First it took on debt, then raised fresh capital, but at a lower valuation than its earlier rounds. The core issue was that its user growth had slowed considerably and fallen behind its peers in the world of mobile social networks. But if these changes help Foursquare finally hit those bigger user numbers, its investors believe it will be extremely valuable. The company has been inserting ads into its app for a little over two years now, and that taught it some critical details.
His previous job was at Apple, one of the most profitable companies on the planet, where he helped launch its mobile ad product. He was inspired to leave for Foursquare, he says, because he thought it was simply the best way to do mobile advertising. The best model for where the company hopes to be a few years from now is probably Yelp, and in fact people around the Foursquare office refer to its new discovery app as a "Yelp-killer".
Crowley smiles and says something a bit shocking. Not only has Foursquare collected 6 billion check-ins, he says, but it has collected 6 billion signals to help it map out over 60 million places around the world.
Now that it has this data, Foursquare can make a very accurate guess at where you are when you stop moving, even without a check-in, a technology it hopes will allow it to keep its database of places fresh and accurate.
Foursquare calls these implicit check-ins "p-check-ins," or Neighborhood Sharing. Take your phone into four or five different Japanese restaurants over the course of six months and without a single check-in Foursquare will learn that you like Japanese food and start making recommendations for you based on that data. Tiny micro-facts are part of what could make Foursquare bigger than a recommendations service.
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We were being treated like rockstars, and I was hooked. I quickly found myself obsessed with creating products; trying to follow the work of Steve Jobs and other product leaders that did it best.
With so many approaches to product management, I found but a single common philosophy that bound all successful products together:. Recognizing the opportunity that mobile web browsers and SMS provide, Dennis Crowley conceived the check-in and began working on a mobile social network built around it called Dodgeball.
The service was acquired by Google in , but would soon collapse due to lack of support , leading Dennis and co-founder Alex Rainert to quit in frustration. The launch of the iPhone had only induced half the smartphone revolution; the other half arrived with the iOS SDK in Mobile apps created entirely new user behavior, and new user behavior creates incredible product opportunities.
Among them would be the ability to turn common occurences like arriving at local bars and restaurants into a game, and the desire to broadcast the location of our fancy new devices.
Foursquare, like all new services, would need users. Leaders who are shaping the future of business in creative ways. New workplaces, new food sources, new medicine--even an entirely new economic system.
A lot has happened at Foursquare over the subsequent decade. Instead of either selling out to a big company or fading away , as many another hot startup launched in did, Foursquare stayed independent and evolved. It ended up carving off the original check-in feature into a separate app called Swarm, and found a business model in providing location-related data to companies such as Apple, JetBlue, Target, Twitter, and Uber. This conversation has been edited for publication.
People that we knew and people that were interested in building cool stuff on the internet. There was no launch party. There was no event. And then I think we went every year for four years.
FC: Was that a happy surprise that people at the event loved what you were doing? Did you expect that or try to orchestrate it going viral? DC: To be honest, I remember feeling very self-conscious about the app that we had made.
Because Foursquare 1. It was a lot of stuff mashed together. And we actually thought people would think it was a dumb idea. People loved it.
And it was much better received than we expected it to be. We went from having a hundred users in New York City to leaving Austin probably with 4, or 5, users. That was really kind of the kickoff for the company. We came back being like, okay, this is interesting enough that we should continue plugging away.
Where everyone that you met was using Twitter. Everyone that you met was going to check in to a place. Everyone that you met had a camera phone. But everyone was using all of this stuff all the time [at SXSW]. Which is why it became a great place for other companies to launch things, because everyone was willing to play with prototypes.
And then we just stopped doing it because the company really got too big. And so we are showing off a demo that we call Hypertrending. The original Foursquare had a feature called trending. It would show you how many people had checked into a place.
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