The originator of Foursquare why did you screw up?

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Original title: Who screwed up the lbs sign-in originator Foursquare?

Recently, the media reported that Foursquare to 1.5 million of businesses to open the advertising platform to seek transformation, and its CEO Crowley's entrepreneurial process for more than 10 years. How does he lead a team in a slump to find a way out? To see the FastCompany website on the Dennis Krauli report, to see the story behind the CEO, compiled by the titanium media:

Dennis Krauli (Dennis Crowley) has recently become a media focus, not a hot-talk tweet on Twitter, but a public-eye news.

At this year's SXSW music festival, he spent most of his time dodging gossip. Because the legendary Foursquare consumes a large amount of cash, is trying to find new financing. Keith La Bouise, the Yelp director, has become the most publicly vilified Foursquare. According to him, the company's potential is a "myth", only to come to a last resort to take a gamble only chance.

Crowley spent more than 10 years pursuing his dreams and building a global social GPs. Foursquare is his second start-up to pursue his dream. He has dodgeball the results of his first pioneering attempt (a city-navigation app that was shut down by Google in 2009) and sold it to Google, but the search giant has made the company's dream product a crushing defeat.

At the mobile end, social class check-in applications are far less active than Yelp, Twitter, Facebook and other social applications, the decline in check-in applications, in the end is due to the comments, social application of the overwhelming momentum, or because of the inherent drawbacks of the check-in mode? The Foursquare team, whether transforming or refinancing, is tantamount to "worm", to see the CEO's ten years of confusion:

Lipaizhongyi

It is now questioned whether Crowley's lifelong pursuit of ideals is Foursquare's real Achilles ' heel, and perhaps his originality is inherently "disabled"? Maybe users just don't like sharing their place by sharing photos or updating their personal status.

But Crowley has never been so confident about his mission as he is now, and has never reacted so defiantly to his critics. He said

We've done a lot of things in the past few years to try to keep the company alive, so we're not going to break Facebook and Google.

This April, Foursquare successfully raised a $41 million trillion in debt financing, and the company took the opportunity to "reinvent itself". Foursquare has made a determined transition-the ultimate goal is to create a site search and discovery engine, while downplaying the past well-known check-in (check-in) features and virtual medal features (see the Domestic Consumer-to-consumer Application Street features).

Today, Foursquare finally opened up the advertising platform to 1.5 million of the businesses on his platform to sell their advertising tools. The site's location data is creating a range of services, such as Uber and path, that are enough to threaten Yelp, the US's biggest comment site, with a market capitalisation of 2.2 billion of dollars.

"We are now at this juncture, a really difficult juncture for us," Crowley was very clear about the situation. And his public spit, Lipaizhongyi also quite let people sigh:

"Someone will say, ' Oh, you can not get the same as Google's killer! ' said the right, but Google has 50,000 employees don't forget ... Others say: ' Your product will not be as profitable as Facebook! ' Yes, there are 4900 people working for Facebook, and Facebook is 10 years old! We are only 4 and a half and we only have 160 people: give us a chance to grow up and see what we grow up to be. ”

Klaurich

The style of startups is always influenced by the founders themselves, but few companies are as similar as Foursquare and Crowley's personalities.

In the early stages of this application, Foursquare was in the direction most favoured by Crowley, and when Foursquare's users were more than millions, Crowley was on the cover of the magazine, and when the TV report Foursquare, he got a 50 million dollar round of financing.

However, by the end of 2011, the user successfully broke through 15 million people, registered enterprises up to 500,000, even Starbucks such a brand also attracted to-at this time, Foursquare's aura has begun to decline. In the 2012, the crisis was particularly grim, and it had not only affected Foursquare's development potential, but also threatened Crowley's CEO throne. Speaking of the development of Foursquare, Foursquare's veteran employee, Nathan Folkman, the current path chief technology officer, explains that

"Expectations are so high, so inevitably everyone will come for you." At first everyone will fall in love with you, then suddenly all of a sudden, will not see you die. ”

With the foursqaure of the early development of the bottleneck, the team's pessimism is difficult to clean up, and Crowley's mistakes also make their work more difficult. From the beginning to the present, Foursquare more like a growing dodgeball, to provide users with the "sign in" such characteristics, to encourage users to report at four different bars a night, is to win a "wine man" medal. However, when you go back to the user experience, this application is no different for users to play games with their teens.

"We don't want to be a medal-making company, and that's probably wrong." Crowley said, but Foursquare later undoubtedly in everyone's mind became such a company.

Foursquare finally began to act, they are trying to deal with advertisers. However, they do not even have a local sales team, there is no common tool used by businesses. There was little response to the launch of search ads designed to generate revenue.

