| Have you heard of Boston based Sponty? http://www.thesponty.com Our original idea was exactly what you describe: organize casual events with friends. But that didn't gain traction. What we've empirically verified, is that this is not a big enough pain point to get people to ditch the default position. The default position being:
1. SMS
or
2. Facebook status updates. Not even structured events, even though Facebook just made creating the latter much easier. So we pivoted. The new incarnation was:
Discover events through taste makers. This -we thought- allowed us to short circuit the "I don't have enough friends on the service" argument. So now you can follow people who share your cultural interests and discover events through them so that you can drag your friends along. This newest incarnation is too hard to distribute. By distribution I mean: user acquisition. We had/have an awesome website, a native iPhone app, cool graphics and even a gaming element. You need to convince enough people to post events, and then convince others to follow them and like/attend those events. So my 2.0 cents:
1. Think about distribution: How are you going to get users?
2. Is this a big enough pain point to convince people to ditch the default? (I don't believe so, and I brought a similar product to market). EDIT: Sponty is still running and we do have users. But we've moved on and are now working on social games. Cheers,
M |
One of my ideas was to give users access to sponsored SMS's. They could send a SMS and would have to choose some sponsor to that SMS, in the bottom of the SMS it would be included a slogan of the sponsor (20-40 characters). This could also work as user acquisition by sponsoring the platform itself. <evil> The friends contact information could also be used somehow </user>
The strong points for this idea was that the profiles of users would have been richer to the advertisers allowing better targeting. Consumer brands are strongly tied to events, and I suppose this would facilitate getting advertisers. It would also enable to give brands opportunities to sponsor smaller events (long tail on the event advertising market).
Ads targeting is in a whole new level nowadays and I don't believe it would be a real competitive advantage, but maybe it could be sold as so. The success of this idea also depends a lot on how much people value free SMS's. Here in Portugal SMS's are free inside the same operator but I see younger people doing big gimmicks to get free SMS's to other operators. The effort people are willing to put to achieve that is crucial, I don't know how well that applies in other contexts.
Could we see something similar on Twitter? Instead of a sponsored SMS, a sponsored Tweet? If they give me the possibility of tweeting from my cell phone for free in exchange of a few characters and ads noise I would do it.