by Yahoo: http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/15/sources-yahoo-in-talks-to-buy-foursquare/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/15/sources-yahoo-in-talks-to-b... Makes the timing of this post interesting.
      - TylerH 12y ago
        Google has to want you for that to happen.
      - ulfw 12y ago
        That didn't work out so well the first time, did it? https://gigaom.com/2007/04/15/dodgeball-founder-quits-google/ https://gigaom.com/2007/04/15/dodgeball-founder-quits-google...
  - 12y ago
alanmoo 12y ago
"Oh, I'll TiVo that!" And how are they doing?
- bandrami 12y ago
  Pretty well. Actually very well. Meeting expenses with quite a bit of padding. That used to be the definition of success before the cult of "growth" took over everything.
  - aioprisan 12y ago
    So, you mean profit? They're a public company, so the bar it set at a different level.
mangeletti 12y ago
Firstly, when did http://cl.ly/image/192x1c3L3B0d http://cl.ly/image/192x1c3L3B0d become the model for success? What it really comes down to is this: 1. You're left with an app that has stagnated in market share for a number of years (even dropped a bit) 2. Your brand has been marginalized by Facebook's vertical integration of your primary feature 3. You have some money left (investment, revenue, whatever - I don't know about Foursquares's finances, but they obviously have some money or they'd be gone) Given the aforementioned, do you A) pretend like nothing happened and continue watching your brand fade into obscurity (e.g., MySpace), or B) try to reinvent (e.g., like MySpace did - their traffic topped 55M uniques/mo in 2014)?
- varunjuice 12y ago
  ^^ This. It was a bet. Some times these things don't pay off. A lot of folks were upset when a small app named Burbn removed a bunch of its features as well, after a year of stagnant growth.
  - jarin 12y ago
    For those who don't know, Burbn is now known as Instagram.
- lavamantis 12y ago
  Because of your #3, that means they had some time. Rather than torpedo something that was still a bit of a success, if no longer a moon shot, they could have innovated something new alongside the existing product. Either a compelling new feature or a separate product that was able to leverage their huge data set. Their users were delighted by the existing product, but they ignored their users in order to go with the torpedo route. Clearly they had never read anything by Paul Graham?
joeshaw 12y ago
The app isn't the product. The points-of-interest database they built from their apps' users is the product. And that is what they're now selling to companies like Twitter. Twitter's incorporation of the POI will give them much more "check-in" data than their own apps ever could. https://medium.com/@dens/six-years-in-a-few-thoughts-on-foursquare-1ec31cbbe51c https://medium.com/@dens/six-years-in-a-few-thoughts-on-four...
- bandrami 12y ago
  Ah, yes, I've done broadcasting too. The app is not the product if it's free. But people mistake that: you still have to actually have an app people want, if you're going to make them the product.
  - joeshaw 12y ago
    The app doesn't matter anymore. Twitter is the app now (and whomever else they license their points-of-interest service to). Consumers of their service likely feed back check-in-equivalent data to foursquare, which allows them to do trending and bolsters their database further. I lament the loss of the app too. Checking in and becoming the mayor was the fun of the old app, and Swarm just doesn't do it for me. At this point I use it mostly as a log of new places I've been to so I can visit them again in the future, particularly while traveling.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
gdilla 12y ago
True, they should have made Swarm their new Yelp clone or whatever their curated travel guide strategy was, instead of gouging the flagship app that had popularized the check-in for 10s of millions of active users. It was such a departure and made no sense branding wise. I mean I guess they wanted to associate their company name with the money making version of their app (if this strategy worked out) but still... it was oddly done. A lot of bouncing back and forth between two apps (check in on swarm, look at tips on FS?!).
- jamiesonbecker 12y ago
  Right. They could have simply launched a new app that centralized the review data that they'd already gathered from 4sq and continued to populate this new app w/ the valuable data from 4sq, and then used the two apps to feed each other. That would have been cool and not irritated their most loyal users. Also, Brand extension almost never works: http://amzn.to/1D2J4c8 http://amzn.to/1D2J4c8 I might have even installed it. ;)
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

roel_v 12y ago

"If your app name has become a verb the last thing you ever want to do is refocus." What? If you don't make money, you will go bankrupt. You can be a verb all you want, if it doesn't make money, it doesn't matter.

