Foursquare can be said to be the victim of the early hopes and impetuous coexistence of mobile internet

In a Saturday afternoon in March 2010, Foursquare, the 33-Year-old co-founder of Dennis Klauri, received visitors on a sandy beach in front of the Texas State Austin Convention Center, the 5th time he had traveled from New York to attend the annual "South-southwest" conference. At this time, a CNN photographer took hold of Crowley's arm and wanted to introduce him to a father who was old enough to be a gram laborer. The guest comes from a newly formed department in the United States federal government, who is a bit uneasy about the hair-fluffy, brightly-coloured sportswear, a hangover-like young man, but still tries to talk to Crowley about the possibility of cooperation.

At this time is foursquare most scenery. Khosla, Accel and Andreessen Horowitz, the 3 most famous venture capital companies in Silicon Valley, are scrambling to get a B-round investment priority. Meanwhile, Yahoo's bid to buy the company, which was founded only 1 years ago, was rejected as a 100 million-dollar premium. Soon after, wearing a crown, his hands folded in front of his chest, a king of the world-like Dennis Klauri boarded the cover of Wired magazine, the cover is a line of eye-catching yellow title: Social networking new Kings.

"I'm already very excited to be able to get the money," said the time when it was 2013 years. Dennis Kest, the 3-year-old Silicon Valley star, began a tough new round of financing from the end of 2012, and investors who lined up to see him now hearted to Foursquare and even said they had overvalued the company before, So that it took half a year to raise 41 million of billions of dollars in debt financing, temporarily avoiding the foursquare that analysts predicted would close before the end of 2013.

Although new financing has temporarily ended predictions of its demise, it has not changed the company's uncertain future. In October this year, Foursquare launched a major commercial-opening new advertising platform for merchants, but did not get the expected recognition, Business Insider, a leading technology blogger, said it "may still not be enough to make Foursquare survive."

In just 3 years, what happened to Foursquare from the Darling to the outcast?

Honey is poison.

On the big mobile internet stage in Silicon Valley, Foursquare from birth to enjoy the spotlight and the feeling of standing in the middle of the stage.

March 13, 2009, after 6 weeks of writing code, grams of labor and another co-founder Naven Sairvadule will take Foursquare to the "Southwest South" conference. It's almost perfect for a couple of days of Carnival: Tell a friend where you are, so they know where there are cool bars and parties.

No surprise, Foursquare's debut was a success, with another similar product Gowalla together to become the year "Southwest South" conference on the star.

6 months later, the company introduced a 1.35 million dollar angel investment. In another six months, Yahoo offers an offer, venture capital is also competing to join. Foursquare finally chose to work with VCs, which financed $20 million trillion in June 2010 and valued 120 million dollars, at a time just 15 months after the company was founded.

Behind the pursuit of capital is the pursuit of users. In January 2010, Foursquare opened up the registration function of users around the world, after it opened only 100 regions, the number of users reached 500,000 in March, and then it grew almost by about 100,000 a week, and began to quickly become popular.

In 2010, the smartphone is far from universal, just using mobile phone for simple positioning will let users excited and scream of the era, too optimistic media and investors for Foursquare constantly painting more and more imagination space.

Many people are optimistic that Foursquare is the equivalent of Facebook 5 years ago, and that the mobile internet entrepreneurial boom behind it is the beginning of the desktop internet era, which began in the frenzy 10-12 years ago, and is a chance to brew the next Google and Microsoft.

Capital sees the huge business value behind lbs, which is thought to be "the Ultimate Marketing Dream": Advertisers can know exactly who consumers are and pinpoint where they are, through a real-time social network that understands the personal diet and shopping preferences. Someone compared it to Google's advertising platform, calling it the next money-making machine on the Internet.

It is no exaggeration to say that Foursquare grew up in honey from birth, never lacked money or imagination, but no one would have thought it would become its poison, and 3 years later it had not only become the ideal, but even survival had become a problem.

