@skyler_bissell @raunaqvaisoha Full disclosure: we shut down this product in June 2016 after about 6 months live (post-beta). Just because we couldn't make it fly doesn't mean others can't. At that time there were a TON of competitors in this space including Who's Down (a Google product), Down to Lunch, Heyo, and our product, Down to Hang. As far as I know all of them are defunct at this time. We were first to market, but found that the incredibly fickle nature of social apps is challenging to navigate, to say the least. Biggest takeaways, bit long but I think this deserves a thorough answer: 1. Mobile apps are not the way. As a small startup, bandwidth and money are likely short. Going with an app-based model means you have to make two apps (iOS + Andriod) and you lose a fat chunk of whatever earnings you do make (more on that in a minute). Apps are probably great for certain verticals, but for social-based things like this they concept simply won't fly without a dual platform approach. How can I possibly become habituated to this cool new app if I can't engage with my Android friends on it, or vice versa? We got this feedback over and over and over. The answer is that web apps are the future for this kind of thing and probably in general, in my opinion. 2. Competing with SMS (and every other messaging app) is kind of insane. Think about it: if a core function of your app is messaging your friends to hangout / creating an ephemeral event (this is what we called our short term events), then you basically have to convince everyone to abandon their previous messenger app (SMS, Signal, WhatsApp, FB Messenger, etc) and talk on this new app. Our initial thesis in building DTH was that people wanted a better way to communicate with their friends, all in one place, so we built something very similar to Herdd. In reality, people love SMS and tend to be very difficult to pull away from whatever they currently use to message. This is for good reason: it's simple, universal, requires no download, and doesn't require that you get someone else to download anything. Anyone digging into this question can probably find many reasons very quickly why this is a hard sell. If the app relies on people revisiting it daily and being present in the ecosystem - but that happens less often because users keep reverting to other messaging methods for other interactions - then stickiness is not really there. 3. All apps (and social media in particular) depend on addiction to succeed. Dopamine loops are the key to everything online. I hate this concept and despise the pervasiveness of it in our society, but it's the truth. When my co-founder and I pitched Chris DeVore from Tech Stars (I couldn't believe we got a meeting) he had already tried our app out and was ready with feedback. We sit down in the conference room and he just says something along the lines of, "I like the idea and the product looks nice, but it's just not addictive enough. There's not enough here to bring people back to the app on a regular basis multiple times per day. That's going to make it hard to get consistent user growth". I'm paraphrasing here because this was years ago - I'm not trying to put words in his mouth. But honestly I think it was incredibly apt feedback and one of the most profound things I've heard in my life. It's propelled almost all of my ideation around products to date and has had a huge impact on my views around regulation and governance of the internet. Our product - as with Herdd - depends on people engaging with friends (or other contacts) in order to need to use the app. There's not much reason to be in the app if I'm not doing one of those things. Realistically, even the most social of people do not hang out with more than one person per day or go to more than one event. If they do, it's likely a weekend or an extremely uncommon occurrence. Thus, the maximum 'touches' you're likely to get (and we found to be true in our experience) was about 1 per day, at the most. The average was less. For most people it was a lot less and the only thing pulling up the average was a very small percent of super users. By contrast, Facebook/Instagram/Tik Tok/Reddit/whatever new garbage is out there have infinite potential calls to action (content), which leads to dozens if not hundreds of touches per day. Some people spend hours per day on these platforms as we all know. That builds such an insanely strong addiction. It is incredibly difficult for new platforms to stick if they don't have a similar approach to capturing user attention. There is nothing good about this for our species as a whole, but it's the race to the bottom that we are currently within. 4. A viable business model didn't really exist, from what we could tell. Apps often rely on this 'build it so big that we get money' approach, which I'm sure is no surprise to anyone on PH. It's like having a financially viable business model is secondary to growth, which is ridiculous. We can thank Twitter and others for that. At DTH, we tried the local business-based promo/ad model mentioned above. We toyed with paid subscriptions. We even thought about ads. At the end of the day, I think some options could have worked - primarily at scale - but when you evaluate the difficulty of getting to scale based on the pitfalls I outlined in #1-3 you begin to see how that's really not likely. There are a few other key takeaways, but those are the biggest ones. I mean no offense to the founders of Herdd. I would happily give all the advice I can to people with a mission like theirs because it is something I'm also passionate about and have spent a great deal of time working on. My co-founder and I ran out of what little angel funding we had and decided to close it up - based on the analyses and learnings outlined above - instead of continue part-time. Again, scale is key and without addiction + virality it's very hard to get scale on a product like this through part-time work. If it works for Herdd, amazing. I hope to see Facebook die and if less people use Events that would be wonderful. However, if that isn't mean to be then I would rather that other founders like myself get to see this advice. I wish I had gotten it when I was working on DTH, even if I wouldn't have liked hearing it. I didn't like hearing what I heard from Chris DeVore, but he wasn't wrong either. As you can tell, I love talking about stuff like this. Appreciate your patience with the long post!

@skyler_bissell This post definitely deserves to be a separate blog post, as there’s so much to be learnt from your experience with DTH. Point No. 3 is super underrated, that’s what separates the viral UGC platforms from the linear ones. Based on your experience in the consumer product space, what would be one book/framework/resource you think really captures some good insights on product development? For me so far, I love the Delta 4 framework by Kunal Shah and the Jobs to Be Done Framework by Clayton Christensen. I usually filter what I’m working on through these frameworks so that I make sure I’m making the most of my time with users. I also like the Toy Markets model from Chris Dixon for really out there innovative stuff.

Raunaq Vaisoha

Convo

Super cool app. Just a thought, It would be super interesting to open this up as a platform for local restaurants/pubs/museums etc. to post calendar events. For instance, Taco Tuesday for a restaurant which has a special offer if you bring 3 friends. Could become like a next-gen Groupon.

4yr ago

Daryll Wong

Similar thoughts!

Skyler Bissell

@raunaqvaisoha as someone who previously co-founded an app similar to this and tried almost exactly that, we found it very difficult to scale. It puts one in direct competition with Yelp and other behemoths, which is tough. Not saying it's impossible, but I've spent hundreds of hours racking my brain on how to make an app like this have a viable business model and it's quite an uphill battle. Wishing these folks the best of luck.