Down to Lunch Founders Pursue Less-Traveled Path to App Success | Hacker News Reader

Down to Lunch Founders Pursue Less-Traveled Path to App Success

nytimes.com

36 pointsdigital5514 comments

I recently did some research on sites like this and one of the oldest ones I found was "Yo You Want To" from 2009. It was basically the same as the others, but what was really interesting was finding analysis of why it and all the similar services since haven't made it by the founder in a comment:

Nikhil Nirmel · Lawdingo Founder

I, too, started a site like this for college kids back in the day (perhaps the first one. See: http://columbiaspectator.com/2009/11/04/columbia-students-sa...). This idea doesn't work. The primary reasons are:

1 - there's not sufficient motivation among people (let alone busy college students) to meet for platonic reasons. Either there's a prospect of clothes coming off, or there isn't interest.

2 - It requires, right out of the gate, a high proportion of students to be on it. It does the app not good if it has ten thousand users spread across 1000 schools.

3 - The time-based expiration means that there has to be huge number of requests posted; a lull in activity will mean there's no content, thus discouraging future activity.

4 - No good way to monetize. No virality since.

5 - And perhaps the biggest problem: even if all of these things were solved, it doesn't add more utility that mere messaging or group messaging.

http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/30/google-asks-if-you-are-down...

Wow, talk about a product that is not on my radar. Right now, I'm too geographically constrained to find it useful (it takes too long to casually meet up with friends), and in New York, we all just group texted each other. I guess this is nice in comparison to mass text/email (I'm speculating since I don't have the app) in that when one person replies "Yes!" or worse, "No", not everyone has to get that message. And right now, Facebook Events seem too formal a mechanism for setting up casual meetups. I could see that differentiation making a product...but how did it reach a critical mass?

It's funny that the article mentions that the app can be used for invitations to a variety of events, "even a church service". This sounds like the kind of app that would seemingly have originated from a church community. A lot of people go to megachurches for the daytime social networking, and stay loyal through small groups (Bible study, recreational sports, etc)...while it's often joked that this serves as a dating service for Christian singles, there's a lot of eagerness for platonic casual meetups, or just wondering if anyone is going to go to Wednesday night service this week. If a pastor recommended his 10,000 congregants to use an app to best stay in touch...I'd think that its adoption would spread very quickly...and the church-going crowd is still a big sector in America.

I guess other people enjoy this style of socializing, but I like to know at least the day before if we're supposed to hang out. I get annoyed when a friend texts me "hey let's do this thing right now", or in an hour or whatever. I already had an idea of what I was going to do that day, and it messes that up.

On the flipside, that is what makes me feel old.

In my teens/20s, my friends/colleagues and I would just go casually someplace to hang out after work/school without planning squat. (After class) Hey, let's go to x's house and chill. (After work) Everyone, let's go to x bar and unwind for a few hours. Now? I can't remember the last time I could casually say to a friend to hangout tomorrow. Practically everyone (save one's SO) seems like they need a few days to weeks notice in advanced. It's not an exaggeration to say that sometimes I have to book people 2-4 weeks in advance just to have a coffee/lunch! All I have to say is thank god for meetup.com which fills the space in between.

I had the same experience when I hit my 30s. I think it's because peoples' social networks expand through their 20s, and there's a bit of a social arms-race once peoples' calendars and social circles start to fill up. It's often considered rude to say "Somebody invited me to something else and I'd rather hang out with them than you, so I have to cancel", so most people take a first-come-first-serve approach to accepting invites. That means that each one of their friends needs to schedule before anyone else gets to them, so peoples' calendars fill up increasingly far out.

And then they get promoted, get married, and have kids, and they don't have time to hang out at all...

It's as much a cultural thing as it is a generational thing. In Argentina, where I grew up, showing up unannounced to a friend's house is normal (some people might add: "as long as you bring some food!"); on the other hand, in neighboring Brazil it was seen as a pretty rude.

So, I guess, what might not work for you might work for other people. I personally prefer at least a couple hours of heads up, but don't mind doing a last-minute dinner/lunch when I'm close to a friend I haven't seen in a while.

I've seen this app come up on the App Store search page, took a look and didn't get it. Just gave it a download based on this story.

Maybe I'm just old (28, a couple years older than these guys). But I don't get it. And I'm very much over this "growth hacking" trend. Asked for contacts, I said sure, figuring I'd see if anyone I knew actually used it. I'm now being prompted to share the app with everyone I know on every view of the screen (and it tells me how many friends they have on the service, which just feels weird to me).

At least the growth hacking will aid the inevitable "pivot", where they go Sync.me and sell all that contact book data.

I know I'm just being bitter and jealous. But the app doesn't even support the iPhone 6 screen size! It's literally a hand few of views! Like, how does the New York Times do a full expose on this? Like I wish I could offer to do the UI layout fixes for free, just so I could be less embarrassed that this is one of the top apps available today in my industry.

Have you ever thought about the possibility that NYT wrote about it because it's one of the most popular apps nowadays? Snapchat UI used to be super ghetto too. When you provide something that resonates with people, nothing else matters.

I built exactly this app (functionally, but even used "down" in our vocab) in 2003 for a class project called Nitester using the web and an AIM bot. If only I had the drive then to push it further rather than jump to the next project :/

https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~wgg/CSE118/presentations-2003.html

> I built exactly this app (functionally, but even used "down" in our vocab) in 2003 for a class project called Nitester using the web and an AIM bot. If only I had the drive then to push it further rather than jump to the next project :/

Do you seriously think a web based, AIM bot from 2003 is "exactly the same app" as a mobile, iOS, push notification based app of 2016? Your takeaway from this shouldn't be thinking you would have succeeded if you had the drive and kept working on it. There are probably at least tens of thousands of other people who tried solving the same problem, counting myself. I honestly have no idea how this took off because I've seen so many apps that tried to do the same thing and never took off, but these guys did. So I give them credit for the execution.

In my experience, things like this take off because the people/person who built it have enough contacts within a community to personally drive the initial adoption.

I rarely would say things like I built the same thing, and yes web/mobile are very diff but given the context it effectively was the same thing at that time.

I actually had never seen anyone do anything quite like it since until now -- what are these other ones?

Social is very tricky -- network effect is everything, and the founders ability to time and push that out is a combo of luck and skill. Just looking at the history of chat services is a clear demonstration of that.

Thus I'm not saying nitester was guaranteed to be successful, but the concept was the same, the context was good (I was in college and Facebook didn't exist yet so social was open), and I had the friend networks and already threw big parties/raves. I just regret not giving it a bigger shot. It did help me get into MIT for grad school so at least something good came out of my laziness :)

If you are asking "where are these other ones" you probably need to do some market research. There are many many many others that are much more "exactly the same" as this than yours. You can start here: https://www.producthunt.com/tech/down-to-lunch

I don't recommend that founders pose for photos in their office in their bare feet (and while eating!). Yuk.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com