Foursquare 8.0: Smart people turn the flow of traffic into internet companies

the interconnected

The Swarm, which came online this May, despite its sophisticated application, is a dubious Foursquare of a failed internet company serving Cross-border and user loyalty test water. But soon the smart guys let us find out that it wasn't that simple: they gave the internet company a lesson called Foursquare 8.0.

Foursquare is the first time for mobile internet users to realize that they have a "check-in" demand window. People are happy to leave a simple, location-centered record in their lives, and are more willing to show their lives to their friends. This freshness-led lifestyle explosion is also staggering, with Foursquare having 1 billion new signs in 2011 and 2012, and 2013, which almost doubled to 5 billion this year in January.

Despite sitting on 50 million of registered users, Foursquare had few outstanding earnings patterns until this year. Until recently in June, Foursquare began to try to sell its sign-in database to some (enterprise) users and developers. However, the platform in July has a turnaround. They announced that they would shut down the check-in entry in Foursquare, requiring the user to migrate the check-in behavior to a new application called Swarm. The following is the removal of the check-in function of the new Foursquare 8.0.

As the Union Square Ventures co-founder Fred Wilson says, there has been a contradiction between the privacy model inherent in the original Foursquare application. Some of the core sign-in users only want to share the site as private information to friends and family, but this information will inevitably be applied to businesses and advertisers. If Foursquare is aware of the problem he is asking, it is not difficult to understand why Swarm is being positioned as a social application. Foursquare the original core of strong demand users to the new application, directly ensure that the new application can accumulate an objective number of strong relationship chain, this is the social application of activity and retention rate is critical. Within two months of publication, Swarm's download of Google play reached millions of, close to One-tenth of the original Foursquare application-and only less than two weeks after the forced migration. Foursquare has been successful in directing existing users to new services in accordance with their needs, while safeguarding the retention of the main brand's users. According to the requirements of different users are divided into a certain overlap between the two categories. At the same time, the product is also based on the characteristics of the two types of user design for different forms.

The new version of the Foursquare provides by the scene and focus on the user recommended around the food, become a "comment + Rice" model, while Swarm around geographical information as a Path of private social services, the difference is that Swarm's use of scenarios and user needs are more simple and clear.

Split and transformation are just beginning, but Foursquare and Swarm are on the right path. This lesson tells us how to start a new service model based on existing users and to direct users to the demand stream, and also how to simplify the product without overdoing it or even hitting the pain point. Foursquare is trying to turn a story "once there was a very successful product called Foursquare, their company has a product called Swarm" into "once there was a very successful product called Foursquare, there is a successful product called Swarm, they come from the same company."