Shizzow: What I would have done differently
It’s been nearly 3 months since I announced that I left Shizzow, and I’ve finally been removed from it long enough to write a reflection piece.
I definitely share Dawn Foster’s sentiments in her great reflection post and promise not to repeat too much of what she stated. I will reiterate that we definitely spent too much time putting the cart before the horse, whether creating a corporation entity that was too heavy for what we needed at the time, or writing our own framework to create a scalable service before even opening up to beta users.
Creating Shizzow was a wonderful experience. From the start, we intended for Shizzow to be a service that allowed you to find your friends. As a refresher to how Shizzow came about in late 2007, Mark, Sam and I were coding buddies, and we found that while there were a number of ways to communicate our location, it took too much effort to contact each individual in our group separately in order to gather on the weekends. We created Shizzow to have a unified place to communicate location and status, and used the service to find and hang out with our friends.
Shizzow solved an immediate need for its founders, and initially for the Portland tech community as well. We launched at a time when the Portland tech community had found each other through Twitter, and Shizzow provided a way for community members to quickly find each other in the physical world.
But as it grew outside of the Portland tech community, Shizzow did not solve the needs of other communities. For new users, the “win” that the service provided was not a “win” for those individuals in other communities.
The location-based services that are still standing all provided wins for their users: Brightkite and Gowalla met the needs of techies by offering a great user experience on their websites and iPhone apps; Brightkite allowed its users to show-off to their friends by taking and posting pictures of themselves and attach that to their check-in, while Gowalla provided virtual rewards. Meanwhile, Foursquare met the needs of the gamer crowd by offering virtual rewards, such as badges, leaderboard statistics, and the ability to become the “mayor” of a location, which is awarded to the person to frequent a particular location the most.
While Shizzow wasn’t able to compete with the aforementioned services, I still consider it a success for developing into the Portland friend finder that it was originally intended to become. But the way that we weren’t successful was that we failed to shift the focus of our service to create a win for new users in order to grow the Shizzow userbase.
Brightkite, Gowalla and Foursquare all created wins for their users, but these are temporary wins, in my opinion. Virtual rewards only really speak to a small subset of the human population, and won’t work for mainstream people. For my mother to have used Shizzow, it would have had to provided a win for her, and that only could have happened by creating a physically manifested reward for using the service.
If I could do it over again, I would have approached Shizzow from the standpoint that it needed to provide a physical reward for its users. First, I would have developed a basic iPhone app for the service. Then I would have wrangled up local businesses to provide coupons that would be delivered via push notification as soon as a user checked in to that location.
For example, when a user checks-in to a Starbucks, they’re effectively advertising their preference for Starbucks to their entire social network, and Starbucks should reward a user for that advertisement. After checking in to a location a user should receive a text message containing a $.50 off coupon code off their next purchase that must be used within 1 hour of checking into that location. And heck, add an extra $.50 off for marketing that location by posting that check-in to Twitter, and maybe another $.50 off for posting that check-in to Facebook too. If a mainstream user can save $1.50 off their $3.80 cappuccino simply by taking 15 seconds to declare their location to their social network - now that’s the kind of win that would get my mother to use that service.
Additionally, there were a number of developers who were working on iPhone and Android applications using the Shizzow API, none of which came to fruition because we didn’t provide a win for those developers. The win that we offered was that we promised to provide the developers with recognition for their applications. But writing a full iPhone or Android application was simply too daunting of a task and required a greater incentive to finish those applications. In the scenario above, I would have offered incentives for developers to create applications for each of the mobile platforms by offering those developers revenue sharing for allowing users to check-in to Shizzow and also delivering coupons to those users upon check-in.
Now, this is a very condensed summary of what happened and why we didn’t reach the level of success that we’d intended. There are any number of factors as to why we weren’t able to see that we weren’t meeting the needs of new users - from not being lightweight and agile enough to shift our strategy quickly, to spending too much time implementing technology that wasn’t yet necessary, to being burnt out from working full-time jobs and trying to launch this startup in our night and weekend hours. While I don’t technically have regrets about how we operated Shizzow, I would have been okay with a $125 million buyout offer.
