Plancast folds, GonnaBe responds
Today Mark Hendrickson, founder and CEO of Plancast, announced that he's winding down the business and stepping away from it. He gave an in-depth postmortem on Tech Crunch explaining the difficulties and failures he encountered, which was chock full of insights and helpful information.
The article was also full of proof that Plancast was never positioned to break into the mainstream market. It worked, but only for its niche appeal: "events."
Please read the Tech Crunch article if you have the time - it's great. Then see below: a set of rebuttals and commentary on many of the points Mark makes. GonnaBe's service will gain larger traction because its intent is better aligned with mainstream users.
The world of "events" - think conferences, networking socials, and "meetups" - refers to a specific activity. This is a space populated mostly by startup folks, techies, businesspeople, and members of a specific industry for a function on one particular night. A service that only deals with these types of occasions is bound to find trouble scaling, because there are only so many "events" that one can attend. Most non-business people (read: the masses) don't care about "events" – or at least not enough to use a service to organize them. Their lives revolve around other important things, like food, drinks, and fun. And there's a ton of planning around these occasions every day – they're simply not considered "events." These activities are simply "what's happening." To most mainstream consumers, they're considered "my social life."
GonnaBe realized that there isn't a service that makes planning this social life easier. It seems like services like Plancast, Meetup, et al are more positioned for the business world, or at least more official occasions between friends (camping trips, birthday parties, etc.). We at GonnaBe are fortunate to have had a foot firmly planted in "social life" as we careened through our ad agency jobs, and we've determined the real planning needs of people. (Hint: it's not "events").
Let's look at Mark's learnings to see how Plancast may have been better positioned to tackle its various problems:
People also don’t proactively seek out events to attend as you might suppose.Â
Perhaps this refers to businesspeople, or folks with families at home perhaps. Regardless, the target should be those who have lots of free time. For:Â
 Those who don’t have much free time and would rather not plan anything at all,Â
they should be able to browse their friends and get value from it. Like Twitter. Low friction plan-making and browsing.
It’s hard to get them excited about a service that will give them more options on how to use their time. Â
Giving people more options on how to use their time is the wrong goal. What the service should do is help you save time and energy by making it easier to know what's going on around you with your friends, colleagues, and even strangers doing something you might want to do. The result will be more options for what to do, but it won't feel that way.
Most people resist making advanced commitments before they absolutely need to make them. People fear missing out on worthwhile events but don’t actually like to take the deliberate initiative to avoid such missed chances, which requires planningÂ
True, but GonnaBe can be used with a few hours or even minutes advance - this isn't something that needs days of planning ahead of it (though it works for that, too).
The positive feedback of having friends join...Â
...is not what drives GonnaBe's service to success. It's first and foremost a utility to help alleviate the inconvenience of mass emails, phone trees, and mass texts to organize a simple activity. It's more about "FYI", not "hey join me for this cool event!" In many cases, the activity could be something that 2 or 3 are already going to do (having talked about it at work) and then each posts it to GonnaBe so that others can join if they'd like, or at least know that it's happening.
friends have considerations to make before they can commit, and they’ll tend to defer that commitment for practical purposes, per above...
...there is a time window when people have to make a decision about what they're gonna be doing on a given night. It's often not a few days or weeks out, but like we said above – it's a few hours or minutes. It's Friday from 5-8pm, or Saturday afternoon. That's GonnaBe's prime space.
Additionally, if a user wants to show off the fact they’re at a cool event, there is little additional benefit to doing so before the event rather than simply tweeting or posting photos about it while at the event. Â
We disagree. It seems that Plancast's intent was culturally disconnected. Knowing what's going on in your social group on a given weekend and being able to opt in publicly, early, is huge for the social set. Plancast was never positioned to take advantage of this space, and it's a big space.
An important exception is to be made for professionals who style themselves as influencers and want to be instrumental parts of how their peers discover events. This exception has indeed been responsible for much of our attendee-contributed event data among an early-adopter community of technology professionals.Â
Yes, these folks are important. And there is an entire segment of individuals outside of the standard business world who do "style themselves as influencers and want to be instrumental, etc.," on a purely social level, far away from startup, tech, or business-land. Another cultural disconnect for Plancast. These socialites will likely be the drivers of the entire service.