Many sources acknowledge that Facebook and Yahoo were trying to acquire the site at the beginning of the Foursquare, but Crowley and another founder Naven Serva du Rai (Naveen Selvadurai) rebuffed the takeover intent, The bids were later wiped out. At the same time, Foursquare, which has a similar business approach to the search company, Yelp has been publicly listed. The company ushered in its first trading day in early 2012, when its share price soared 64%.

From people to products, the variables are heavy

March 2012, the most important test for the Foursquare team.

At that time, Crowley broke up with his partner who initially set up a company with himself. They shared responsibility, but as the company recruited more staff, one of the partners Serva Durai slowly lost its original status, Crowley decided to powers himself.

"The Serva du Rai were squeezed out and the relationship was stiff," said one person familiar with the two people. But it was a turning point for the leader, Crowley-probably the hardest thing he had to do. "Changes in management have been declared by insiders to be a sign of the company's maturity, and the media in the scientific and technological sector see the episode as a Foursquare struggle." The starting point of the battle was Crowley's "painful period".

Headlines in the media are repeating Foursquare's financing and profitability difficulties. PrivCo, an agency specialising in private enterprise, Foursquare in the "Death vortex" and predicts that the company will be closed later.

In the late 2012, Crowley decided to change the Foursquare, no longer focusing on the "check-in" function, but the emphasis can be used to search and find extinct places of their own tools and information. The company completely replaced the original user interface, the search engine to the forefront of its own, just a simple search, the new opening of the burger or snack dining car on the front. After the website revision, two months time, the user uses the search the frequency to increase one times.

Foursquare's list of sites has been updated for the first time since 2011, and this small improvement calls back those who were left behind by Foursquare. Today, 50 million of visitors are searching for comments in a large amount of information on the Foursquare Web site every month. The company also seamlessly combined Visa and MasterCard two international cards to offer discounts to businesses.

Crowley still showed a peculiar arrogance, he said: "People do not find out what we are doing, I do not feel bothered." Because they did not see it when I left school, nor did I see it in Dodgeball. Crowley still wants to use numbers to help tell his story: Foursquare tracking metrics-active users, registrations, and check-in numbers at least between situable.

By April this year, Foursquare 41 million dollars through a convertible bond. Crowe used such a way to give his company more time to develop, but also to end the world of Foursquare death predictions. He told investors the opportunity: "There is no doubt that what I have in mind is that hundreds of millions of people will use what we are creating in the future." The question is: Is it a sign with a foursquare, or is it something else? If it is not our logo, it is because someone has defeated us in this respect. ”

Targeting the advertising platform, betting on the future

Foursqaure's thunder, has long been abroad such as Yelp, domestic such as the public reviews such as the application Rob. What else can you play?

It sounds an intriguing prospect: if Google has 294 billion of dollars of business based on its own definitive search results, Foursquare bets that the data behind the user's ambiguous intentions can also be quite rewarding.

In 2011, Foursquare launched a similar feature called Radar, which provides location-based VOD services to users. The All-weather GPS is very power-hungry, and Foursquare has not had enough interesting content to spread. Crowley is also leading the team to develop new products, he plans in the week of internal testing to the whole company to launch the product.

We can not assert that vertical search and sign in the tide, after all, it is Foursquare survival means. The company is currently testing a variety of advertising products. A Foursquare internal document published in April this year disclosed some of these tools, such as banner ads for specific groups of people.

The most recent source of revenue may be a 14 million of the local businesses on the platform, and Foursquare plans to offer them advertising products at the click Cost (CPA) later this year. This may prove to be a useful way to increase net income. Crowley said: "Maybe you're a slow person all day, so when someone's looking for a place to go for lunch, you'll find a nearby advertising restaurant and enjoy a grilled chicken salad." If we show this ad 100 times, six people will see the ad for the next three hours-that's a great conversion rate. So we might choose that place to charge 200 dollars a month for advertising. We advertise from 10% to 20% of our 1 million locations, and the advertising revenue is 20 million-40 million dollars a year. ”

Crowley's account is not an unrealistic illusion.

At the end of September this year, FastCompany magazine interviewed Foursquare's investor Ben Horowitz, who mentioned that the start-up company had only 2 million dollars in operating income in 2012. At that time, Horowitz revealed that Foursquare's operating income had exceeded last year, almost four times times higher than last year. Rough estimate, Foursquare2013 year of business income is expected to reach 15 million to 20 million dollars. As companies begin to charge more businesses with more advertising products, the growth rate of such revenues is likely to accelerate.

Foursquare's revenue is still dwarfed by the model's Yelp. Today, Facebook's Instagram, Twitter's Vine, and Yahoo's Flickr all have site-based social functions, and the location data collected by Foursquare can only help these popular apps, the biggest dilemma that Crowley faces.