'Play by your own rules' - How Gowalla lost the race against Foursquare | Hacker News Reader

'Play by your own rules' - How Gowalla lost the race against Foursquare

medium.com

20 pointsdirkk012 comments

That was a great read. Thanks for posting. It might just be your writing style but one thing I took away was Foursquare was leading and you were following. Or, to put it another way, you guys obsessed over them at the expense of your vision and they stuck to their vision. If that happens they're always going to be 1 step ahead by definition. Maybe that's what you mean by "Play by your own rules"

Great story, thanks for the post and congrats on achieving what you did.

Thank you for your comment. I was just posting it, I am not the author. In this thread I found out this was posted before and I hope Josh reads all of this.

I also got the same message. They always had better features but Foursquare got more popular and from then on, they were just catching up in popularity.

I heard Foursquare is just burning cash now. Do they even have a sustainable business model?

I feel like Foursquare had their biggest revenue thunder stolen by the hype around the Coupon companies.

They had a major opportunity to be a universal customer rewards program, using checkins as a proxy. But that has to be a much tougher row to hoe after the rise and fall of Groupon et al, and the stories of burned businesses in their wake.

I also think they missed the boat a bit on social. They had a chance to focus on building communities of people with geographically similar habits, but I don't think they ever found the way to make it click. I don't know what the revenue model would have been there, necessarily, but it does feel like they missed an opportunity with it.

Checkins are a terrible way to do any kind of rewards program because they can be trivially faked.

I always thought foursquare was more a gimmicky feature than a business. Sure "checking in" sounds cool the first few times. But sooner or later you have to ask "what's the point?" And there's really no good answer to that question.

That's my impression too, and the last time I remember anyone four-squaring was a long time ago. I think Facebook and Instagram ate their lunch.

Foursquare and Waze would make a great combination. Waze already shows me location-aware offers from every Taco Bell in the area.

I used both Gowalla and Foursquare when they launched. The reason I stopped using Gowalla was that they were pushing game features that distracted from simply keeping a check-in record of places you visited. Being a Foursquare mayor is simple and makes intuitive sense (you are mayor because you like a place and go there a lot), but Gowalla was sending you on what were essentially scavenger hunts, pushing you to visit places in order to complete a map or theme that they had created.

"Game-ification" was/is a popular app strategy but not everyone wants to make everything they do into a scored game. Sometimes you just want to record and/or communicate.

Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5328993

One bit missing from this story is that Foursquare and Gowalla didn't actually launch on the same day at SxSW. Foursquare had previously launched at the New York Tech Meetup a week or two earlier to an audience with a surprising amount of clout in the pre-celebrity Twittersphere of 2009.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com