Vanity, of course, is not the only possible incentive for users to share their plans. There’s also utility to getting others to join you for an event you’ll be attending, but this turns out to be a weak incentive for broadcasting since most people prefer to be rather picky about who they solicit to join them for real-life encounters.Â
This may be the case in the business or professional world, but it's very different in the social space. People may get "rather picky" on professional occasions, but outside of this arena they prioritize enjoying their time with friends and having fun experiences. GonnaBe helps facilitate these.
Attendees themselves mainly turn to their closer circle of friends and reach out to them individually. You don’t see a lot of longer-tail plans in particular (such as nights out on the town and trips) because people are both wary of party crashers and usually uninterested in sourcing participants from a wide network.Â
More and more we're seeing tweets and FB posts that read: "Anyone down for drinks tonight?" This is not a new cultural wave, mind you - but it's a sign of the times, and a trend that points to a new utility available to people. GonnaBe's offering a crowd blast option, a personal invite option, and a private event option are what will help alleviate this perceived problem (which, again, is likely much more present in the professional world and not in the younger crowd). Our service will start there and eventually build out to all of these rejectors that Mark is recognizing, who - by the time GonnaBe gets to them in a mature state - ought to hop right on board.
When you have a service that helps spread personal event information but doesn’t concurrently satisfy that need, you have a situation where many people feel awkwardly aware of events to which they don’t feel welcome.Â
This is exactly why GonnaBe offers a public post and is planning an FYI option to let you make your friends feel recognized.
Unfortunately, plans don’t have a long shelf life. Before an event transpires, a user’s plan for it provides social value by notifying others of the opportunity. But afterwards, its value to the network drops precipitously to virtually nothing. And since most users don’t have enough confidence to share most plans more than one or two weeks in advance, plans are typically rendered useless after that length of time.Â
True - but activities happen in perpetuity - events, happenings, etc. So this argument is like saying before Twitter existed: "Blog posts and articles are short-term items that become dated immediately. There is no value to a platform that simply allows users to be aware of a short term info piece or link." For GonnaBe, if the content is self-perpetuating then the platform is always valuable.
I may share plans for a ton of great events in San Francisco, but few to none of my friends who live outside of the Bay Area are going to care. In fact, they’ll find it annoying to witness something they’ll miss out on. Sure, they might appreciate simply knowing what I’m up to, but the value to that kind of surveillance is rather modest all by itself.Â
Two good points in here. 1) GonnaBe will offer a geo-fence search feature that shows only your friends close to you, and 2) It seems Mark has never Facebook-stalked anyone, and is not aware of a key fact that anyone under 30 will tell you: surveillance is a VERY big part of social media - especially Facebook and Foursquare, and to some degree Twitter.
This is especially problematic when trying to expand the service into new locations. New users will have a hard time finding enough local friends who are either on the service and sharing their plans already, or those who are willing to join them on a new service upon invitation.Â
This is why GonnaBe is built to be a service that will allow:
1. Users to get value from it (by posting a happening to their friends) and
2. Non-users to get value out of it (seeing the post on FB or Twitter or getting an invite/FYI personally, and being able to opt-in to the activity without owning the app).
It will grow and expand in a frictionless way, much like Instagram has.
People who encounter the service from non-urban locations have the hardest time, since there aren’t many events going on in their area in general, let alone posted to Plancast. Trying to view all events simply listed within their location or categories of interest yields little for them to enjoy.Â
People in rural areas still have friends and still do social things and are still on Facebook. In this way GonnaBe is able to avoid needing critical mass in order to work. Also, trying to view all events in an area is extremely valuable to people, rural or urban (folks who are new to a city, are feeling adventurous, recently single, have a new job, or are looking for a new experience).
Mark has learned a lot from his run with Plancast, and we've in turn learned a lot from his insights (which, between these highlighted comments, are terrific insights).Â
For mainstream adoption, the service has to be about your social life - not "events." "Events" is too strong of a word. Plancast was rarely if ever used for lightweight plans. That's where the use cases will really explode.
It's about joining in, hanging out, meeting, or simply knowing what your friends are doing. Mark and Plancast were either trying to solve a different problem, or were mis-judging the intentions of the masses. There are about 100MM young folks out there that know nothing about the startup world, the tech world, or the business world, but use social media products every day. Reaching these people is the key. It's what Facebook did, it's what Twitter did, it's what Foursquare and Instagram are doing, and it's what GonnaBe is gonna do.Â
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