PlayWith

@alxmlv Difficult part of apps like these is getting critical mass. What's the strategy there? :)

@marckohlbrugge Yes, very changeling. Will be doing a lot of FB/Meetup/CL scraping, a lot of foot work to meet with serial organisers and working to improve organic social sharing from within the app. I can see it being only useful in high pop density areas early on. By it's nature PlayWith will be hyper local.

@alxmlv Yeah, makes sense starting with a big city like SF or NYC. Would be cool if you could get some sport celebrities involved by pitching it as a way for kids to get outside of the house more. Same with meetups. If you could get some well known entrepreneurs involved to attend some ad hoc meetups, that would be a great way to get people to check out the app. I'm sure there are plenty of successful people that have gaps in their schedules they don't mind filling with a meetup, but it's not something they are going to schedule long beforehand so using PlayWith would make a lot of sense.

@marckohlbrugge Yes, focus on high pop metro areas is natural ... looking at SD, SF, LA and NYC first and foremost. There are many of use cases for PlayWith from filling gaps in schedule, to staying active, to be able to take your group sports when travelling, to using sports/games as an icebreaker when new to a city, to getting kids out of the house, to quick and dirty meetups after work ... so we'll be doing a lot of the things that don't scale to make sure that PlayWith is the best product for a use case. Trying to work the celebrity angle ;) It was difficult to get anyone to commit pre-launch but I think we'll be able to make more progress there now that the app is live. Also working on some collaborations with other people driven companies.

@marckohlbrugge PlayWith is aimed for smaller, ad hoc, spontaneous and smaller events. Mechanics behind the location aware push notifications and machine learning magic sauce aim to address problems of precisely spontaneous ad hoc events that are not met by Meetup.com and other solutions.

@alxmlv Yep. Love it!