Comment by po | Hacker News Reader

Comment by po | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

A service like foursquare can be useful to different people in different ways. Some people use it as a personal record, some people use it for discovery, some as a social app, some like the game, etc… Many people might initially come for the game and stay for the deals.

For example, when I lived in NYC I used to enjoy the game aspect and knowing where my friends were. When I moved to Tokyo, these weren't that useful to me. Now I still heavily use the application because I find their venue locations to be more accurate than google maps.

Beware of people predicting doom because it doesn't solve their pet-problem. I can't tell you how many friends I have that initially signed up with twitter, posted 5 or 10 tweets and then went dark for months or years only to become active again. Twitter failed to solve a problem for those users initially. What held twitter through (besides tons of investment money) is a core user group that loved the service as it is today. Foursquare has that.

I think I'd put what Foursquare has done well/not done well into three buckets:

1. Virality - Highly viral product that got shared enough to the point that almost everyone knows about it (in current target demographic). Throw up that Mission Accomplished banner.

2. Engagement: Falls off here. Most early adopters got bored, and it's just now catching on with what I would call the "early majority." This would be fine except they're running through the same cycle of being bored by checkins. Reviews/Radar seems like an attempt to engage their users beyond check-ins, which probably seems more confusing than anything else for the typical early majority user. I think the problem here is that they've lost the "core user group" (aka that bored early adopter) you're talking about...the type of people that would spend time curating lists, putting up great content, and getting a kick out of people checking in to their recommendations.

3. Monetization: Nobody seems to care about this anymore, but with their level of funding/valuation, it's probably becoming increasingly difficult to tell them that they're just a few pivots away from making money. However, until they have a clear idea of how people will engage with their product, I'm not so sure they'll know how to monetize. It seems like 4square is pushing towards some sort of CRM system for local merchants, but I don't think I'm smart enough to know the right answer to this one.

I think you are spot on. I think they are pushing towards CRM. The question is how many users do they need to pull off a local merchant CRM tool that is big enough to justify the amount of funding they have received.

I have found their recommendations to be stellar and much better than anything else.

"What held twitter through (besides tons of investment money) is a core user group that loved the service as it is today. Foursquare has that."

Bitcoin too?

"A service like foursquare can be useful to different people in different ways."

Which indicates that their focus is too broad to capture a critical mass of users that use it in the same way. I don't think a pivot is necessary, just a focus. They probably have enough $ to figure it out, but IMHO they need to find something soon and stick with it. I suppose "Radar" is supposed to be it, but I don't see it.

A knife is useful for different people in very different ways, but it's a very, very focused tool (unlike a spork). foursquare is a very focused service. The fact that users find different usages for it without them having to release tons of unfocused features only proves it's well designed

Reply on news.ycombinator.com