You know, Foursquare? No, not the game you played as a kid. This is a game for you to play as an adult – allowing you to explore your city, connect with your friends and find new hot spots to hang out at. It’s being pinned as the next Twitter, and if you’re not on it yet, you should be.
For the people who haven’t heard of it yet, can you briefly describe what Foursquare is?
Naveen: The background for Foursquare comes from a service that Dennis started a long time ago, called Dodgeball. It was a service which allowed you to ping your friends to let them know where you are, via text messaging.
Dennis: You get this ambient awareness of where your friends go and what they’re doing and where they are right now and where they’re going to be in an hour from now. It helps you make better decisions about what to do after work, or on a random Saturday.
How did Dodgeball work?
Dennis: It was before we had GPS on phones and big touch screens. It was all based on SMS, so people would just send us a text message that said, “I’m at The Magician,” or “I’m at Cooper Square,” at wherever. And we would have to do all this tricky stuff on our end to try to match what the user said to where we thought they were.
And Foursquare is more sophisticated than that?
Dennis: Yeah, it gets a little bit easier on today’s phones. We have an iPhone app with a menu that will tell you, “Here are the 10 places that are nearby, choose the one you’re at.” It’s more precise and easier for people to use. But the way people are using it, the value that people get out of it, is still the same. There’s just a lot more people that are playing with it now. People have more mature phones to play on, and they’re used to things like Twitter, so the Foursquare concept is easier to grasp.
Screenshots of the Foursquare iPhone app via TechCrunch.
What are your backgrounds? What led you to start this thing?
Naveen: A long long time ago, I was working at Sony Music, doing a lot of their mobile product stuff – basically building a music store for your phone. And then I worked at this company called Socialight, which is where Dennis and I met. They also do a lot of local platform, local blogging kind of stuff. So I’ve been doing mobile-related stuff for almost 10 years now.
Dennis: Before doing this, I was at a company called Area/Code. It’s a digital agency, and they specifically do work that overlaps the digital world with the physical world. They started a business around co-opting public spaces or public data feeds. A lot of the Dodgeball and Foursquare stuff comes out of time that I was there. Dodgeball was bought by Google in 2005. When we went to Google it was just too big; we couldn’t get a lot of stuff done. So I left Google and went back to Area/Code. Naveen was at another company that shared office space with them. We were at different companies, but our desks were next to each other.
Naveen: Dennis and I started talking about how we could augment the Dodgeball experience with other things. There’s a lot of data to be mined from where everybody hangs out, where everybody goes every day. Your friends know a lot of things about the city that you may not know. We thought, why not bring all that stuff together in a single experience? We just threw ideas out there.
When did you decide to go full-force with Foursquare?
Dennis: Naveen and I had been running little experiments on the side, just talking about stuff and prototyping things. Then, in January, Google announced that they were going to shut down Dodgeball. Naveen and I started seriously thinking, “We should build something and try to replace it.” We set SXSW, in March, as a deadline to launch.
Naveen and Dennis at SXSW [photo via flickr]
Wow – that’s not a whole lot of time.
Dennis: Yeah. And so we saw a huge spike in growth at SXSW, but then there was a big comedown after that, because a lot of the stuff wasn’t working properly yet. But we got the concept out there. Around June, we got everything working. We came out with stronger versions of the iPhone app, and since then we’ve seen hockey-stick growth. It’s been awesome.
What was the launch like?
Dennis: We went down to Austin for SXSW thinking, “People either going to be really interested or they’re going to laugh at it and think it’s stupid.” Luckily it worked and people liked it, and they told more people about it. SXSW is great for that. People go home to Seattle, and San Francisco, and Portland, and Washington, wherever, and spread it to their friends. So it was really important that we hit that launch date.
What kind of feedback have you gotten?
Dennis: It’s a lot like the feedback Twitter got early on. I don’t know if that’s encouraging or just to be expected. People say, “I hate it, I would never use this.”
Naveen: Well, more like, “What’s this for? Why would I use this?”
Dennis: And then people come back to it. “OK I tried it, now I’m kind of hooked.” There’s definitely that same hater-to-hardcore-user cycle. So we want to encourage people to sign up and play around with it! And let us know what you think – a lot of the decisions that we make about what we’re going to build next come directly from the users. The more feedback that we get from people, the better.
Video of Naveen and Dennis at SXSW, talking about the Foursquare launch
How many cities do you support now?
Naveen: It’s 20 cities in the US, plus Amsterdam and Vancouver.
Dennis: The number one feature that people request is, “Bring it to my city.” It’s one thing to try to go get data for Phoenix, but it’s another thing to try to get a data set for Berlin, or Tokyo – somewhere where you don’t understand the language, or the character set doesn’t even match up. It’s difficult. But we’ve got this laundry list of users that are asking, “Please add this city.” A bunch of users started a petition to launch Vancouver. Weren’t you getting like Twitter-bombed?
Naveen: Yep. They would retweet, over and over again. It was easily 300 or 400 messages.
So what are your hopes for growing this? More cities, more users – anything else?
Naveen: More devices. Right now we’re on SMS and mobile web, as well as iPhone. We just launched Android. That’s an app that was actually developed by 8 to 10 passionate developers and designers who just got together and used our API.
Dennis: There’s a huge list of all the stuff that we want to do. We’ve started to reach out to bars and offer specials, like, “If you’re the mayor you get a free cocktail.” We want to allow local businesses and local merchants to communicate back and forth with the users. There’s all these little things that we just started experimenting with. We went and raised some investment money, so now we can hire a couple other people to flesh a lot of this stuff out.
Very cool! One last question – what advice do you have for other people who want to take their ideas and launch them?
Dennis: Don’t be afraid to work in teams, and don’t be afraid to share your ideas with people. I’ve been teaching at the ITP program at NYU for a couple years, and lots of students say, “I’m really afraid to get people on board, because I don’t want them to steal my ideas.” You have to realize that ideas are kind of a dime a dozen. It’s much, much harder to go out and build something. You have to be a little bit vocal and try to get a lot of people involved, and get them excited about what you’re doing.
Naveen: I’d say find a co-founder. There have been many times when I started different projects, but nothing ever went anywhere. I did a lot of small hacks and small experiments, but if it worked for me, I would leave it at that scale. For instance, I had a bookmarking thing on my phone that helped me bookmark all the places that I wanted to go to or wanted to remember. It was very hacked together, very low level, but it worked for me. So I never took it to the next step. It helps to have someone to bounce ideas off of.
Dennis: Another thing is, there’s always people that say, “What you’re doing is stupid. No one wants that.” There’s just a ton of haters. People hated on Dodgeball before we built it. We even hated on Foursquare a little in the beginning – “This is kind of stupid, right? Is this going to work?” But if you have a gut feeling about something, you should just do it and see how it goes.