No excuse. If you have a timestamped record of people's interactions with physical businesses and can't find a way to monetize that, sell to one of the thousands of people who can connect those dots pretty easily. And how do you possibly convince yourself that moving into an already-saturated market like ratings is going to help?
If it's as easy as you believe they wouldn't have pivoted. Perhaps they know something you don't. Or perhaps there's still a massive opportunity there. I don't know.
And how do you possibly convince yourself that moving into an already-saturated market like ratings is going to help?
I suspect it's by being wildly successful for a while and believing that you can translate that success in to a market that you can monetize. Plenty of companies make the mistake of thinking success follows you around rather than a pivot being a step backwards as far as your brand goes. Foursquare mistakenly thought that people were fans of Foursquare the brand rather than being fans of the value that Foursquare gave them (eg social validation from having the most checkins). They thought they were a brand like Nike that people do follow from one product to another. They were wrong.
I don't think that follows. People and organisations make mistakes all the time; it's equally possible that Foursquare made a bad decision here.
This kind of major decision would have been made with the full agreement of the board. They have some very impressive investors, including DFJ, Union Square, and A16Z. The theory that all of these people, people who collectively happened to have $160m on the line, just happened to miss easy monetization opportunities is implausible.
Not only that but in Foursquare leadership's case it was a matter of being wildly successful two times. Dennis had already sold the first version of Foursquare to Google.