If you understand the trajectory of Crowley's success, you will understand that the seeds of this company's decline, seems to have been buried since the South-southwest Convention blockbuster.

Crowley Love the party, he had carnival until 3 o'clock in the morning, do not feel the public on Twitter what is wrong, he was because of the rise of Foursquare became a star. For him, the south-west side of the situation is nothing more than a different kind of technical party-he knows what people want at the party, what the concept is obsessed with, what makes the audience scream and make themselves the focus of attention.

So, after 6 weeks of writing code Foursquare hit the media and investment people to the new mobile internet era, the most excited and enthusiastic imagination, in that everything is possible in the mobile internet "Genesis", many people really believe that when Google represents the relationship between people and information, When Facebook represents a human-connected world, Foursquare will grow into a new pole in the dimension of location-and move naturally.

The high expectations of the outside world, and the foursquare of money at the start, give the company more freedom to make its choice, but it also leads to excessive neglect of earnings, which is further away from the business model and the way it caters to various concepts.

As early as 2009, it was suggested that Foursquare should start commercializing, but was rejected by Crowley, since his idea was to develop the number of users to 1 billion before starting commercialization. Ironically, so far Foursquare has only 30 million users, and compared with 2009 years, the active degree is not as good as before.

It was then that Foursquare had to decide on commercialization and was too selective to focus on any one strategy. In its founder's public expression, the company, which was founded only 4 years ago, has positioned itself to develop a platform for local businesses, to become the geographical location of the Internet, and to be the best local search platform in the world. Specifically, the commercialization strategy that began in 2012 included the introduction of a monetization program similar to Google AdSense, an open API, a partnership with OpenTable, a business offering of preferential trading services and commercial tools, and the latest launch of Foursquare Ads ... What are the effects of these strategies? According to public data, the annual Foursquare revenue of 2012 is only 2 million dollars.

The price of flying in the air

Lack of profitability is the most immediate dilemma faced by Foursquare, and the root cause is that the core services provided by the product cannot create enough value, whether for the user or for the merchant.

Foursquare has been floating in the air since starting a business, believing that a user's pursuit of the cool company will accumulate hundreds of millions of check-in information, and on that basis Foursquare will be a great company like Facebook, where merchants They will naturally take the initiative to the world-class platform, so never put the development and operation of the offline merchant resources in the strategic focus.

From the beginning of Foursquare can be seen, it initially with fun, cool this concept quickly attracted a group of people, and after the introduction of the game mechanism, trying to increase user stickiness. However, these are destined to just icing on the cake, not enough to be the core value of a product. It is an indisputable fact that Foursquare's user activity is reduced. In March this year, 30 million of its users signed in 5 million times a day, which is no different from the number they reported a year ago.

This is why in the 2011 the internet appeared a "sign of death" prediction. This is also true, the domestic batch of Foursquare imitators some began a difficult transformation, and some have long died.

In the face of the problem of reduced attendance, Foursquare thought is to increase the interest. For example, to provide users with quantitative self trend reports, tell users how often to visit a place, distance from the last visit and so on. In addition, brand advertising sponsored experiments, such as the Samsung sponsored "Time Machine" activities, let users review their check-in history. However, these measures in essence with medals, mayors and other game settings are not different, still can not provide users with enough power to indulge.

Sign in for a discount, this is another way, but it needs to have a strong local ability, many companies have opted to build offline sales team, and Foursquare chose to use the Full self-service platform form. Building a platform is much easier than recruiting a large local sales team to do dirty work dirty, but it may not work.

Parking Coffee is a café located in Chaoyang District, Beijing, in its Foursquare page shows a sign on the reward, as long as to the store check-in will be able to obtain a 10-yuan parking coffee card, or in the membership card based on the enjoyment of 5 yuan today deduction. "Business value" reporter called the Café, the store manager said there was no knowledge of the event, she said that no one has ever signed up for this award, "may be a few years ago who put it up."

