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My friend Amit Klein and I have been giving away startup ideas on our blogs. Amit has previously talked about a service that lets you “follow” your favorite digital content and a service that aggregates and prioritizes incoming social messages based on what’s really important to you. I have previously written about a service that lets you create challenges for yourself and your friends based on your real-life goals.
Amit and I have been bouncing together ideas on interesting startup opportunities and here’s another startup we think someone should build: GTTGTHR.com (pronounced Get Together) — a service for getting together at places with friends of friends. As you can imagine, the service is inspired by services like SCVNGR that bring together the real world and the virtual world.
Here’s how Amit and I see users interacting with the service –
Step 1: You sign up using your Facebook ID and indicate your interest in joining different types of get-togethers: meet up for coffee, watch a movie, listen to live music, go shopping, learn how to dance etc.
Step 2: You browse through a list of awesome things to do in the city around your interests. Like Thrillist.
Step 3: You indicate that you will attend a proposed get-together, or suggest a venue for a proposed get-together, or propose a new get-together. Like Plancast.
Step 4: The system will connect you with friends-of-friends who have also expressed an interest in attending similar get-togethers. Like Thread.
Step 5: Once a group of friends-of-friends have decided to attend a get together, they might get a surprise group deal offer from the venue. Like Living Social.
Step 6: Users can be designated hosts for venues, activities, or even cities. Like Foursquare.
I see elements #1, #2, #3, #4 and #6 as engagement elements leading up to the real #5 group buying core.
You should build the service using the Facebook and Foursquare APIs and launch it city by city, starting with New York. The service has intention, location, game mechanics and transactions built in, so, you should be able to get some VC interest, with a decent beta.
What do you think? Would a service like GTTGTHR.com get traction? Would you like to build it? Has someone already built it?
At a recent Startup Weekend, one of the services to launch was: http://www.downforthat.com/
Though I believe they've stopped working on it.
you could check with http://www.techjini.com/ I'd heard they were working on this.
Thanks Manu, but the site to watch is http://www.gofika.com
stay tuned.
Sounds like a good idea! Would this be like an app on Facebook? It should have integration with twitter, linkedin too..
I'm imagining it as a standalone website with an iPhone/ Android app. It will use the Facebook API for finding friends-of-friends and the Foursquare API for finding locations. It will also have the usual share on Facebook/ Twitter buttons. Perhaps, LinkedIn won't be a good fit.
@Amit: I just did a homepage mockup (see update above) and will do the inside page mockups during the week (for fun and to try out Balsamiq). If you are developing a similar service, feel free to bounce off ideas or use ideas I am sharing here.
Thank you, Manu.
Thank you, Dru.
Interesting concept – I could see myself using this site if it's executed well and if my friends are using it.
I like your concept btw – giving away business ideas!
I'm going to do something similar – I'm going to “give away” a free 1000word biography to friends on Facebook. More of an art project (and a way for me to get back into writing!) than a business idea. But nevertheless!!!
i like @Gauravonomics’ start up idea ‘GTTGTHR.com’ http://bit.ly/aMTexs would you like such a service?
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Yes, giving away things is fun. Looking forward to your biography giveaways!
Wow, that's actually an interesting idea and you've made it even better by adding the last bit ala foursquare/group deals. Leveraging FOF for these things is really cool.
I'd absolutely love to be involved in the project if something decides to work on it.
Only issue, why Inception at Regal Union Square and not PVR?
@Mayank: Yes, it's an interesting idea, but it's likely to work better in New York than in New Delhi. That's part of the reason why I'm holding off the temptation to work on it.
Hey Gaurav,
. Here's some feedback:
Nice job! I see you've taken a liking to balsamiq
Big picture:
* The most important thing to do on the home page is to explain the people what the service is and convince the user to explore more. In ecommerce sites we sometimes talk about make the homepage as a metaphor for a real-world storefront, you might want to display a few important things that gets the user hooked. I feel that this design gives away too much at first glance. I would try the following:
** 1/2 the top real estate – Large banner up top explaining the service (through video, images, copy whatever)
** Left bottom blurb – Some dynamic info – See what people are doing right now in your city
** Right bottom blurb – Blog, Twitter, FB (tabbed) feed
If you feel confident in the direction you are headed in, then some more specific feedback to your design includes:
* Change 1 to Why GTTGTHR
* Make 3,4,5,6 all images
* Using other controls (like tabs and accordions) to keep the UI a bit cleaner. For instance Most Popular Get Together and Venues could be two tabs in the same area.
** Instead of tag clouds I think showing real examples (i.e. a 4sq or Gowalla type newsfeed like ” 4 people are going skating in central park on Friday) would be more compelling.
* The search things in top right and 365 things to do in your city are sort of redundant
* Get rid of explore more
Real UX sticklers would say the right way to develop mockups would be to:
* Create personas (not too detailed) of your typical users (i.e. a new user who wants to explore their city, an experienced user who wants to create an event)
* Come up with a list of tasks for each that they would like to do
* Rate them (1-5) according to:
** How much value this feature this would provide
** How frequently this feature would be used
** How hard it is to develop
* Additionally you can add tasks that you want the users to do (buy something, signup for newsletter, etc…)
* Factoring all of these in, you can then begin to develop mocks.
As a Product Owner I'd say it's your job to develop the minimum viable product, cut out everything that's not quintessential.
Nice job again, look forward to see how it progresses.
Cheers,
ak
My first impression of the idea, was a revolution in the online dating game. Bringing friends of friends together using common interest parameters and a certain level of trust thanks to being a friend of a friend, could really be something.
When i read up, I realise that you had more in mind, but that was the first thought to strike my mind. Thought I would leave that behind
Ishwar: Some friends-of-friends (!) have created a pretty good friends-of-friends dating app: Thread. Do check it out.
Dude! That's a ton of feedback! Digesting it.
Gaurav:
Looks good. Definitely no one has figured out how to link people together randomly at locations yet, and that ability seems pretty powerful. People still plan events ahead of time, and rarely look at their phone to see where people are, and then go there as it's happening.
Thoughts: GTTGTHR looks to me like “Get-Gather”. Which is kind of interesting.
Friends-of-friends seems interesting. Maybe if you give people more points for attending events of friends of your friends than just attending events of your friends (which would give points, but fewer).
Ben: Yes, the possibilities for leveraging game mechanics are endless in such a service. The trick will be simplify the storyline and get some initial traction.
The idea is greaaaaaat… but I don´t like the name/url
My best,
@paloma
This is the ultimate mashup idea
!! However, how much ever you get to gether, the idea will be fun only if there are some girls attending the event too. So do check out for feedback from females..May be that will give you some interesting insight.
Vivek
I really like this mashup idea. It will be interesting to see real and virtual lives amalgamating through such ideas. Do you have any initial thoughts on how to market it in a unique way?
Yes, Gaurav, retail tie-ups and promotions would be the key to scaling a service like Get Together.
Dru: Thank you for pointing to downforthat.com. Yes, it seems that they aren’t working on it anymore.
Himanshu: Amit and I think that it will be best to launch Get Together city-by-city, with a network of on-ground coolhunters, starting with New York. That's the trick.
Vivek: We were not really seeing Get Together as a friend-of-friend dating site. There's Thread.com for that.
Awww! I really like the name Get Together. GTTGTHR.com, I agree, is a little inelegant.
Semil: I would love to hear more about your project.
Thank you, Mansi.