

WhereBerry (YC W11): A Social Network for Making Future Plans - turoczy
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/17/a-social-network-for-making-future-plans/

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mvkel
We tried solving this problem in 2007 with the "plans" functionality in the
first iteration of Localist. It's definitely a tough nut to crack, as a
website/app will never beat the convenience/accessibility of email.

Here's the biggest issue we ran into, which I'm not sure WhereBerry has solved
either:

Let's say Julie wants to see Fast Five (ugh), and she wants to know which of
her friends would like to attend. At first, she considers using WhereBerry, as
it's designed for such things. But wait, Julie's friend Joe doesn't have an
iPhone. And I know her other friend Steve doesn't use social networking sites
besides Facebook. Julie resolves to just send an email out to everyone, so she
knows she'll get a response from everyone she wants to talk to in one step.
Plus, she already has everyone's email address.

See the problem? Julie is forced to isolate her non-WhereBerry friends, or
invite some on WhereBerry, and others via email (huge inconvenience). This
isn't solving the problem. It's compounding it. Let's say WhereBerry tries to
"solve" this problem by allowing Julie to invite non-members via email. We
tried that, too. While it sounds good on paper, nobody wants to send their
friends an email saying "Hey I want to go to this movie. Join WhereBerry to
tell me your response!" In reality, they'll probably text Julie saying "Sure,
I can go! Why didn't you just text me?"

It doesn't matter if 95% of your friends are signed up to WhereBerry. You'd
need 100% to get people to use it in any consistent form.

It's not a tough problem to discover, as many products have attempted to solve
it. But, no company has succeeded, specifically because of the scenario posed
above. I wish WhereBerry luck, but I think it needs to solve the problem
before being a "cool plan-making utility." There are millions of those.

~~~
bricestacey
Did you try not requiring sign ups to respond? Invitees should be able to
click yes or no and automatically create an account for them.

~~~
unfasten
I had a similar thought as well, except no automatic sign up. What if the sent
email had a reply-to address specific to the event?

In the event invite email you could have a short message that tells the person
can just reply to the email with a 'Yes/No/Maybe' in the subject and any
thoughts or questions in the body. The service would then show the appropriate
response on Julie's event. 'Maybe' responses would be marked somehow to show
they need manual review and Julie would be able to see the the response text
from the email and easily set the status for that person.

To help make it simpler, for people that don't change the subject you could
default to a 'maybe/review' response or try language processing on the
response text.

Combine this with your idea of including links in the email for a quick
response and I think it could work.

~~~
nickbaum
Being able to interact with the app without signing app is something we've
wanted to do.

We chose to get it out the door first so we have a larger user base to learn
from, but hopefully we'll get to it soon.

Great suggestion!

~~~
dodo53
From my experience of facebook - I'd say aggregating or having the choice of
aggregating all the email would be really nice. So instead of a So-and-so is
doing X, would you like to join them? You could have - Your friends are
planning the following things this week/later this month. Reply with subject X
to join in.

~~~
mvkel
We do this -- a digest email of sorts. It's very handy. Still requires the
user to have a friends list, though.

~~~
dodo53
Cool. I guess I should sign up before suggesting stuff :o)

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twakefield
I think this is pretty useful for broadening your social graph, or as normals
call it - making new friends. There seems to be a trend towards using
technology to facilitate having experiences with people that aren't your
closest friends but that you have some kind of connection to or common
interest with (see grubwith.us). Maybe it's a new kind of social dating,
although it certainly could be used for making/solidifying platonic
relationships. This is obviously useful for someone that moves to a new city
or just wants to explore new relationships. Also, it allows you to throw an
idea out there to see if there's interest before having to figure out all the
scheduling details.

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akkartik
This is hugely monetizable, far more valuable than checkins. Imagine being
able to advertise coupons to people who have already indicated willingness to
go to your competitor.

~~~
mvkel
Theoretically, but there have already been enough apps released to gauge
viability... there's not much.

Groupon needs several thousand employees just to build the relationships with
local businesses, the difference is it could be ANY business.

With this, WhereBerry would need to base their monetization on user activity,
which means they need a critical mass of users before they can even approach
businesses to ask for their ad money.

~~~
akkartik
Hmm, but do they need a larger critical mass than fourSquare or even groupon?

~~~
mvkel
To turn the project into an actual business, yes. They'd need at least a year
of exponential user growth before convincing businesses to spend ad dollars
will actually yield a return. In just one city.

