WhereBerry (YC W11): A Social Network for Making Future Plans
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
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.
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.
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!
Why would a person go to the trouble of filling out everything on WhereBerry, connect their Gmail, connect their Facebook, go through both lists, etc.? The only thing WhereBerry has done is introduce an extra step without adding any incentive to do so. The event host is still getting the same information that they would if they posted on their FB wall, or shot an email out.
I hate beating up on WhereBerry, but this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to figuring out this problem. We went well beyond these first steps and still didn't figure it out.
We see WhereBerry as most useful for less mainstream things (Inside Job, Cambodian restaurant, Lebowski play) where you want to do it, but don't know who might want to join you. WhereBerry helps you gain some momentum, at which point you can organize it via email.
Did you see any of that kind of activity? I'd love to chat briefly if you want to get in touch at feedback@.
Ultimately, users want to publish their plans where most of their friends will see them. That is Facebook. Ever think about putting the app on FB, vs. rolling your own?
You, sir, have a chicken and egg problem.
Although it does surprise me a little. Among my friends, I don't think we ever use email to organize things like going to see a concert. Or really, anything.
And I doubt I have more than 10 friends' emails at this point. ALL my communication with (non-business) friends happens on Facebook.
Is it very common among other people to organize things by email?
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.
(Goes back to working feverishly on his own flavor of futurecasting...)
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.
I look forward to trying it out.
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.
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.
Also - could lead to a targeted-groupon like business model (in your circle of friends, 2 people have said they really want to come to our restaurant. Convince 10 people and get 20% off! Someone's friends that already like a product are probably the best word of mouth you can get). Or advertising could be much better targeted if you say what you're planning on doing instead of what you have done.
I had an idea like this once (and gave up cos I thought it was unlikely I'd pull it off - and I think I have a more reasonable idea to execute on) for a social-network travel agent. If you have hundreds of people giving you advance notification of their desires (I'd like to go skiing, for < £800, anywhere in the alps, with this group of people), travel agents could do collective purchases like booking entire chalets / chartering flights (a la Social Flights which also just hit HN headlines).
A lot of people have probably looked into social planning, but no one has done it very well so far. The execution is going to be all that matters with this, not the fluffy pitch about "social" and all that gunk.
the trick will be curating or culling the feed, we all have a lot of FB friends
dodo53 and useflyer's comments do a good job at explaining how WhereBerry is different from a calendar.
WhereBerry is helpful for capturing ideas that aren't fully formed events yet – simply things you'd like to do. In fact, a lot of our items don't have a set date (movies, hikes, restaurants...). Once you know who's interested, it's easier to pick a date and organize it.
Re:curation, for now you can unfollow people who post activities you're not interested in. As we get better data, we plan to add relevance ranking so manual trimming becomes less necessary.
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.
You're correct and I get your point. My first statement didn't get out as intended. I think that with those services in its current form it's not so much about where it is now, but where it can get. Ofcourse you don't go out with the 300 friends you have on facebook. But those services aren't focused on such big networks; they are focused on the 25 people you do and can go out with and it is about sharing valuable information and having fun with those. Facebook is great for the 275 other ,,friends''. The network is smaller, but it's really more social.