josephmx 12y ago
If your monetisation attempt kills your app, you will go bankrupt and it is a failure.
- dagw 12y ago
  You have two options. One will leave you bankrupt within a year or two with probability 1.0 and one will leave you bankrupt within year or two with probability 0.8. Which would you chose?
  - josephmx 12y ago
    Except if they had monetised in a way that isn't changing their entire app then they would have been more likely to stay successful. This change was poorly thought out and probably wasn't going to be successful, same as if Twitter spun their micro-blogging to another app, it wouldn't end well.
    - und3rw4t3rp00ps 12y ago
      IMHO - Dens is a romantic dude. He has just as many conceptual aspirations as he does commercial ones. Power users of 4sq. turn their worlds into farmville - mindlessly checking in everywhere they go (i.e. "home", "gym", "home" etc.). He wanted to disassociate the brand from that activity, and emphasize the utility of check ins (i.e. who else is here, how popular is that etc.). Could he have done this in a more elegant way? Maybe. But either way, the data he has compiled to entice advertisers is already quite substantial. If he successfully rebrands 4sq. as a resource and swarm as a tool, he's done exactly what he wanted to do.. as opposed to something close/safer.
    - wpietri 12y ago
      > This change was poorly thought out What's your evidence for that? I could entirely believe they thought it through very carefully, knew that this was a likely outcome, and did it anyhow because it was the best chance they saw for success. Remember, this is the third checkin app in this series. It started life as a student project. The first commercial version was Dodgeball [1], which was created, grown, and purchased by Google before the iPhone even existed. Google wasted the opportunity, so Crowley started Foursquare and did it again. Personally, I suspect they discovered that the whole check-in dynamic was fading. E.g., it's something people did for a while out of novelty and they expected its true long-term audience to be small. Once you take VC money, it's "go big or go home". A small, modestly profitable company is not something your investors are interested in; they would rather you gamble and lose. And Foursquare took $162 million [2] so they had to go very big indeed. The "success" period of the article's graph looks like VC-failure to me. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodgeball_%28service%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodgeball_%28service%29 [2] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/foursquare https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/foursquare
      - furyg3 12y ago
        This logic blows my mind. Winning back your penny at the penny slots isn't the result you're playing for, but it's a better result than losing the penny. I don't know the details of the FourSquare pivot, and hindsight is 20/20, but if I had even a small chance at medium-to-long term profitability (good brand, loyal followers, but flat growth), and a minuscule chance at riches by burning down the building, I wouldn't light the match.
- codingdave 12y ago
  If you grow so big that you are verb, and yet still have not monetized, then you had a deep flaw in your business plan from day one.
  - aioprisan 12y ago
    Many apps try to just get traction instead and grow on that front, that they're as big as possible, then worry about monetization.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
bandrami 12y ago
Ah, you fell for it too. How much does it actually cost to run the foursquare that millions of users liked? Hint: not very much. If you can't make that "not very much" back from ads, you should sell to someone who can.
- wpietri 12y ago
  If you settle for barely breaking even, your investors will replace you with somebody who believes they can take your company and have a chance of making ridiculous money. They will do that even if it is a 20% of wild success and an 80% chance that you will drive away the millions of users. Why? Because merely covering core operational costs doesn't do anything to pay back the investors who put in $160 million.
  - bandrami 12y ago
    Why do you have "investors" with a low-margin, low-cost business model?
    - wpietri 12y ago
      I'm having trouble understanding what you want to know here. Is this whole VC funding thing new to you? Assuming so, the short answer is that the venture capital ecosystem is about investing in businesses before we know what kind of businesses they'll turn out to be. This was especially true for free-to-use social apps like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare. Those only make sufficient money if their scale is very large. It's also hard to know what their true monetization opportunities are until they reach scale, which is why Twitter and Facebook didn't really bother with pursuing revenue until they were huge. This worked out pretty well for the winners. But it has a known failure mode for the losers: things that might have been good small businesses end up getting totally destroyed in the rush for glory and riches.
    - bdcravens 12y ago
      You're describing pretty much every B2C startup ever. Many of which I promise you're using today.

