| > Imagine you are an event hoster, you create an event on ICU and you get an ICU link, people take picture with the app on your event, and in live you will see all the pictures on the link. I spent a year working on a startup doing exactly that. We failed. The problem we ran into is that it's cool, but Twitter (and others) already accomplish the same thing with hashtags. People just don't like to add new channels to their everyday lives. Beyond that, it was impossible (for us) to monetize, even though we had connections to creative agencies and large companies that were marketing events. The problem is that we weren't reducing pain points or adding operational efficiency, and thus paying us was never urgent. Meetings would get pushed off by weeks at a time, and it was hard to get anyone to make concrete moves forward. To give you an idea of what we were experiencing, imagine that you're selling your car. Which is a higher priority, getting a scratch fixed or having it waxed? It's very possible that you'll make your money back from the waxing when you're able to sell it for more money, but that's only a possibility. You're going to first spend your money on the repairs and then on the appearance. For the business world, increasing operational efficiency is like the repair, while marketing/social media is like the appearance. People in the business world just don't like to pay out for something that MIGHT have ROI. That's why creative budgets are some of the first to get crunched in a recession. |