~~~
akkartik
Which is more than fourSquare needed? Why?

~~~
mvkel
Ever heard of Dodgeball? Foursquare's been going for quite a while :)

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Cherian_Abraham
Its not everyday when something we are building ends up on NYTimes as being
built by a competitor and that too funded by YC. Its a double whammy though
with a cherry on top - of validation.

We still havent been able to figure out how to scale this and answer the
questions posed by mvkel. We have not quit our jobs and are building this at
our spare time, so that shows we are not committed as Whereberry's founders.
But its still cool to know that someone else thinks the "pre-checkin" aspect
is pretty interesting. Another startup in the same scene would be Ditto.me.
They have a beautiful mobile app as well.

Just wanted to wish these guys the best.

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gms
The best ideas are ones that seem obvious in hindsight. This is one of them.

I look forward to trying it out.

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theklub
I actually think now is a good time for a new social network. People are
increasingly sick of Facebook.

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kongqiu
Telling me I need to "invite a friend" to gain access is extremely lame at
this stage in the game.

Maybe after I've seen the product and am ramping up my use, this would be ok,
but before I've seen it? Poor form.

~~~
nickbaum
Hey kongqiu, this was actually a bug on our side. Until today, we were in
closed beta where we required users to have at least one friend on the
service.

We removed that requirement last night. Unfortunately we left in a piece of
code that redirects you to the thank you page if the login fails. Facebook
Auth has been failing intermittently for us all day, so that's likely what
happened to you.

If you try again, you should be able to sign up immediately (and if Facebook
fails again, you'll see an error screen rather than the confusing thank you
screen). Sorry for the inconvenience.

~~~
kongqiu
Much better -- and good work doing customer service directly on HN!

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corin_
What's the advantage over a tweet or a facebook update of "I'm going to be
at.." or "I want to go to..." followed by "anyone up for it?"?

~~~
marksbren
I have thought about this type of service for a while. The problem with
Facebook and Twitter is the signal to noise ratio is too low. Your status
saying, "I am going to be here, who wants to join" will only be seen by a
fraction of your friends & is not necessarily limited to your current
geographic location. There is just too much noise.

~~~
wferrell
Hey Mark -- one of the WhereBerry co-founders here -- we think you are right
on the money. We also find that having a persistent list of activities you
want to do helps make that activity actually happen. Cheers!

~~~
nickbaum
Mark, that's too funny. The idea for WhereBerry came from my own Google
Spreadsheet, creatively titled "Concerts I want to go to". Turns out a lot of
people have these...

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akharris
loving what nick and bill are building - and if you want to join a smoked fish
expedition to brooklyn, you really should.

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suking
Seems like YC will take anything with a few good people and buzzwords this day
- ignoring the fact that there are 500 million social networks already...
Seems better suited as a fb app or something. Either way I personally have
little use for this, it's called a calendar...

~~~
useflyer
what differentiates whereberry from a calendar is that you can see all of your
friends calendars, too. If you want your friends to see that you're going to
the beerfest, it saves a conversation/invitation

the trick will be curating or culling the feed, we all have a lot of FB
friends

~~~
suking
I'm not sold... If I want to see if my friend is going I'll IM or call or
email them, this is almost an inconvenience.

~~~
kapilkale
If you want to see who out of your group of friends wants to watch a movie,
are you really going to IM / call / email 25 people? Organizing stuff is a
huge pain in the ass. Whereberry gets you doing stuff with people you wouldn't
ordinarily have even contacted.

~~~
suking
I don't ever want to do something with 25 friends, that's more of a meetup.com
type thing. I would usually have a few people in mind...

~~~
thomasgerbe
Agreed. If I want to see a movie, I already have a few friends who I know I
could contact directly to see if they'd want to go. Same with going to
restaurants or hiking.

I might have 300+ friends on Facebook, but really, I like to spend time with
maybe 10% of them on a weekly basis doing these type of activities.

~~~
Marvin_Kennis
So I guess you share your photo's via email still? Really, theres only a few
you know would be interested in seeing those, but you share them with all.

~~~
thomasgerbe
There's a pretty big difference between sharing photos and going to an event
with someone. I'm willing to share all my concert photos but I have a
shortlist of people I'd be willing to spend hours at a concert with.

