

'Play by your own rules' - How Gowalla lost the race against Foursquare - dirkk0
https://medium.com/work-education/6152adc41de9

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jusben1369
That was a great read. Thanks for posting. It might just be your writing style
but one thing I took away was Foursquare was leading and you were following.
Or, to put it another way, you guys obsessed over them at the expense of your
vision and they stuck to their vision. If that happens they're always going to
be 1 step ahead by definition. Maybe that's what you mean by "Play by your own
rules"

Great story, thanks for the post and congrats on achieving what you did.

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dirkk0
Thank you for your comment. I was just posting it, I am not the author. In
this thread I found out this was posted before and I hope Josh reads all of
this.

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w1ntermute
I heard Foursquare is just burning cash now. Do they even have a sustainable
business model?

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waterlesscloud
I feel like Foursquare had their biggest revenue thunder stolen by the hype
around the Coupon companies.

They had a major opportunity to be a universal customer rewards program, using
checkins as a proxy. But that has to be a much tougher row to hoe after the
rise and fall of Groupon et al, and the stories of burned businesses in their
wake.

I also think they missed the boat a bit on social. They had a chance to focus
on building communities of people with geographically similar habits, but I
don't think they ever found the way to make it click. I don't know what the
revenue model would have been there, necessarily, but it does feel like they
missed an opportunity with it.

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evan_
Checkins are a terrible way to do any kind of rewards program because they can
be trivially faked.

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tiramisu
I used both Gowalla and Foursquare when they launched. The reason I stopped
using Gowalla was that they were pushing game features that distracted from
simply keeping a check-in record of places you visited. Being a Foursquare
mayor is simple and makes intuitive sense (you are mayor because you like a
place and go there a lot), but Gowalla was sending you on what were
essentially scavenger hunts, pushing you to visit places in order to complete
a map or theme that they had created.

"Game-ification" was/is a popular app strategy but not everyone wants to make
everything they do into a scored game. Sometimes you just want to record
and/or communicate.

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mef
Previous discussion <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5328993>

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jeremymims
One bit missing from this story is that Foursquare and Gowalla didn't actually
launch on the same day at SxSW. Foursquare had previously launched at the New
York Tech Meetup a week or two earlier to an audience with a surprising amount
of clout in the pre-celebrity Twittersphere of 2009.

