PG: Quite possibly the worst idea ever
blog.fuzzyshot.com
blog.fuzzyshot.com
Your technology is good, your idea is good, but you positioning is bad. You see, you think people want to blog, but you are forgetting the motivation. People don't want to blog, people want to be heard or want to be seen.
Now, let me give you an idea that is almost like yours, but with the correct positioning:
Imagine there is a big-ass concert happening in town. Now, this is where everyone has their camera with them, and they are taking photos with their cameras. Now, THAT is a position for your application. When I take my photos of Kenny Rogers or whoever, then I want everyone to know that I got a photo with Kenny. So NOW I want to share.
So you see, in your case I have never wanted to blog about stuff I see on the street. But in the second case, I actually want to post photos of the concert, but it's not just easy to do it.
If I were your marketing guy, I'd rebrand as this:
Where were you? Send your photos in!
People take photos of their concerts or whereever they were, and it all gets dumped into a visually very attractive group collage of that concert. Something that looks like a poster, but with everyones photos just mashed together.
And there is your first monetization idea right there - sell posters of people in their own concerts, but with themselves inside.
And it's easy to make money, because you focus on people going to concerts and events, so you can make money by affiliating with a ticket seller.
The problem you have is that you make a proposition to me that sounds like pain. You write on your site: Blog with mobile phone, and I'm thinking:
1. I have to sign up 2. I have to download and install their app 3. I have to figure out how to send photos 4. I have to frickin blog 5. I have to invite everyone to join this damn blog I have which will be filled with a bunch of boring photos
It's pain. If I were already a photo blogger, maybe your tool would make sense, but for me, it has zero compel.
Position correct, and position in a simpler manner. Think of the twitter slogan.
Great suggestion. We have some ideas for how we can aggregate photos based on location and category. For example, if a bunch of photos from San Diego Comic-con came in we could somehow group those together into a public event. The iPhone camera quality is not super great so I'm not sure how many people would be interested in paying for a collage of photos with strangers in it. Maybe we can create personal prints of people's photos with the location of each photo on some sort of map...
To sleep.fm guys: not trying to offend, I genuinely think it's a bad idea.
To those who were in elementary school when Seinfeld was on: damn kids:-)
Like Redux, they would be helping their users get laid.
"Out of all the ideas you could build for this platform, this one is quite possibly the worst idea ever."
Sleep.fm probably didn't work on android :P
It could be useful if they streamlined it and marketed it without the corn :P
And like youtube there could be top rated wakeup messages and bedtime stories. It could be a passive voicetwitter that helps you in and out of your day.
Are you one of the founders?
You have the wrong attitude if you are only focused on what investors want.
EDIT: To answer your other question, I am not a co-founder, but looking at pure numbers they are doing better than my last two trials and those of a lot of us.
As for the meet thing: what do you do if you know your friends are 30 minutes late. Start another round of Sudoku on your phone?
99% of the time, SMS messages arrive within 30 seconds of the sender hitting "Send". When you are going to be delayed by 5+ minutes, 30 seconds rounds down to "instant".
As for the inconvenient, I personally HATE getting a call when I am either in a very quiet business lobby, or very loud social event for someone to deliver an essentially 1-sided trivial message ("I am running 15 minutes late"). SMS's are PERFECT for this. They are, IMO, cheap quick and convenient.
Perhaps it is all in the eye of the beholder.
The "killer app" for this situation would be (IMO) to use a GPS-enabled phone with some rudimentary mapping capabilities that would auto-text SMS ETA messages once you are >5 minutes away from the meeting start time and your travel time is also >7 minutes (ie: when it predicts that you're going to be late by more than a couple of minutes). You would have an "app" on your phone that sent SMS messages to your co-attendees (they would NOT have to install, download or use any sort of application just to get this trivial text info). This would increase the viability and adoption rate, as suddenly your friends do not all need smartphones to get some benefit from the app.
In every group there are always outliers, and I see this in some cases with techies who for some reason or another simply REFUSE to acknowledge that their cellphone is anything more than a $20/mo voice communicator. You can't really solve for those situations.
Amongst all the people I've known/worked with, SMS-enabled cell phones and monthly service packages are the norm. Building an app or service on top of the premise that people can easily and cheaply send and receive SMS messages is not, to me, all that grand of an assumption.
My solution above also somewhat applies to your situation, as you would be the potential SMS recipient from someone with an app-enabled phone. Also assuming that the SMS messages is of the "I'm running late" variety, which would be most common for business meetings and social gatherings, the 20c surcharge would not seem to be something that adds up to a ridiculous monthly accrual. As a proportion of the cost (as in cost of a normal social gathering where timeliness is of some value), or value (as in the potential value of a business meeting), I think 20c is less than a rounding error.
As for business meetings, SMS messages almost seem incredibly informal and curt, especially when money is on the line ("We're settling a business deal and you don't even have the courtesy to actually talk to me?").
I'm most certainly not saying that no one should be texting, just that to some people, a phone is a phone, and would prefer to hear someone and chat with them, rather than having short, expensive, impersonal messages flying about. Granted, 20c by itself isn't that much, but when us poor Americans get slapped with charges on both outgoung and incoming messages, it can add up pretty quickly.
If you don't use text messages, fine. But they definitely have their legitimate uses.
I do take issue with the slow and inconvenient part. It's real time and much less distracting than a phone call. If you stick with it for a few days you can type messages at a surprising rate and it really is faster than a phone call. You don't stop what someone's doing and take over when you send someone a text message. SMS has the convenience of email and the immediacy of a phone call.
However, the problem is that the implementation was flawed. Relying on people having solely the Android platform is a mistake. Basing it on the web as well as having a simple implementation over many platforms and having some sort of SMS or MMS integration for non-smart phone users might have got you somewhere. How to make money from it is a different question entirely though.
Philip Greenspun, Founders at Work, pg. 343:
People focus a lot on the bust-up phase. It upsets me that they remember the wrong things like, "This Greenspun guy sued the venture capitalists." This is not true, first of all, since I was a defendant, not a plaintiff.
So, do you have evidence that Greenspun is lying or confused, which I'd be very curious to see? Or are you just spreading malicious rumors with no basis in fact?
Perhaps you should shorten your meme to "be cautious of programmers" or just "be cautious".
You may need to stubbornly prove them wrong, or you may need to listen to them and make some changes. But don't pack it all in and get a job working for the man.
Sort of like a process of elimination; people can cross-check their ideas against a list of pre-determined list of bad ones for similarities. Might help with an early filtering process or even good for a laugh.
For example:
It's like a toilet, but only more social! This is not only a bad idea, but I think George Michael has already done this.
I can't tell you how many times I've heard this too. Just realize it only takes one "yes"... or whatever you're looking for to make it happen.
Are we solving a customer pain with Fuzzyshot?
But what customer pain are you solving? You describe your solution but not the problem...
Not to say it can't, but as-is it doesn't.
I use Buddy Beacon with Where.app all the time on my iPhone. Probably one of the most useful apps I've used.
It's frustrating enough to develop an app that depends on the adoption rate of a vaporware platform, but it really is kind of crazy to develop an app that depends on the square of the adoption rate of a vaporware platform.