The Trigger SXSW: Hank Leber, GonnaBe
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The Trigger SXSW: Hank Leber, GonnaBe
GonnaBe hanging out in the Rackspace Winner's Circle at SXSW. Read more about our time in Austin on Rackspace's blog:
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/inside-the-rackspace-winners-circle-at-sxsw-startups-using-open-cloud/
CEO Hank Leber talks the latest on GonnaBe at #Launch2013.
Greetings from the team at #LAUNCH2013 in San Francisco. We're sharing what's in everyone's future by using GonnaBe to show where they're going to be & what they're going to be doing...all right from our gypsy camp.
The Social Networker's Chris Miller & Living Life Mobile's Paul Steel give their thoughts on GonnaBe & SXSW. GonnaBe humbly thanks them for the shout out & responds to questions they raised in their review.Â
Will GonnaBe eventually support other networks besides Facebook? Well, we'd like to (as we love all social media platforms.) The reason we're sticking to Facebook Connect for logging in is: security. Facebook makes it difficult to create fake accounts and we value that as a high priority with our app. Because let's be honest, it's rarely supermodels or tall-dark-&-handsomes who are making fake profiles – and our users have expressed concerns over creepy ex-boyfriends with restraining orders, etc. GonnaBe is social media for your actual social life. So the rules change a bit.
Re: inviting people to your GonnaBe plans – a great concern. In the next app update (due out before SXSW) you can invite your friends to plans via SMS, email, Facebook & the GonnaBe network – which encompasses nearly everyone you know in this world. Our favorite part: even if they aren't GonnaBe users you can still invite them, and they can opt in without ever downloading the app. We like to think of it as sharing a little GonnaBe love with everyone – no strings attached (TMI?)
To the points about Facebook not being an accurate depiction of your social graph, realize that we're only using Facebook for login (so that you've got legitimacy, a profile pic, and a proper name). We never intended GonnaBe to be a Facebook-friends-group-activity platform. That's called Facebook Events. There are over a billion people on Facebook. It's a safe bet that the people you know are on it, so we'll stick with it for now.
In regards to our sweet GonnaBe party – we can't wait to see you there. To clarify: the first 50 to opt-in to our plan will get their first drink free. But because you think we're so slick...maybe 2 for the both of you.Â
See you both at SXSW! You'll find us on the app.Â
It Was Never About Me, Was It? The Real Value Of Living Social.
Living Social is in trouble. Whether they know it or not. Or would care to admit it. Privco.com reported on Wednesday; "LivingSocial (PrivCo Private Company Ticker: LIVSOCP) has just received $110 million in emergency financing from some of its existing investors today, in a last ditch attempt to save the privately-held daily deals company from imminent financial ruin, PrivCo has confirmed exclusively, until the company can be sold by year's end to recoup whatever is still possible." Yikes. Sounds like no one's hankering after those 8 gym classes or helicopter tours around your city after all. Or maybe it's because we've all come to realize that Living Social doesn't really know us at all.
I could kick myself for opening the 3-Hydrocolonics for $15 deal about 9 months back as a joke for a friends upcoming birthday. Why? Because now Living Social is under the impression that's my thing. And it's so not-my-thing that it's enough for my to delete every Living Social email I get (without reading it) and eventually just unsubscribe all together.
Let's be honest - I suppose I was never really honest with Living Social about my wants & needs - but then again, they never asked or gave me a chance. They just made assumptions! And it seems like everyone's jumping off this band wagon with about as much fever as they jumped on. Guess they don't like daily reminders of 10-botox injections.Â
Now - the fate of Living Social is by, all means, still up for discussion. They still hold strong that there is no peril in our relationship regardless of what the rumors flying around the internet state. We'd be willing to hear them out if they'd stop reminding me I need to try out 18 different gym memberships.Â
However, this is exactly the fuel behind GonnaBe. The data that GonnaBe generates ensures quality. Users are telling us A) What they're gonna be doing, which turns into B) what they're doing, and then C) what they've done. So we know more about a user than LivingSocial ever did – and we're able to send deals, offers, and pairings in advance of your activity – in the very window that matters most. The defined space of opportunity that every marketer dreams of. It's the byproduct of our app. Finally - someone will understand my appreciation of a good wine with a good meal relatively close to public transportation! So three cheers for the (potential) demise of LivingSocial – it's validates the point: quality, not quantity. The smart targeting that comes from machine learning and the rare platforms like ours who have future/intent data is how this space will be won. And the payout will be bigger than the original valuations of Groupon and LivingSocial.
It's like someone will finally 'get' me.Â
GonnaBe CEO Hank Leber chats with Cat Mangan (@CatMangan), Event Marketing Manager for D&B Credibility, about what 2013 has in store for GonnaBe.
 Join DigitalLA for our pre-Valentine's Day panel featuring Dating and Social Networks! Speakers include: Eden Dranger, At The Pool, Social Media Manager. The At The Pool social network lets you join a school / interest group, and sends you daily emails based on your common interests introduing you to others in the group to encourage meeting in person. Also organizes networking events for members to meet. At The Pool recently raised $750K in funding. Backers include Clearstone Venture Partners, Canyon Creek Capital. Recent press includes TechCrunch, PandoDaily, etc. @ThePool Hank Leber, GonnaBE. CEO / Founder. App lets you let your friends know where you're gonna be to meet up, and also lets you see what events are going on around you. @GonnaBeApp
Brent Wisener, DateFunded. Founder. DateFunded site lets you set up dates that are crowdfunded by your friends to happen. Created at the recent AngelHack. @DateFunded
Tickets available here.
Time for a Platform: Teens texting, not checking-in.
According to this CBS news report, teens are sending more texts than ever. 60+ per day.
Not surprising, really. In fact, it's more justification that there needs to be a platform for this information. WTF are they (and we) still doing texting?
Looking deeper into the numbers, the compelling part isn't that texting is on the rise. That's to be expected. Everything mobile is on the rise. But according to the study,
"the increase in texting didn't carry over into location-based services like Foursquare or Facebook Places. Only 6 percent of teens overall admitted to checking in to share their physical location with friends."
6 percent. Know why? That's because most of their location-based and planning based info is still being communicated via text. Services like Foursquare and Facebook Places only allow you to share CURRENT location data. This is relatively useless when trying to make plans and figure out your day/night/weekend.
Most of the energy that these kids are putting into texts is wasted energy. Once upon a time we all used to send out links to cool articles via email. Remember? Yeah, it was around 2006 – before Twitter changed everything. A platform to help us share the data we wanted to share.
It's time for the info of our social lives to get organized. It's time for texting to take a back seat. It's time for a platform.
    -hank, CEO
Why we aren't Forecast/Foursquare/Plancast etc.
We get these questions a lot:
"How are you different from Forecast?"
"Didn't Plancast do this?"
"Can't I do something like this on Facebook?"
"What's wrong with texting? It's not inconvenient..."
It's like asking Instagram 2 years ago: How is this different from Hipstamatic? Didn't Flickr do this? Can't I already upload pictures on Facebook? What's wrong with using Photoshop? It's not inconvenient...Â
Here's our attempt to tackle all of these questions at once:
Some thoughts on search, social, and how future/intent space will unlock a ton of new levels of relevance. Ads won't feel like ads anymore – they'll feel like 50% off that thing you were gonna do anyway, or buy 4 get 1 free to that thing you're gonna do (now that you've got a group of 5 together).
Excited to lead the charge in undoing the problem of advertising: irrelevance and interruption suck. No more spray and pray... #itscoming
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.
While true:
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
-Hank Leber, CEO
The view from the office