Small Talk On Our Awkward Orange Sofa with Zach DeWitt of Drop Messages
Vettery’s Clark Winter discussed with Zach DeWitt, co-founder of Drop Messages about leaving the typical path of corporates and business school, the importance of integrating with third party services, and the use cases of location-based data.
Founded in 2013, Drop Messages is an award-winning app that alerts you when you are near friends and photos from accounts that you follow. They recently pushed a new version so check it out today!
Drop users leave location-based messages for friends and other users where upon users can see them when they are at the location. I've heard you say that the idea for Drop messages originated from an email you sent to your roommates to take out the trash (which they subsequently forgot). Is this true?
In 2013 I was living with 3 friends in San Francisco and somehow I was the responsible one of the apartment. I would email and text my roommates to help with simple tasks when I was traveling for work like drag out the trash in the morning or record a football game. They would often forget as I would text or email them when their mind was on something else. I wanted to create a virtual sticky note that I could leave at our apartment so whenever they got home next, they would be reminded of the ask and wouldn't have an excuse for forgetting.
Beyond the fun element, tell us about some of the more practical use cases for leaving Drop messages?
Drop Messages has evolved a lot over the past two years. Our mission is to help you know what is going on around you. Now, you can open the app at anytime and see which friends are the same venue as you or are nearby. For example, if you go to a concert, you can check out which friends are also at the concert. We also send you alerts when friends are nearby and when geo-tagged photos from friends are nearby (either from Instagram or Drop). A practical use case that just happened to me was I was having dinner at Foreign Cinema in San Francisco which is a large restaurant with multiple rooms. I got a push that my sister's two best friends were near me and it turns out they were having dinner in the next room over! It was such a fun coincidence and was great to see them.
You are clearly very driven about the future of Drop. What was the tipping point for you to postpone your second year at HBS and move to SF and dedicate yourself full-time to Drop last year?
We launched in November 2013 and a few hours after launching, we pitched in front of a thousand people at the TechCrunch Boston Pitch-Off and somehow ended up winning. We were on the cover of TechCrunch.com for the weekend and this gave us conviction that location-based content is important and worth pursuing. When I deferred my second year of HBS, they told me that 90% of people that do this don't come back so hopefully I can keep pursuing Drop Messages for the foreseeable future.
You left the corporate world to launch a startup, what advice do you have for someone looking to join a startup but comes from a non-traditional background? Both on the technical side and the non-technical side.
Be as proactive as you can and be a social sponge. Coming from private equity, I needed to learn a new skill set quickly. I tried to read as much as I could and I had to be more proactive in pursuing small ideas. Nobody was telling me what to work on anymore so you have to grow into a more self-directed role. With the startup community, everyone seems to be very friendly and loves talking about what they are working on so try to attend as many meetups as possible and learn from others who have made the same mistakes you are making!
Integration with other social media seems crucial for creating virality. How important is it to you to incorporate the location craziness of users on other social media apps such as FB, Twitter, and in particular Instagram?
Facebook is the passport to the internet now so it was very important to allow Facebook login because it is quick and trustworthy. We recently integrated with Instagram because we realized that when a millennial takes a photo, it is either staying on their phone, being posted on Instagram or being sent on Snapchat. We realized we couldn't compete at point of capture with Instagram so we made the decision to work with their API and give our userbase location-based context: when they try a new restaurant or explore a new city, we will alert them if their friends have posted at those locations before!
If you weren't growing Drop, which other startup would you love to work at? Why?
I would work at Yoshi. Two of my best friends, Nick Alexander and Bryan Frist, co-founded the company. Yoshi delivers gas to your car every week when parked at work. It is a great idea and saves the average driver ~10 hours a year while filling up at the pump. If they can figure out how to get the price of gas below what is being served at the pump, I think it can be a unicorn of a company!
If you could combine two existing, but unrelated startups to make something totally ridiculous, what would they be?
This is an awesome question and a great brainstorming prompt for new startup ideas! I love people and I love hearing people's background stories -- where they came from, what they care about and where are they going. I would combine Shazam with Facebook so I could shake my phone and quickly learn about someone before I meet them.
What's your favorite social media handle/account to follow?
@historyphotographed on Instagram. Amazing photos -- recently they posted a pic of The Rock's dad from 1981 and he was probably even larger than The Rock.
Lastly, what your favorite Drop you have come across?
I traveled to China with my family this summer and we were visiting a Tea House in Hangzhou and my friend had been there before and posted a photo. Was very cool to feel like I was walking in his shoes and it was a complete coincidence.