Offline is the most important ability to engage in local life services, whether the listed Yelp, Groupon or the National public reviews and the United States network, there is a huge offline team, they want to let countless small businesses to understand the Internet companies and products, so that they trust and use the product, There is also a need to update maintenance periodically.

More importantly, only low posture to actively cooperate to understand the needs of small businesses, as a platform for marketing value can be achieved. Take sign in, Foursquare's logic is to sign in to the merchant is a kind of brand exposure and marketing, but for the merchant, let has to the shop users do not know that there is a preferential action to obtain concessions, not only to pay the preferential costs also to provide check-in service Foursquare pay, This is not reasonable.

Faced with this problem, Foursquare's choice is to change the logic of the product and launch a new form of advertising. In late 2012, Foursquare launched the "Radar" service, in the absence of registration will be the user position positioning, and push the content nearby. But it was a failed product because of the lack of capacity for smartphone battery life, geo-fencing and Foursquare's own data. Radar Until 1 years later, Foursquare in the latest version of the introduction of similar functions, while the launch of the new Foursquare Ads, this time is not to the store to pay for the check-in, but will lead to the store.

At first glance this idea is feasible, but the question that has been Foursquare is not the idea, but how to achieve it. This requires two abilities, one is offline, and the other is the ability to handle massive amounts of data.

For the former, Foursquare did not want to really for the above 1.5 million small businesses to provide services. Crowley's development platform for local enterprises is to attract customers such as BMW, Samsung, "We provide services for small businesses, because these reports on the big brand will be very attractive." The salespeople he hires are also dedicated to big clients, and for small businesses, "we don't call every coffee shop in America." The founder thought he needed only 20 employees to make a big deal.

And for the Foursquare is considered the most valuable data assets, the current practice is a successive launch of different cities based on the registration of the hotspot map. Crowley in a media interview explaining his logic for commercializing data assets: Using this map to analyze where people have been angry over the past two weeks, and to predict where the future will go and eventually build a database of points of interest. He did not mention the specific ways in which the interest point database could be used to achieve greater value.

A company's commercialization is actually the process of growth, because business is the most brutal and the most realistic, a solid business model behind is necessarily the company's overall maturity and certain business core competencies. Foursquare in the face of difficulties, time and time again choose to bypass it, missed the opportunity to grow, the result is only a waste of resources and more valuable time.

From puberty to maturity

In fact, the ups and downs of Foursquare in the past 4 years are essentially that the company and founder have not kept up with the pace as the mobile internet has gradually matured from the hyper-excited adolescence of the concept.

The mobile Internet of the 2009 is full of restless hormones, in which everyone is susceptible to a new concept, and Foursquare's concept of lbs is one of them. People give the nascent company a halo of subversion, as if by virtue of a good concept and great imagination space can change the world overnight. However, the reality and the business world have their irrefutable laws, from the Internet concept to the real change in the world need more down-to-earth work.

Unlike the PC Internet age, mobile internet has a deeper involvement in the real world, such intervention needs not only strong technical support, but also a solid offline ability, and the core of offline ability is how to use technology to bring convenience to traditional industries and the way they can understand the education line.

Looking at mobile internet companies, which have been the focus of the last two years, it is no longer an exciting concept to become famous overnight, but the value of its plowing years later. More and more new startups will opt into a small vertical area instead of fantasizing about doing the next Google. Mobile Internet gradually return to calm, in which the start-up companies naturally need to adapt to this wave.

The frustration that Foursquare has endured over the past two years can be said to be the victim of the early hopes and fickleness of the mobile internet. The benefits of following the concept affect the Founders ' decision to the company so that in a few short years it turns out to be an obstacle to their efforts. However, when the mobile Internet continues to penetrate the entire traditional business world at an unprecedented rate, the threshold and barrier of future competition will be more and more high, leaving Foursquare time is not much.