DevX101 12y ago

> wildly successful app Foursquare didn't agree. They didn't pivot just because it's the cool thing to do.

raverbashing 12y ago
> Foursquare didn't agree Maybe the millions of users actively making check-ins every day weren't too big of a clue for them? They needed a monetization strategy, you pivot when your product is not being used.
- untog 12y ago
  It's funny how everyone in this thread is saying they needed a monetisation strategy but no one has suggested one. Maybe there just isn't a business in check ins.
  - emodendroket 12y ago
    How about "be acquired by Google."
    - untog 12y ago
      There are rumours today about them being acquired by Yahoo: http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/15/sources-yahoo-in-talks-to-buy-foursquare/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/15/sources-yahoo-in-talks-to-b... Makes the timing of this post interesting.
    - TylerH 12y ago
      Google has to want you for that to happen.
    - ulfw 12y ago
      That didn't work out so well the first time, did it? https://gigaom.com/2007/04/15/dodgeball-founder-quits-google/ https://gigaom.com/2007/04/15/dodgeball-founder-quits-google...
- 12y ago

alanmoo 12y ago

"Oh, I'll TiVo that!" And how are they doing?

bandrami 12y ago
Pretty well. Actually very well. Meeting expenses with quite a bit of padding. That used to be the definition of success before the cult of "growth" took over everything.
- aioprisan 12y ago
  So, you mean profit? They're a public company, so the bar it set at a different level.

mangeletti 12y ago

Firstly, when did http://cl.ly/image/192x1c3L3B0d http://cl.ly/image/192x1c3L3B0d become the model for success? What it really comes down to is this: 1. You're left with an app that has stagnated in market share for a number of years (even dropped a bit) 2. Your brand has been marginalized by Facebook's vertical integration of your primary feature 3. You have some money left (investment, revenue, whatever - I don't know about Foursquares's finances, but they obviously have some money or they'd be gone) Given the aforementioned, do you A) pretend like nothing happened and continue watching your brand fade into obscurity (e.g., MySpace), or B) try to reinvent (e.g., like MySpace did - their traffic topped 55M uniques/mo in 2014)?

varunjuice 12y ago
^^ This. It was a bet. Some times these things don't pay off. A lot of folks were upset when a small app named Burbn removed a bunch of its features as well, after a year of stagnant growth.
- jarin 12y ago
  For those who don't know, Burbn is now known as Instagram.
lavamantis 12y ago
Because of your #3, that means they had some time. Rather than torpedo something that was still a bit of a success, if no longer a moon shot, they could have innovated something new alongside the existing product. Either a compelling new feature or a separate product that was able to leverage their huge data set. Their users were delighted by the existing product, but they ignored their users in order to go with the torpedo route. Clearly they had never read anything by Paul Graham?

joeshaw 12y ago

The app isn't the product. The points-of-interest database they built from their apps' users is the product. And that is what they're now selling to companies like Twitter. Twitter's incorporation of the POI will give them much more "check-in" data than their own apps ever could. https://medium.com/@dens/six-years-in-a-few-thoughts-on-foursquare-1ec31cbbe51c https://medium.com/@dens/six-years-in-a-few-thoughts-on-four...

bandrami 12y ago
Ah, yes, I've done broadcasting too. The app is not the product if it's free. But people mistake that: you still have to actually have an app people want, if you're going to make them the product.
- joeshaw 12y ago
  The app doesn't matter anymore. Twitter is the app now (and whomever else they license their points-of-interest service to). Consumers of their service likely feed back check-in-equivalent data to foursquare, which allows them to do trending and bolsters their database further. I lament the loss of the app too. Checking in and becoming the mayor was the fun of the old app, and Swarm just doesn't do it for me. At this point I use it mostly as a log of new places I've been to so I can visit them again in the future, particularly while traveling.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

gdilla 12y ago

True, they should have made Swarm their new Yelp clone or whatever their curated travel guide strategy was, instead of gouging the flagship app that had popularized the check-in for 10s of millions of active users. It was such a departure and made no sense branding wise. I mean I guess they wanted to associate their company name with the money making version of their app (if this strategy worked out) but still... it was oddly done. A lot of bouncing back and forth between two apps (check in on swarm, look at tips on FS?!).

jamiesonbecker 12y ago
Right. They could have simply launched a new app that centralized the review data that they'd already gathered from 4sq and continued to populate this new app w/ the valuable data from 4sq, and then used the two apps to feed each other. That would have been cool and not irritated their most loyal users. Also, Brand extension almost never works: http://amzn.to/1D2J4c8 http://amzn.to/1D2J4c8 I might have even installed it. ;)

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]